I am Margot Van Sluytman. I live in Alberta, Canada.  Because of reading about an award I received from The Foundation for the National Association for Poetry Therapy in April 2007,  for my work creating and  facilitating growth experiences through experiential workshops in writing and healing voice in North America, the man, Glen Flett, who murdered my Father, Theodore Van Sluytman, March 27, 1978 contacted me. I chose to share dialogue with him and we have shared encounter with forgiveness. 

     The phrase that is used for what occurred between Glen Flett and I is: Restorative Justice. I did not know about this before I was offered the gift of opportunity to dialogue with the human being who ended the life of a human being I  loved so deeply. Now I know of this phrase, and I know as well, that Restorative Justice happens in very different ways for each individual who is involved in it. What has happened for me, is  only one of a myriad of possibilities for those who have been harmed by crime, or have caused the harm, to find ways to navigate their lives.

       I am a poet. I am an Expressive Writing Facilitator. I made the choice to work with words as healing voice because since I was little, and particularly after my Dad was murdered,  it is words/palabras, poetry, story, that have essentially saved my life; and which in a sense caused the email to come, the email that would shape my life and my work newly.

     I have written a book entitled Sawbonna: I See You. Dialogue of Hope about how restoration and transformation came for me and the man who killed my Dad.  Howard Zehr, PhD has written the Foreword, and Sr. Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking, has offered me a quotation to use on the cover of Sawbonna: I See You. Dialogue of Hope.

     I believe that one story can and does save and honour life.

     I believe that when we can look at our very selves in the mirror and own all that we are, we know Sawbonna, and we learn to shape, to reshape hope and possibility. We can learn to write new life-stories.

Margot Van Sluytman, Poet, Calgary, Alberta