'The Road to Keringet’ began some years ago, after Maggie Ziegler was accepted into the Wired Writing Studio at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada. Here, in a supported writing community and under the talented and encouraging mentorship of an award winning Canadian novelist an idea began to take form. She began to grapple, as a writer rather than as a reader, with how books are constructed and what structure might best serve this story. From that beginning, the book (and writing in general) continued to grow in precious moments set aside from a busy life as a psychotherapist, educator and community activist. This is her first book.
Maggie Ziegler’s creative non-fiction has been published in literary journals including Prairie Fire, Other Voices and Room and has won honorable mention in contests sponsored by Event and Prairie Fire. Her essays and articles have been published in newspapers and news magazines including Peace Magazine and Herizons. As a psychotherapist specializing in trauma intervention, she has written professionally and published in psychotherapy journals, texts, and training manuals.
Maggie Ziegler’s deepest interest is in understanding our personal experience within the wider contexts that surround our own unique journey, how the interplay between interior and exterior informs who we are. ‘The Road to Keringet’ explores her family history and her relationship with her mother from this perspective. It’s a way of seeing that Maggie carries into all her work, whether facilitating a group for trauma survivors, leading a team building retreat for an environmental non-profit, chairing a community meeting, delivering domestic violence intervention training in Japan or writing about social change initiatives in Kenya. She honours the individual while also examining the social and historical contexts that form us and that too often limit freedom, truth and justice.
One of Maggie’s passions is ecopsychology which explores our relationship to all of life. She has published on this topic and also facilitates workshops and retreats based on 'The Work That Reconnects,’ a group approach to addressing our deepest pain about our world pioneered by eco-philosopher Joanna Macy. For more information, go to www.reconnectingtolife.org
Maggie recently returned home to Salt Spring Island, on the Pacific north-west coast of British Columbia, Canada, after two years in Kigali, Rwanda, where she worked at the Kigali Genocide Memorial on education program development, focusing on peace-making after genocide. Maggie blogs on Rwanda at www.journeyrwanda.blogspot.com
