Creative Therapy

ARTS&LIFE

ART

Creative Therapy

Meet Samm, a certifi ed Zentangle teacher.

ROCHEL BURSTYN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

If you’ve never heard of Zentangle — the relatively new art movement of purposeful doodling until one reachinformation and found there were classes for anyone who wanted to become a Certified Zentangle Teacher (CZT). es a Zen-like state — you’re not alone. But Oak Park’s Samm Wunderlich is an expert on it.

She discovered it by chance.

Wunderlich grew up in Pleasant Ridge, attended Ferndale Public Schools and graduated from Central Michigan with an undergrad in psychology and recreation therapy, something, Wunderlich said, most people haven’t even heard of. She belongs to Young Israel of Oak Park.

As a recreation therapist, Wunderlich worked with people who’ve had traumatic brain injuries, helping them reintegrate into the community through their personal interests.

“I specialize in cognitive skill retraining, such as social skills. I’d take clients to community settings where they needed to interact with the world, and I’d coach them through the steps needed for the interaction,” Wunderlich explained.

In 2011, Wunderlich was working at Havenwyck Hospital in Auburn Hills. One of the tools the staff informally used was a how-to book on Zentangle. Wunderlich found the concept fascinating and often flipped through the book herself. Intrigued, she looked up more Wunderlich immediately signed up. She discovered Zentangle had been invented in 2008 by Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts, a husband-and-wife team in Massachusetts. Roberts noticed that when Thomas, a calligraphy artist, inked her patterns or embellishments, it was hard to get her attention. Thomas was able to break down what she was doing into easy-to-follow steps for Roberts. Soon some of their friends and neighbors got in on the meditative fun, and the Zentangle Method was born.

ANYONE CAN CREATE

According to Wunderlich, it’s simple; anyone can do it. She’d been prepared to adapt the Zentangle Method for people with lower cognitive abilities and motor skills but found she didn’t have to.

“It’s just repetitive geometric abstract swirls and patterns. Really, anything repetitive and deliberate can be relaxing … It might look like doodling, but we don’t like that term, because there’s a negative connotation; it makes it sound absent-minded, which is the opposite of the Zentangle Method,” Wunderlich said.

Wunderlich began using the Zentangle Method more pointedly with her clients and word quickly spread. She later had a following in a Ferndale art studio and has been giving private art classes out of her home, stopping periodically when she got married to her husband, David Faust, in 2019 and during the pandemic.

Supplies are portable so she’s also run Zentangle workshops at bat mitzvah parties, birthday parties, in various dining rooms, and even corporate events, as well as classes at nursing homes and independent living facilities. She’s had between one and 150 people doing Zentangle at once.

In 2018, Wunderlich went back to college to get a research degree and ended up with a master’s in program evaluation.

“I went from one field no one heard of to another!” Wunderlich laughed. She works with programs and organizations, usually nonprofits, many of which are funded by grants to help figure out if what they’re doing is working and how

Samm Wunderlich

JESSICA BELICKA