International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute
A visionary home for the wellbeing-through-writing sector
The International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute offers leadership in the wellbeing-through-writing sector.
It was founded in 2023 by Dr Stephanie Dale, who sought a natural home for her work among peers. The Institute’s initial purpose is to offer practitioners a public-facing portal through which to share their research with the wider world, as well as showcase the kinds of programs and outcomes achievable through wellbeing writing.
IWWI recognises wellbeing writing as a health practice, discrete from writing as an art form. IWWI’s inaugural research project is underway.
What is wellbeing-through-writing?
“An embodied languaging-through-writing process that enables people to locate, identify, release and transform troubling feelings – acknowledged, unconscious and subconscious – that are psycho/physiologically affecting their ways of being in the world, thus facilitating the changes necessary for human health, wellbeing, recovery and growth.”
Dr Stephanie Dale, adapted from Dale (2023) in Writing for Wellbeing: Research, Theory, Practice
Wellbeing writing is an overlooked resource in the health and wellbeing sector. Writing is also largely ignored in the arts/creativity-and-health sector. As a mental health professional in a remote corner of Australia said: “how do we explain to people this is not a writing workshop?”
Wellbeing-through-writing is a languaging process. It is more than ‘writing thoughts in a journal’. The embodied writing process developed by IWWI founder Dr Stephanie Dale is a process through which people will find not just expression, but self-aligned expression.
Find out more about IWWI’s leading edge wellbeing writing process: languaging the feeling body.
About our logo
The IWWI logo is the foundational diagram of the wellbeing-through-writing model developed by Dr Stephanie Dale. The logo represents the four primary stages of the embodied writing process, from the initiatory stage of activated longing (for self-aligned expression) to overcoming to claiming and, finally, home-ing. It is worth noting that throughout the process of guided embodied writing the first two of these stages are in play at all times. Once the final stage of home-ing has been reached, all four stages are simultaneously in play.
The triskelion at centre represents the embodied practice of the whole of the process. Further explanation of the model is available here (our research), here (training development through our research) and here (the original research paper).
Our forerunner: The Write Road
In 2014, Australian journalist Stephanie Dale drove west to rural and remote areas west of the Great Dividing Range. Her intention was to share valuable media skills with grassroots organisations, small businesses, and everyday people with something to say. She called her initiative The Write Road.
A local Rural Resilience Officer asked if she would she create a journaling workshop. She said: “psychologists are always asking us to write things down, but we don’t know where to start.” The inaugural journaling workshop, accompanied by a ‘get started on a writing project’ workshop, was delivered in one of the most remote corners of the state. Men and women who did not identify as writers downed tools on farms and drove up to two hours through the dust for a writing workshop.
Said the resilience officer after the workshop: “people walked away two feet taller.”
Over ten years, Stephanie drove more than 200,000 kms delivering wellbeing-through-writing programs (and occasionally media training) to more than 2000 rural and remote people, including people in recovery from drought, flood and wildfire, and newly literate Indigenous adults.
In 2020, curious about how/why writing had such a powerful impact on the health and wellbeing of people who did not identify as writers, she began work on a doctoral thesis exploring the relationship between wellbeing and writing. More information available here.
