Welcome!

Welcome to the website of Toby Chown. I am a dramatherapist, storyteller, and clinical supervisor.

I write about Imaginal Ecology places the creative process as the key to understanding ourselves and the world around us, a “poetic basis of mind”

You can find my original music and spoken word here and my album “A Paradise of Shadows” here

You can find my poetry archive here and buy my book Haunted Evaporations here

You can find my dramatherapy research and writing here

I send out a e-newsletter to keep in touch when I post here which you can sign up to below. But let me take you on a tour of my work, starting with poesis

About Dramatherapy – The Healing Poetics of Symbolic Action

Dramatherapists work from the understanding that stories that can become therapeutic. Storymaking – either through paying attention to ones own life story, or a creative process – loosens the bonds of a fixed life script, allows a rehearsal of the possible. The word “Drama” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “to act or do, or take action.” But the action in theatre is always on a stage – it is symbolic and poetic, the enaction of a story. Drama is always symbolic action.

Taking symbolic action can help us to make decisive change in the “real” world – this is the ancient truth of ritual theatre, where myth and personal narrative blend to allow an archetypal background to everyday problems.

This process allows “time for a different story” to emerge. The relaxation and flow within a creative process allow difficult material to be integrated and a new sense of self to emerge.

My own creative process led to an explorations of the place where the mythic psyche meets the everyday, a book of poems called “Haunted Evaporations”

Haunted Evaporations

Haunted Evaporations is a book of poems.  

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‘The path up is the path down… The way back is the way onward… Black is white and white is black… The great secret is no secret… Come closer and I will tell you…”

Hermes speaks, in “I will be your Amulet” from Haunted Evaporations