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About
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The Sawbonna Project is the name I have given to the work I will continue to do with my writing workshops and courses offered in corrections, at colleges, universities, spirituality centres, healing centres, and online. This work is about how both victim and offender, in writing their voice, by speaking and sharing their experience upon a blank page or blank screen, can find hope. In their way, in their time. Screaming, crying, meditating, trusting, walking with long-term grief, trauma, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, coming to face the horror, coming to believe in the hope. The Sawbonna Project is as well, the name under which I offer talks, presentations, and lectures, about what happened between Glen Flett and I, with my Dad's energy ever-present. I highlight that this is one story, one encounter, and not the way Restorative Justice must be or should be done. The journey is yours and not another soul's. Honouring possibility for reshaping lives, is good. Trusting the sorrow, the savage ache, the raw anguish, knowing that you do not have to journey alone, is what The Sawbonna Project speaks to. My work is offered to both victims and offenders. I was recently in British Columbia, speaking at Fraser Valley Institute with Glen Flett, and will be workshopping at Ferndale Institute and Fraser Valley Institute this upcoming month. Here is one link about a workshop I offered to individuals at a corrections facility: http://www.nald.ca/acea/newslet/sept07/sept2007.pdf I have shared and continue to share my work with writing as healing voice, in North America, and have found that our hearts and minds and souls can open newly when we experience hope not as a word, but come to learn it as a fact. Please know that your journey is yours and you must honour, value, and respect it, your way. Speaking your reality, your truth, owning your story, trusting that life: the paradox, the process, asks you to make a choice to see your soul, to share that soul, and to know that you do not have to journey alone in your healing process. Sawbonna, Margot Van Sluytman
Here are some of the quotations I have received to be used on the cover of soon to be published Sawbonna: I See You. Dialogue of Hope:
Sr.
Helen Prejean, csj, Author of Dead Man Walking: “In writing of her journey through grief, hope, and healing,
revealing the dialogue she shared with the man who killed her father,
author Margot Van Sluytman offers you a genuine and generous manner of
how you too might navigate the seeming unnavigable world of life after
violent crime.”
Howard
Zehr, P.hD., Centre for Justice &
Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University, writes in his Foreword: "Ultimately, restorative justice is about values. Three key restorative values stand out for me: respect, responsibility and relationship. Margot’s remarkable story in Sawbonna: I See You. Dialogue of Hope, embodies all of these values. She speaks from the heart with clarity and eloquence, affirming her mantra that poetry is both art and healing. In doing so, she demonstrates once again the humanity of both those who have been harmed and those who have been the cause." Dr.
Michael L. Hadley, Project Director, “The Spiritual Roots of
Restorative Justice,” Centre for Studies in Religion and Society,
University of Victoria: "Violence
shatters our bedrock assumptions about ourselves and our world. Trauma,
grief, anger, and hopelessness seem all that is left. No one is spared.
But there is a way out. It is the path of reconciliation. The journey
along this path is never a soft option, for it is fraught with many
risks. Courage, honesty and hope are the keys. Accountability is the
first step, and Grace the final gift. Sawbonna: I See You. Dialogue of Hope,
shares insights into the experiences of two people whose lives were
radically altered by a violent encounter. It highlights signposts and
turning points on their life-long search for spiritual healing. It marks
a deeply personal step towards restoring the once-broken moral bond of
community." Caryn
Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., founder of Transformative Language Arts at
Goddard College: Diane
Allerdyce, Ph.D., President of The National Association for
Biblio/Poetry Therapy: “This
book tells a story that will sting your eyes and open
your heart. Margot Van Sluytman's account of her encounter
with the man that had murdered her father years ago sets an example for
all of us and speaks to words' incredible potential to transform
and heal. I cannot think of a more compassionate voice than the one that
rises from these pages to tell of a journey of pain, into
the rare realms of apology and true forgiveness.” James
Brandenburg, M.A., M.Ed.: “In this amazing spiritual journey Sawbonna: I See You. Dialogue of Hope the paths of the author Margot Van Sluytman and Glen Flett, the man who murdered her father when she was sixteen years old, cross. Through a series of essays, letters, and poems, I was magically enticed to enter two people’s journey of healing. I felt that many traumas in my on life were faced and dealt with, and I felt literally transformed when Margot and Glen Flett eventually met in person. I felt I was there when she heard his words and closure finally came into her life. Margot sums up her own closure brilliantly: “Closure which is in fact an opening, an opening to permit grief’s profound keening wail to exit the stricken soul and permit space into which a new voice with possibility can enter.” In this story, she navigates us through two people’s sorrow, horror, and seeming endless void, and we come out of our own void, like Margot and Glen Flett, liberated and able to think by feeling. This book is about transformation, and it touches the possibilities for transformation in all our lives, whether we are victims or offenders. I took this journey with you, Margot Van Sluytman and Glen Flett, and Sawbonna: I see you.”
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