What if the image you made without thinking was already holding something you hadn't yet found the words for?
It is a question that sits at the heart of Evie Lindemann's life and work. An art therapist, marriage and family therapist, and author, Evie has spent decades accompanying people through grief, trauma, and life's most disorienting thresholds. Her approach is neither purely visual nor purely verbal. It lives in the place where image and word meet, and in that meeting, something often unlocks that nothing else has been able to reach.
I had the pleasure of talking with Evie on the Writing with Purpose podcast, and what follows is a reflection on some of what we explored, and an invitation for you to try it yourself.
Pick up your pen and see what visual journalling can reveal about grief, creativity, and becoming.
Grief Has More Shapes Than We Name
One of the most subtly radical things Evie said in our conversation was this: "Grief can strike us about any topic." We expect grief to arrive in the wake of death or relationship breakdown, but what we rarely give ourselves permission to grieve are the places we have left behind.
Evie lived in Afghanistan as a young woman, illustrating children's literacy materials and immersing herself in the culture and landscape of the Bamiyan Valley. When the Taliban destroyed the ancient Buddhas carved into the mountainside, she felt it physically. "I felt viscerally sick," she told me. "I had so much geographic love and memory about the culture and the people." That experience led Evie to write about what she came to call ‘geographic loss’, the grief that attaches itself to places, to neighbourhoods left behind in childhood, to countries we once called home, to landscapes we may never see again.
It is a grief many of us carry yet never mention, unsure whether it counts. Evie's work says clearly: it does.
She drew on grief researcher William Worden's four-stage model, and the fourth stage is the most poignant. After accepting the reality of loss, experiencing the pain of grief, and adjusting to a changed world, Worden describes a final stage of finding an enduring connection with what we have lost. It’s not really closure or the process of moving on. It’s a thread that remains, held in memory, in imagination, in the creative act of returning to what mattered. "We have to go back into our imaginations to be able to do that," Evie said, "and remember."
What Images Hold That Words Cannot
Evie described a prominent moment from her work with combat veterans. Without going into too much detail because of privacy, a man held up a drawing. He said nothing, yet across the table, another veteran looked at him and said, "I get it, man. I get it." Evie described it simply as, "That was the healing."
Images can carry what language cannot always reach. Evie told me about a story from Rachel Naomi Remen's book Kitchen Table Wisdom, in which a young man, bitter and resistant after losing his leg to cancer, was asked to revisit an early drawing he had made: a cracked vase, dark. He said it was not finished. He picked up a yellow crayon and filled the cracks with light. "That's where the light comes through," he said. You could say this is a devastating yet beautiful image of the therapeutic process.
But Evie does not treat image and word as separate things. She believes in the blending of the two for expression. "Sometimes the image has the potency, the power, the expression in it to say much more than any bunch of words on a page can do," she said. "But I do believe in the blend. I think the blend is powerful." One of her most distinctive practices is asking someone, at the end of a piece of artwork: 'I wonder if you could let this picture title itself?' That single question does something important. It invites a shift from the imagery-rich parts of the brain to the parts that pull words together into coherence. Image and language cohere. It becomes, as Evie described it, "a whole something."
The Inner Cast of Characters
Evie speaks in terms of Jung's concept of active imagination, the idea that we can enter into creative dialogue with the different parts of ourselves. She described our inner life as a cast of characters, each with a distinctive voice and need: the part that wants to stay in bed, the part that pushes forward regardless, the part that sits on a fence and gets splinters.
Creative practice, whether writing, drawing, or making, is one way to give those parts a hearing. Not to necessarily silence them or resolve them into tidy answers, but to let them speak. "Everything that comes from us has some kind of meaning," she said. "It may be scratching the surface, superficial. But it may not be. It may be like being an archaeologist and excavating underneath the surface of something."
What I found particularly helpful was Evie’s instruction to approach resistance gently. Many of us have a tendency to force through a creative block, to shame ourselves for not writing, not making, or not doing. Evie reframes that impulse entirely. Forcing, she says, is "a violent move against the psyche." The more useful question is: can I find a nest inside myself first? A safe and settled place from which to begin? She described a persistent pain in her shoulder that requires patience and gentleness rather than a chisel. Our creative and emotional resistances, she suggests, deserve the same quality of attention.
Pick Up Your Pen
Near the end of our conversation, Evie shared a moment from a visit to her teacher's tomb, Meher Baba, a place of deep quiet, when she received what she described as an intuitive voice, not authoritarian but authoritative. It pointed at her and said: Pick up your pen. She came home and did just that. The next day, a writing invitation appeared in her inbox, and one thing led to another, to Evie finding herself in Asheville and a new creative chapter.
"Pick up your pen" is, in Evie's framing, both literal and larger than the literal. It is the act of beginning. Of not waiting for inspiration or permission or the right materials or the right mood. It is the willingness to make the first mark.
For anyone who has never worked with image and word together, or who has been away from it for a while, Evie's starting point is simple, comprising blank paper, simple materials, perhaps a pencil, or oil pastels, or a brush-tipped pen. She suggests filling the whole page with marks, scribbles, and not aiming for anything. When you stop, look to see if an image catches your attention, then outline it and start a written conversation with it. "There are never any mistakes," she said.
The power of creativity, Evie told me, is a movement like water. "Maybe it starts with a spring and it has a little movement and it goes into the river and the river gathers force. And then eventually it spills into one of those beautiful oceans around the planet. And out of that ocean comes a much larger experience of the self."
You do not need to know where the ocean is. You only need to begin.
Your Turn – The Visual Journalling Practice
This episode lives in the territory between image and word, so it felt right to offer a practice that honours both. Rather than written prompts alone, this journalling suggestion draws on Evie's scribble technique as a way in, using the image you make as the starting point for writing. You do not need any artistic skill. The point of this exercise is simply to begin.
Set aside fifteen to twenty minutes and gather whatever materials you have to hand: a pencil, some coloured pens, or oil pastels if you have them. Take a blank, unlined page and experiment with your materials, broad and free, without aiming for anything. When the page is full, let your eyes rest on whatever jumps out at you. Outline that shape or area, however loosely.
Then turn to your journal and write, using one of these invitations:
· What is the title of this piece? Write whatever comes, without editing it.
· If this image could speak, what would it say to you right now?
· What does it need you to know?
You do not need to understand the answers. The act of asking is enough for now.
Evie's work is a quiet reminder that nothing we carry is wasted, and that the fractured places in us are often exactly where the light is waiting to come through. Pick up your pen. See what arrives.
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Episode 73 of the Writing with Purpose podcast with Evie Lindemann.