The Power of Our Stories
with Jackie Parker
About Jackie Parker
​
Jackie Parker is the founder and director of The Power of Our Stories, bringing workshops and trainings to health care, educational, and community settings.
​
She has developed classes for The UCLA Arts and Healing Program, The Wellness Community of Los Angeles, USC’s Department of Work and Family, and The Center for Psychosocial Excellence at the Neurology Department of the Keck School of Medicine.
​
An award-winning fiction writer and poet and a teacher of meditation, Jackie is the author of the novel Our Lady of Infidelity (Arcade Publishing) and three works for young adults. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, MS Focus, A Taste for Writing: Composition for Culinarians, Thirteenth Moon, and City Magazine.
She has taught writing at every educational level, from elementary, as poet-in-the schools and writer-in residence, through university. Her students have ranged in age from 5 through 95.
​
She is a Macdowell Fellow in Fiction, a recipient of a grant from The New Jersey State Council of the Arts, and an Amgem nominee for Excellence in Teaching.
She teaches ongoing workshops and lives in New York and Los Angeles.
Podcast interview
For over 30 years I’ve been a writer, teacher, and mentor guiding individuals and groups to use writing to connect to themselves and each other and live inspired, empowered lives.
I’ve drawn from my experience as a poet, novelist, meditation teacher, student of literature, years in the classroom, traveler to create this program. But nothing taught me more about writing than the ten years I wrote and rewrote, wrote and rewrote to bring forth the novel, Our Lady of Infidelity. And no one taught me more about our capacity to heal and support each other than the hundreds of students in my Power of Our Stories workshops.
Some of my students have published books. Others have found the work that they love. Some find healing. Others growth. Everyone finds joy and connection and hope.
The stories that we write have power. They’re wiser than our thinking, talking selves. They’re more beautiful than stories we can speak. They can create healing. They give us access to the deep truths of our lives. And they create wonderful delightful experiences that people call art.
When we can deeply feel our lives instead of rushing past them, dismissing them, judging them, we get into the rich, alive parts of ourselves—that’s how great writing comes. And great living. In writing you are there. With it. In it. Those voices that tell you not to say that! can’t get to you now.
The story prompts I’ve designed over the years—there are hundreds, maybe thousands of them-- will give you the scaffolding to write your stories so they are alive on the page. And after a while you won’t need the prompts. Your writer’s mind will have learned to write powerful stories.
​