Closing 9 Creative Lives Studio: An Official Goodbye (for now)

Hello,

This newsletter is a little late in coming. I had some resistance to writing to all of you and more officially closing this particular chapter in my life, but here we go…

On October 2025, I closed the doors to 9 Creative Lives Studio. Thank you to everyone who participated in both my poetry writing classes and speech arts classes over the last five years, and who I had the privilege of supporting as an editor. It has been a true delight and unimaginable gift to have been of service in this way.

Together we developed a writing ritual, explored poetry’s relationship to the body, read and wrote poetry to reflect on our relationship to authenticity and our voice, and wondered about the ways finding new metaphors to describe our experience could renew and invigorate us. With teens, we disrupted the overly analytic ways poetry can be taught in schools and learned to approach poetry with delight and curiosity.

You left my classes and wrote books, entered (and won) literary contests, and made poetry a part of your life.

I want to thank those people who’ve sent me beautiful letters, expressing their gratitude for my classes and sharing how much they added to their lives. I want you to know that I will treasure those letters for the rest of my life and I truly mean that. 

Regardless of where I go next (how poetic of me to even write those words), these letters will remind me of this very meaningful period in my life — when despite having published so little myself, you attended my writing classes, which allowed me to develop my voice and pedagogy as a facilitator, opening my eyes to a passion I did not know would energize and terrify me in equal measure: teaching and through teaching, getting to create entrances for and stand witness to the embodied and imaginative inner lives of my students.

To properly close this studio, I created four wrap up posts:

I’m not done teaching by the way. Just for now. 

Breaks are necessary sometimes. And a break, a pause, is exactly what I’m offering myself.

With that said, I’m still diligently working towards my certification as an applied poetry facilitator through IFBPT, and later this year I’ll be recording one of the poetry writing workshops I created through this studio to share with you (and which maybe you’ll feel inspired to share with others).

I’m also going to finally release the poetry short film about anxiety I wrote and co-produced back in 2019. You’ll hear from me again this year when that happens. 

And now, I’m off on a new adventure as the manager of local enrolment and family engagement at Bodwell High School where I get to be a storyteller and build (with a very inspiring team) a community of both locally and internationally diverse students who are engaged and passionate about learning, not just from textbooks but from each other. 

There! Whew! I’ve finally written to you. I can now put up that ‘closed’ sign on my instagram page and switch my career in LinkedIn.

If you’re still with me at the end of this goodbye post, thank you. Endings are important, and I wanted to close this studio well. I hope I’ve succeeded. Given how much my breath moved and how clear headed and calm I felt as I wrote this letter to you, it feels like I have. 

With gratitude,
Christine Bissonnette

Questions or comments about anything in this email? Send an email to [email protected] . I’d love to hear from you.