Writing and Health

Arts for Health

In Spring 2023 Untold Stories project partner Lime Art, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust’s in-house arts & health organisation, celebrated its 50^th anniversary. Lime originated in the Manchester Hospitals Arts Project (HA), led by Peter Senior, artist and lecturer at Manchester School of Art, part of what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Senior’s early explorations through HA of the integration of the arts into healthcare led to the development of a multidisciplinary programme of creative work in hospital settings, and the establishment in 1987 by Senior of a national ‘Arts for Health’ resource centre at Manchester Met. These pioneering initiatives, originating in Manchester, have influenced a global movement for which the City is still a driving force. Lime continues to partner with academic researchers and artistic practitioners to deliver groundbreaking creative programmes in support of NHS staff and patient health and wellbeing, including the Untold Stories project. An uncatalogued archive of materials chronicling its activities from 1975-2007 is held at the Wellcome Collection. Professor Clive Parkinson, who led Manchester Met’s Arts for Health until 2021, convened the Manchester Institute for Arts, Health and Social Change, whose manifestos The Manchester Declaration (2019) and A Social Glue (2021) underpin a new Greater Manchester Creative Health Strategy, launched in November 2022, which credits Parkinson’s ‘visionary thinking and practice’ and sets out Manchester’s aspiration to become the first Creative Health City Region.

Creative Writing, Health & Wellbeing & the NHS

Within the global Arts for Health movement, creative writing has had an important place, and a growing body of work has demonstrated the benefits of writing in various forms both for people experiencing ill health and treatment, and for staff working within the often challenging environment of health and social care settings. Like all creative arts practices, creative writing makes space for self-expression: for the catharsis of exploring difficult experiences and emotions in a supportive setting. The selected further reading below includes writing by academics, creative writing practitioners and health professionals, and by many people who span these categories. A good place to start an exploration of Creative Writing & Health is the Lapidus International Writing for Wellbeing organisation. Lapidus, founded in 1996, connects an extensive community of practitioners and academics with interests in writing for health and wellbeing. It hosts resources, runs a programme of events and workshops and publishes the LIRIC journal. The National Association for Poetry Therapy, established in the early 1980s in the US similarly convenes and supports a community dedicated to the therapeutic use of ‘language, symbol and story’, through conferences, resources and mentoring.

Creative Writing and Co-Production

Different forms of writing such as those used by participants in the Untold Stories programme make space for the exploration of memories and of experiences in the moment; for telling ‘untold stories’ and making a variety of voices heard. This can be of particular value in a vast and complex organisation like the NHS, where some staff may feel that their contribution is not always adequately valued or their experiences understood. Creative Writing can be a way both to express and to listen; in the words of former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, to ‘speak across differences’. This can be as true of the process of creating writing, where this process is a collaborative and participatory practice, as it is of the interaction between writer and reader; speaker and listener.

The ‘finished’ writing from the Untold Stories project is the outcome of a process of what is often called co-production. The writer-practioners on the project have worked with others, through individual mentoring and creative writing workshops, to produce work which is the collaborative product of various kinds of interaction. In some cases participants have developed writing through one-to-one feedback from the writer-practitioner and their workshop peers; in others they have given writing to the writer-practitioner to be adapted; in others again the writer-practitioner has produced writing informed by conversations with participants. The choice of each approach, and the writing they have generated, have been the product of a process of negotiation; of back-and-forth, which is in fact rarely absent from any form of writing, however much we tend to anchor a book or poem to an individual author. Almost all writers produce their work in collaboration with an editor, and through the less formalised processes of feedback from friends and fellow writers.

Co-production is a deeply complex set of practices across various forms of knowledge and creative production whose ethics and methodologies provoke challenging questions and debate (see books and articles listed below). In the case of creative writing can the writer enable new voices and stories to be heard without appropriating those voices and stories? How can those who have participated in this process retain a sense of ownership of words which someone else has spoken with or for them? Is there a danger such processes can replicate the very power dynamics they often claim to contest? Untold Stories makes no claim to have resolved these questions, but we have used the project to foreground and debate them, and to develop the experience of the Manchester academic and practitioner community who have engaged with the project in navigating the ethical challenges posed by creative writing co-production.

Writingand Health

Arts for Health

Creative Writing, Health & Wellbeing & the NHS

Creative Writing and Co-Production

Further Reading

Office

The Project

Untold Stories