Lapidus International Research and Innovation Community (LIRIC) Journal is an international, peer-reviewed, and cross-disciplinary exploration of the field of writing for wellbeing/creative writing for therapeutic purposes (CWTP).
A Story of a Marriage Through Dementia and Beyond
Copyright (c) 2023 Dr Kim Etherington (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Insight into the Process of Writing the Same Memoir in Two Languages
The experience of a civil war is always traumatic, as is refugee status and settling down in a new environment. Writing about such traumatic events takes a great deal of processing and a lot of time. Almost 30 years after the events, I set out to write a memoir describing them. One surprising fact was that the language in which the book was first rendered was English. Although I have near native proficiency in English, it is not my mother tongue. It was only after the book was completed that the idea of translating/rewriting it in Serbo-Croat started to emerge. The link between language and identity is well-known, but some aspects might seem rather strange. In this essay, I analyse various psychological processes that accompanied my writing. I note the differences in emotions and reactions, as well as something I would refer to as a change of personality traits, depending on the language I was writing in. Completing both versions of the memoir helped me process my trauma and bring together previously fragmented pieces of self.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dr Jasna Levinger-Goy (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Unpicking Horrifying Moments of Uneasy Silence
This duo-autoethnography explores responses to a recurring hiatus in conversations when I, a white English woman, state that I am married to a man with an Arabic name. Together, my husband and I have used practices of creative writing for therapeutic purposes to examine our personal encounters with Islamophobia in the UK. This article evidences the power of co-inquiry, demonstrates the necessity of flexible responses to written expressions of trauma; and reveals outrage and silence as distinctive ways of coping with discrimination. It shows an incongruence in the binary which presupposes white non-Muslim men to be superior in their ability to respect women and highlights the need to dismantle white supremacy in trustworthy environments to avoid unhelpful fight-or-flight responses. Personal responses have been written, acknowledging structures of wider political, social, and historical contexts shaping social conditions.
creative writing for therapeutic purposes
Copyright (c) 2023 Dr Lucy Windridge-Floris, Shaamil Windridge-Floris (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Tim Buescher (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This qualitative inquiry is the account of one academic who used poetry and art as reflective mediums while applying for tenure and promotion in a university environment. The autobiographical framework guiding this work adds a rich layer of understanding to the lived experience of applying for tenure as an academic in a tenure-track role. This paper suggests that using arts-based mediums as reflective tools can ease the journey to tenure. Through thematic analysis of the poetry and art created, three findings emerged: f irst, the importance of considering the creation of poetry and art as mediums to express and explore the reflective practitioner’s role in the academy; second, the importance of creating writing spaces and protecting time needed to engage and critically analyze our works; finally, for each of us as practitioners to engage in self-care activities while inquiring into tensions within our work practices.
Copyright (c) 2023 Janet Kuhnke (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this study, I selected a sample of my own historic diary entries (ages 14–43) and wrote into them reflectively and creatively. This culminated in a script-in-hand performance shared with a closed audience in the landscape. My curiosity was how this process might be therapeutic to me and possibly others. I found therapeutic value in re-storying, becoming more reconciled to life events, improved self-image, confidence, and integration of parts of self. There were impacts on the audience, and findings relate to how sharing life story enables two-way connection, being heard, and seeing oneself in others. There are implications for ongoing work creatively and therapeutically engaging with diaries, especially regarding life review and end of life.
Copyright (c) 2023 Emma Decent (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2022 Dr Reinekke Lengelle (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Photopoetry is an art form that involves the interaction between photography and poetry to produce a new artefact—the photopoem. This article presents two photopoems based on a collaboration between Esther Wafula, a poet, and Phyllis Muthoni, a photographer. In dialogue, the poet and the photographer respond to questions suggested by the LIRIC Journaleditor about how their collaboration began, what inspires their work, and what photography and poetry uniquely bring to the collaboration. The poet also describes the organic process she uses to create photopoems. The implications of photopoetry as a form of creative expression are briefly discussed and an invitation made to explore its potential as a possible tool for research for the self and creative writing for therapeutic purposes.
Copyright (c) 2022 Esther Wafula, Phyllis Muthoni (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Poetry Therapy, Journaling, and Mindfulness
This retrospective case study presents the course of a 16-month treatment of an adult female client diagnosed with severe anxiety. The treatment protocol incorporated poetry therapy, journal therapy, training in mindfulness meditation techniques, and cognitive therapy. Using the Beck Anxiety Inventory for scaling, the client reduced her subjective experience of anxiety symptoms from the baseline score of 34 to 9 after 15 months and to a score of 4 at the end of treatment. The author’s university Institutional Review Board approved the study and the client released the content of her journals for use in this article. Excerpts from her journal entries highlight the course of her movement from severe anxiety to remission.
Copyright (c) 2022 Dr Mari Alschuler (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this paper, I share the findings of a heuristically informed self-study exploring the potential of creative dialogues with characters from Homer’s Odyssey to support the development of a healthy narrative identity in late adulthood. Feeling stuck in a persistent dysfunctional narrative, I was interested in trying to access the wisdom of the mundus imaginalis, described as a third realm between mind and matter with its own non-literal ontological reality, to find new possibilities. The study also drew on dialogical self theory (DST), which suggests that our narrative identity is constituted through ongoing ‘conversations’ between the multiple internal and external voices of a decentred self, rather than the unfolding of a single story. I devised methods (including collage, poetry, and creative dialogues) with the intention of enabling autonomous mythological characters to advise and guide me ‘in their own voices.’ The cumulative effect of these imaginal encounters was both profound and beneficial, helping me shift my narrative identity from that of a life mired in loss and grief to one characterised by gratitude and acceptance. I conclude that creative writing for therapeutic purposes practitioners could use similar methods to benefit others, with the caveat that they require considerable time and commitment.
Copyright (c) 2022 Geoff Mead (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Immobilities of Gender-based Violence in Lockdown
This article reports on a UK-wide, transdisciplinary project between creative writers and social scientists that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), exploring how storytelling workshops with women who experienced gender-based violence (GBV) in lockdown could be used to inform and change social and legal policies. The article is split into two sections: in the first, we give an outline of the project and how the creative workshops were devised, and in the second, we adopt a trioethnographic stance, enabling us to contextualise and present our dialogues that 1) reflect on our lived experience of devising the workshops and 2) draw on interview data with writers and artists who co-led the project to make recommendations for workshop facilitation with people who have experienced GBV.
Copyright (c) 2022 Mel Parks, Jessica Moriarty, Hannah Vincent (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This essay looks at medical students’ poetry on a curated website and design of a course for medical undergraduates called Poetry of Medicine. A close reading of poetry and commentaries on the website outofourheads.net informed aims and design of the course, which had three strands: 1) study of poetics and analysis of poems; 2) practical exploration of applications of poetry within medicine; 3) writing poems and reflecting on them, and reading work by a range of poets. This essay focuses on the third of these. Recurring themes in students’ writing and reflections suggested that writing poetry can offer an outlet for expression and a way of processing personal and professional experiences that may be helpful as a supportive resource for students
Copyright (c) 2022 Fiona Hamilton (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
A regenring of a research project dissertation that explores the experience of women survivors of domestic abuse who had practised creative writing for therapeutic purposes—reading their written work at a spoken word poetry event and asking, What can we do as writing practitioners to support them?
Copyright (c) 2022 Melanie Perry (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2022 Dr Jeannie Wright, Dr Poonam Madar (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2022 Aathira Nair (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2022 Dr Katrin Den Elzen (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Lowen Clarke presents a new therapeutic aide based on a phenomenon that complements the basics of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing). The phenomenon has been made into a useful tool as a picture book. This combination has calming results for clients with PTSD(post-traumatic stress disorder) and dissociation. Lowen introduces the phenomenon, the book, and the lived experience that underlay its discovery and publication.
Copyright (c) 2022 Lowen Clarke (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This paper explores themes of the liberatory in therapeutic writing. It includes a narrative account of a series of difficult encounters at a writing for wellbeing conference and then reflects on this through an ‘otherwise’ lens. By engaging Saidiya Hartman’s term otherwise, the author highlights possibilities for practice in the field as it navigates the unbearable encounter of race. Terms such as therapeutic writing, creative writing for therapeutic purposes (CWTP), and writing for wellbeing, which do not explicitly reference the liberatory, or processes of ‘getting free’, do not account for the experience, knowledge, and possibilities of Black life. Writing OtherWise is proposed as a mode of practice that creates capacity for being with the difficult encounter and expanded possibilities for writing as personal and collective freedom-making.
Copyright (c) 2022 Foluke Taylor (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Creating Space to Write and Grow Spiritually
This paper explores the spiritual health of an individual living recovered from an eating disorder. The goal is to advance understanding of diary writing as a contribution to healing and wellbeing. Frameworks guiding this study include autobiographical/performative and document analysis approaches. Data focused on spirituality was collected from diaries, journals, and art created, each critically analyzed for leading themes. Themes emerging from the inquiry included individual courage and connectedness, the role of diary writing and gaining self-knowledge, and maintaining daily spirituality in recovery.
Copyright (c) 2022 Janet Kuhnke (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This paper is an account of a self-heuristic enquiry into the experience of using artwork and reflective creative writing to map fragments of my dreams over a ten-week period in early 2020. During this time, I generated a series of dream maps and associated reflective creative writing, from which emerged themes of orientation, perspective, journey, beasts, and body. As a cross-art exercise in transforming ephemeral dream fragments into concrete maps, poems, dialogues, and other written forms, it was an extended journaling of personal metaphor that was both playful and deeply informative. I argue that the novel techniques I used in this project contributed to integration of my self and could similarly benefit others. My intention for this paper is to share personal discoveries I made through the work, and to offer practical guidance—in the form of a nine-step procedure—to other practitioners who would like to try this approach.
Copyright (c) 2022 Rachel Godfrey (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
After presenting several theories and dimensions of loneliness, this article sets forth specific ways in which the practice of poetry therapy, which involves facilitating expressive writing and sharing of personal responses to select poems, can not only offer relief to those experiencing loneliness, but also foster empathy toward individuals suffering from a sense of isolation. Addressed to professionals engaged in helping individuals in clinical and non-clinical settings, this article draws from the author’s experiences as a certified poetry therapist and psychologist working in clinical and community-based educational settings and also from the author’s workshop presented at the 2019 Creative Bridges Conference.Poetic materials, along with creative writing and group discussion prompts, are referenced as apt choices for addressing loneliness arising from life transitions involving loss, lack of belonging due to social discrimination, communication breakdown, and chronic dysfunctional patterns. A final section of this article briefly addresses the way in which poetic expression can enhance appreciation for solitude as a healthful state differing from loneliness.
Copyright (c) 2022 Dr Geri Giebel Chavis (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
A growing number of studies on the effects of expressive writing demonstrate an improvement in the long-term physical health of participating writers. However, the findings for psychological and emotional health benefits are not as robust or consistent. With reference to the transformation-through-writing model, I take an autoethnographic approach to explore how creative writing supported an increasing level of self-awareness about my own experience of childhood sexual abuse. I attribute the positive effect writing had on my psychological and emotional health to a combination of concepts discussed in the literature on expressive writing, namely emotional catharsis and cognitive processing. From this analysis, I suggest that creative writing may be an effective healing model for adult survivors of childhood trauma if the expressive writing paradigm is adjusted to align with individual stages of healing, recognize the individual’s culture and coping style, and provide sufficient time for the individual to heal through writing.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jennifer Bertrand (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this paper, I explore my autistic identity through poetry. I briefly explain the medical model of autism, diagnosed as a disorder through the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), highlighting the amygdala as a brain structure that is particularly affected by autism. I outline my writing process for this project and offer suggestions for practitioners or other autistic writers. I then present a collection of sonnets where I problematize the deficit-based pathologizing of autism in the DSM-5, contrasting it with the social model of disability. I conclude with my ambivalence toward getting a medical diagnosis.
Copyright (c) 2022 Sean Erin Moores (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
What is the value, therapeutic or otherwise, of expressive self-writing? What happens when some of those private written thoughts and feelings become material for publication? I was recently reminded of an article I wrote, published in 2009, about dialogical journal writing and compassion-focused therapy. Later, in clearing out cupboards, I found a paper copy of that article (!) and realised that I have a collection of my publications, dating back to 1999 and relevant to the field in which LIRIC has developed. Some of them I'd completely forgotten about writing; some were published in local or obscure journals; some were published in non open access journals and are, frustratingly, now behind a pay wall—even for their author. My intention in this article is to bring together those publications. For anyone who needs or wants a copy, I can supply paper copies but rarely digital ones. Creative therapeutic writing has been a habit I’ve maintained almost since I was old enough to write. Re-reading the thoughts and feelings I catch on the back of flyers, on screens, and occasionally in notebooks helps anchor me, especially at times of transition; helps me to express feelings, make meaning, and clarify my thinking. In a professional life, where talking therapy and then teaching counselling and psychotherapy paid the bills, publishing something became a ‘requirement’ as well as part of an evangelical drive to let other practitioners know about the therapeutic power of writing. This essay aims to capture the ways and various contexts in which the publications about ‘writing for wellbeing’—or whatever we call it—developed.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dr Jeannie Wright (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Touchstone investigates what happens when the man-made climate and nature polycrises—what I call the Anthrobscene—is approached through the lens of geological deep time using established creative writing for therapeutic purposes (CWTP) techniques to enable a conversation between us and rocks. Does such an encounter have any distinctly regenerative, therapeutic benefits? Feedback from my two co-researchers and seven workshop participants confirms that it does. This paper explores how and why this may be. The Touchstone approach is underpinned by Joanna Macy’s influential The Work That Reconnects (TWTR) for activists and an action research methodology. This is combined with creative writing and the growing evidence-based insights that confirm the health benefits of people reconnecting with nature together outdoors. Touchstone confirms that participants can feel consoled and inspired when given the opportunity to develop a close, inquiring relationship with stone while engaging with, writing about, and reflecting on rocks. The process, I suggest, enables us to glimpse over the vertiginous cliff edge of these bewildering times while regrounding ourselves in pre- and post-human timescales that enable us to continue the fight for all life and for sanity.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mark Smalley (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Research from the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge recognises that prison officers are productive role models for prisoners and that the pop-cultural stereotype of the officer beating the inmate into submission has diminished. Yet a report published by the Prison Officers Association in 2020 noted that staff members were at a greater risk of work-related stress and mental health problems than most other occupations, with little support in place. Staff wellbeing is in turn tantamount to the safety of those who serve custodial sentences. In 2022, researchers at the University of Hull designed a bespoke eight-week creative writing course for prison staff at two HMPPS (His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service) facilities supporting the mental health of their staff. This was the first of its kind in the United Kingdom. This article explains the design and delivery of the course, the choice of texts as writing prompts, and the writing exercises used. The data reveal numerous benefits for individual participants, including an ‘escape’ from daily work, improved relationships, and a cathartic outlet for managing a stressful job. The article draws focus to the writing course stimulating confidence and prompting self-growth. The authors contend that the delivery and outcomes of the course positions prison as a unique site for writing to support employee wellbeing.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dr Josephine Metcalf (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This paper explores the cohesive and insightful narrative that emerges where research, thinking, writing, and being converge, emphasising the dynamic essence of academic inquiry in the journey of knowledge creation. It examines the interplay between my doctoral research journey titled Women Living with Autoimmune Invisible Illnesses: An Autoethnographic Study and Narratives in Malta and the writing process of this paper. Inspired by J. Campbell’s insight that ‘where you stumble, there lies your treasure,’ my writing unfolded as a transformative exploration, revealing layers of self in tandem with the project’s evolving layers. Kierkegaard’s notion that life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward resonates throughout, guiding my oscillation between the past and present in the realms of writing and thinking. Navigating memories, events, and reflections enriched the narrative, highlighting that this process was not a straightforward one. While writing, I came to realise that although my focus evolved from my doctoral thesis, the narrative in this paper continued to expand—the story is never fully or exhaustively told. Beyond the material and patterns identified in my thesis, I reflect on the transformative process, acknowledging its ongoing impact on my unfolding life story.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sharon Martinelli (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2020 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0