20 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
students and colleagues at Appalachian, EGS and other universities
and training institutes.
Sally was the founder of the interdisciplinary expressive arts
program at Appalachian, and she is core faculty of the European
Graduate School. She has taught for many years in universities and
training programs in Europe, Asia, Central and South America,
Scandinavia, the British Isles, Canada and the United States. She
is the author of scholarly publications related to the practice of
expressive arts in therapy and education, organizational development,
ecotherapy, arts-based research, indigenous healing practices and
therapeutic writing as well as several books of poetry. Her most recent
textbook, co-authored with Swiss psychologist Herbert Eberhart,
is Presence and Process in Expressive Arts Work: At the Edge of Wonder
(2014), published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Melia currently directs the expressive arts program at Appalachian,
where she teaches core courses in expressive arts including intermodal
expressive arts therapy, current issues in expressive arts, ecotherapy
and mindfulness in nature. She coordinates the annual summer
institute in expressive arts, held at Wildacres Retreat in the Blue
Ridge Mountains. Her research interests, in addition to expressive
arts and ecotherapy, focus on theories and practice of salutogenesis,
the cultivation of health and wellbeing.
For each of us, our experiences teaching and working with the
expressive arts and ecotherapy, as well as the landscapes in which we
work, shape who we are and how we think about the work that
we do. We believe that the landscapes we inhabit also inhabit us.
Throughout the book we include poetic forms and visual images,
especially when the ideas we are attempting to convey stretch the
limits imposed by traditional language structures. With this in mind
we have chosen to offer individual prefaces, each beginning with
a “Where I Am From” poem, a poetic structure developed by George
Ella Lyon, the 2015–2016 poet laureate of Kentucky, to tell our
personal stories in metaphoric terms.