Bringing peace with writing

OLGA LIVSHIN

Dale Adams Segal always felt the pressure to heal the world. "But I can't heal the whole world," she admitted with a shy smile. "I can only care. I believe in people."

Segal thinks that people might stumble and make mistakes, but then they have to pick up the pieces themselves and keep going. And she considers it her duty to light the way, to be a supporter and a torchbearer, carrying the torch of storytelling. In the last two years, as the way to heal spiritual wounds, she has been offering the Writing Peace workshop and Peace Postcards to people who are personally grappling with world conflicts.

Segal always perceived the power of story. Her love affair with words started when she was a young girl, living in San Francisco with her family. "I liked fairy tales, resonated with words and stories," she recalled. "In the fairy tales, good always wins, and it gave me belief and hope."

When Segal was in high school, she became enamored with theatre and healing. "I wanted to be a doctor or an actor. I wanted to heal people and, while medicine heals the body, words heal the spirit." After studying theatre at university, she obtained her master's degree in theatre arts and began working for the Jewish Community Centre of San Francisco, developing theatre programs for teenagers and seniors. In her opinion, theatre changes people's outlook, paves the way out of the confines of their everyday lives and allows them to be all they can be. In theatre, a shy person can become flamboyant and outspoken, a timid person can transform into a hero.

From theatre, there was one short step to television, and Segal took it. After seeing her young daughters watching TV, eagerly imitating the small screen, she dived headfirst into children's television. In 1976, she wrote 26 episodes of the children's show Foufouli for CHEK-TV in Victoria. The program proved to be a success and was later broadcast all over Canada. She also collaborated with the Knowledge Network, writing and producing an award-winning children's special, Treasure Hunters. The program was about building friendships out of animosity, a topic intensely important for healing adolescent woes.

Taking a break from TV and drifting further towards the healing potential of storytelling, Segal initiated and participated in the L.A. Children's Hospital research of how a story influences children's recovery from illness or trauma.

When she moved to Vancouver in 1992, she expected to resume her successful career in television, but the timing was wrong; the media was changing towards a more commercial approach. Segal's spiritual endeavors didn't fit with the new direction. The TV door had closed for her. "I was upset, but I knew I wasn't in charge," she said. The only way to deal with the disappointment was to keep going, to listen and to learn.

Reclaiming her Jewish roots, she worked with children's and teenagers' theatre programs at the Jewish community centre in Vancouver and facilitated various local Jewish youth groups. All the while, she was rediscovering the wonder of written story. "I felt the desire to write," she confessed. "When one door closes, another usually opens. You just have to see it." For Segal, the opening door led to writing.

She immersed wholeheartedly into the world of writing. "A story highlights the veracity of our spirit. It defines what we can do together and offers us our own meaning. We learn who we are. When we take away the judgment, sharing a story becomes a gift."

Promoting her extensive understanding of story creation, Segal worked as a writing instructor at Langara College for 10 years, helping students connect to their own voices, to uncover their own stories.

She also listened. Healing people's spirits through listening, helping them to bring their stories out into the open to let old hurts to heal, had naturally grown from her nurturing nature, becoming her new objective in life. After talking to a Holocaust survivor and learning that the old woman still had nightmares, she decided to help such people as much as she can: both the survivors and the second generation. "They had to tell their stories, and someone needed to listen," she said. That was how she had become part of the Gesher Project.

Together with fellow facilitators Alina Wydra, Linda Frimer and Reisa Schneider, Segal helped Vancouver Holocaust survivors, child survivors and adult children of survivors to deal with the hidden traumas of the Holocaust. Undertaken in 1998, the project used writing and visual art as spiritual therapy and resulted in a deeply moving book. It also sprouted many friendships that have flourished to this day.

Realizing that not only Holocaust survivors need their stories to be told, Segal opened her writing studio, the Writing Tables, in Vancouver. "We are story," she said. "Each of us has a beginning and a middle and an end. Story is what we live.... Discovering story within us frees us from the limits that our experiences may impose upon us and helps us to discover and connect with the extraordinary both within and without ourselves. Turning into one's struggle or confusion or pain allows us to transform it into a teaching, a path for peace."

Over the years, many people passed through Segal's writing studio. To accommodate the growing demand for her soul-enriching teaching, she published the Hour Story – a unique set of cards that taps the innermost wells of subconsciousness and brings forth the most profound of people's stories. And she arrived at her latest project – Peace Postcards.

Her Writing Peace workshop came out after the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, which had left many friends sundered and many hearts fractured. "If we write and share our stories, we hear ourselves and each other," Segal said. She urged her former students to come to her studio, to express their pain and unburden their grievances. After resisting at first, they did. They talked and wrote, and she listened, shifting their perspective towards healing. "Reaching in and reaching out," she called it. "Writing is the way out of fear, the way to learn from it." She knew how utterly important such a course could be in our post-Sept. 11 world.

In the last couple years, Segal has held several such peace workshops in Canada and in Israel. She is going to Israel again this summer. "My workshop is not about political peace," she explained. "It's the peace of the mind and the heart that is paramount, a personal path to peace." One of the participants, an Israeli teacher, told her that if all soldiers everywhere wrote in her workshop, there would be no wars.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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