A conversation with Danielle Y. Drake and Shoshana Simons on I Don’t Know but Together We Do.
What inspired you to bring this book together, and why does this conversation feel timely now?
Danielle: For me, it goes back to being in Shoshana’s narrative therapy course at CIIS. It was an elective in an MA Counseling Psychology program with a specialization in Expressive Arts Therapy, so the narrative concepts were really embedded in the arts.
What I noticed was that the arts weren’t a side note to the questions. The questions were a side note to the art-making. We had a prompt that gave us a bounded space to play, and then the narrative questions helped us make sense of what emerged and begin restorying.
That feels especially timely now. People carry these powerful alternative stories that get overshadowed by dominant narratives. When one dominant voice is taking up so much space, we have a responsibility to help those other stories be told.
Shoshana: And we were making room for different ways of knowing—non-verbal, somatic, arts-based. We could begin with lived experience and explore it through the arts, then bring in the narrative questions to help make sense of it. There was less pressure to come up with the perfect question. We also wanted to open the counseling-room door. These practices have so much to offer in coaching, education, childcare, adult care, women’s centres, healthcare and community building.
The need for mental health and well-being is enormous. We want these skills to become freely and
exponentially available. I think about opening that door and letting fresh air in, letting things circulate. The circulation of stories is such an important part of narrative practice. Social media can offer possibilities for that, too: ways for alternative stories to travel and reach people.
What do you hope people who are beginning—or reimagining—their work in counseling, coaching, education and community building will take from this book?
Danielle: I hope people feel how accessible the arts can be. We can get so much in our heads about how to engage someone creatively. But you can start with something basic, something you already know, and let the creative process help another story emerge.
Sometimes the constructs we live within feel more fixed than they really are. The arts give us another way in. We can start with the body, let something emerge on the page or through movement or sound, and then inquire from there.
And when someone offers you a metaphor, stay with it! There’s so much there. Expand it, thicken it, see where it takes you. Metaphor connects us with natural life processes and the wisdom of the universe. You don’t even need art materials to work this way. Following a metaphor can be painting a picture with words. It’s improvisational poetry.
Shoshana: That connects with our scholar-artist-practitioner model. The artist is in the middle, and that matters to me. There are books that offer rich theory, and books full of experiential activities. Expressive modalities offer a bridge between theory and practice—a place of sense-making through sensory engagement.
Narrative therapy has such a rich theoretical base, but we can find ourselves staying in our heads, trying to work out the right question. Expressive arts offers this high-sensitivity, low-skill approach. You don’t have to be an accomplished artist to work sensitively with what emerges.
I hope people come away with a sense that nothing is entirely stuck or fixed. Things are emerging, changing, in flux. We’re returning, too, to narrative therapy’s systemic roots and asking how we can imagine and co- create the worlds we want to live in.
For practitioners working within formal settings, where there can be pressure to identify and deliver interventions, this approach offers a way to draw on presence and somatic attunement. We can listen to what the body is communicating and allow that to guide our questions and creative invitations.
What becomes possible when narrative practice and expressive arts meet?
Danielle: We pay closer attention to the body, to presence, to metaphor—and to the whole sensorial experience. What does this feel like? Sound like? Taste like? What colours, rhythms or vibrations are there? And the title really speaks to it: I don’t know, but together we do. We’re making sense together. Even if there’s only one person sitting with us, their family, culture and history are there, too.
It’s a collective scavenger hunt. Narrative practice and expressive arts meet, and something else emerges—a third thing. The sum is greater than its parts.
Shoshana: One of the things I’ve been exploring is the “singing body.” I want to credit Johnella Bird’s “talk that sings” as an important inspiration for this thinking. Her work led me to explore how we attend not only to someone’s words, but to how their whole body sings.
And I want to clarify something in my chapter, “Woven at the Roots”: the “singing body,” and my particular formulation of double listening to the spoken story alongside what the body and sensory experience communicate, are my extensions of Bird’s work. In the chapter, I attributed those extensions directly to her. That opens up another layer of listening. What else might be finding expression?
When narrative practice and expressive arts meet, the language available to us opens up: touch, gesture, breath, image, sound, movement. Even pastry-making has a language—texture, taste, acidity. These are all ways of knowing.
We can invite people into their singing bodies and begin to track and map those experiences. We don’t need everyone to be an exquisite poet. We all have access to the exquisite experience of our senses.
How did partnerships with people and communities beyond the two of you shape the book?
Shoshana: There’s an intergenerational quality to this book that I really value. The contributors include former students from the Expressive Arts Therapy program at CIIS, faculty peers and colleagues from the wider field.
And the community partnerships were central: Glide Memorial Church, the Family Youth and Child Care Center, and Contra Costa Regional Health, where we had an arts-in-health project in a safety-net hospital in Martinez, California. We worked together over years. That continuity allowed us to learn from the communities, develop the practice together and have opportunities to track its effectiveness. The university program helped us sustain those relationships.
Danielle: And those relationships speak to the heart of the book. Nobody arrives with all the expertise. The client knows their own life. They know what’s happening and where it comes from. They may not yet have words for that knowledge, but it may be there in their body.
We bring our experience of narrative expressive arts practice, and together we create an experience that helps those internal stories come forward and an alternative narrative be born.
That collaborative quality runs through the book, whether we’re working with an individual, a group or a community.
What else would you like readers to know about the book, its contributors, or what you hope it might make possible?
Danielle: The contributors are extraordinary. Each brings a different lens, cultural and ethnic background, and way of practising. And yet there are these shared understandings of what happens when narrative practice and expressive arts come together.
Across the book, you’ll find coaching, community building, gallery work, role-playing, drama and somatic practice. That range gives readers many different ways into the work. Opening the therapy-room door allows these practices to reach different communities. People can take them up in ways that make sense where they are.
Shoshana: And that brings us back to the phrase Danielle created: I don’t know, but together we do. For me, it invites such humility. It asks us to think again about where our expertise lies. Who, together with me, helps me know what I cannot know alone?
It’s like a mosaic. We bring different pieces, and in the particular way we come together, something new emerges from what’s already there.
Danielle: The phrase came from a time when I really didn’t feel confident. I was stepping in as acting chair of the Expressive Arts Therapy program while Shoshana was on sabbatical, and I was panicking! It became an affirmation for me: I didn’t have to know everything on my own.
There’s such relief in that. For new practitioners, for people in crisis—for any of us. You don’t have to know it all. We can come into community and find our way together, making solutions improvisationally.