Teaching Creative Writing - April

Creative writing and recovery

Tuesday 27 April 11am-12.30pm | Zoom

Lily Dunn and Claire Williamson

Moderated by Ellen Hardy

Increasingly, creative writing has a role in therapeutic environments – both ‘writing for wellbeing’ and as a tool in the process of recovery from a range of physical and mental illnesses, including addiction. Teachers of creative writing in all settings will also face questions around mental wellbeing – both their own and that of their students and colleagues.

This session introduces some of the latest research in employing creative writing for therapeutic purposes, and asks how we as creative writing teachers can make our teaching environments safe, accepting and valuable spaces for self-expression.

Lily Dunn is an author, mentor and creative writing teacher. She is published by Granta, Aeon and many journals. In her final year of her PhD, she has recently completed a memoir about the legacy of addiction. She is particularly interested in the role of 'the self' in fiction and memoir, and an advocate for using writing as a form of self development. She teaches at Bath Spa University.

She also has experience teaching marginalised groups, specifically those in recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol. The ACE-funded anthology ‘A Wild and Precious Life’, which she co-edits with Zoe Gilbert, will be published by Unbound in 2021. She is co-director of London Lit Lab.

Claire Williamson is Programme Leader of the MSc in Using Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP) at the Metanoia Institute. She has been a practitioner in Therapeutic Writing since 1998, working in areas such as addiction recovery and bereavement.

Frequently writing and presenting on her specialist subject of CWTP, Claire most recently spoke at the 5th British Autoethnography Conference on 'Poetics: a form for surviving bereavement by suicide'. Claire‘s latest collection of poetry, ‘Visiting the Minotaur’, (Seren, 2018) is a National Poetry Day recommendation for book groups.

Ellen Hardy is a current researcher on the UEA Creative and Critical Writing PhD programme. She is a contributor to the forthcoming ACE-funded anthology ‘A Wild and Precious Life’, a collection of stories and poetry from writers in recovery that looks at addiction, physical and mental illness, and its aftermath.

Teaching Creative Writing Series Overview

Creative writers teach in schools, universities and the community, on retreats, in theatres and in workshops. Teaching is often a key part of a writer’s career, and there are rich possibilities creative arts education across a huge range of contexts. But how do you teach creative writing? Can you? This series offers anyone considering teaching creative writing as part of their career development the opportunity to look in detail at the theory and practice of creative writing pedagogy in a variety of institutional and community settings.

The series will address the historical principles and contemporary critiques of creative writing pedagogy, and how these are responding to wider institutional and societal developments. It will consider in detail the theory and practice of employing these pedagogical skills both within and outside higher education. Attendees will be invited to reflect on future possibilities and challenges for the development of creative writing teaching, enabling a deeper awareness and knowledge of creative writing as a subject of study, a future career, and a creative practice.

Students are not expected to attend all the sessions, but the series has been designed to allow for an arc of learning from theoretical principles to practical engagement.

The sessions will take place online via Zoom, once a month for the 2020/21 academic year.

Registrations are closed

TCW | Creative writing and recovery