Lapidus Living Research Community (LLRC)

“Wanderings and Wonderings: some thoughts about what curiosity with our writing practices might be ‘doing’ or ‘becoming’” with Sue Spencer

For many years I have been grappling with an unease with the oft expressed dichotomy between research and practice – I see no reason why learning from my practice should not be valued knowledge. Recent stumbles into the world of research-creation have started illuminating a clearer direction of inquiry formed in relation to how I articulate what I am trying to do in my writing and art practice.

In this session I will share my excursions into posthuman feminism and my commitment to making connections that will enhance our capabilities to respond well to participants, be sensitive to the context of our work and our capacities to “think through” what we are doing and why.

This session is designed to be interactive, generative and conversational. I will offer short writing exercises that respond to some question setting from a range of scholars.

Please bring along poems/literature that inspire you and sheets of paper to write on. It is anticipated that this might be the start of mapping your insights and articulating core values. It is some further thoughts following my previous offering in October 2023 – come along to share thoughts or ask questions.

Members can watch a recording of Sue’s presentation for a limited time after the event, via our Events page.

About the presenter

Since leaving institutional employment in 2020 I am learning to appreciate the opportunity of working in the margins. In the last three years I have developed a new practice supporting freelance creative practitioners in socially engaged work.

I offer clinical supervision and reflective practice spaces that enable processing of emotions, thoughts and feelings with the aim of increasing self-awareness and increased understanding of responses to the environments we find ourselves working within.

I am also exploring with a writing mentor (Ruth Charnock) the development of a hybrid piece of work that includes poetry, multimedia visual art and essays.

Mark presented his CWTP-informed research with climate activists, which used creative writing exercises on the rocky, threatened foreshore of the North Somerset coast, while encouraging an engagement with the hard, stony stuff around them, suggesting that our eyes can be opened in unexpected ways when engaging with the lithosphere. It’s just one way of engaging with the more-than-human world, inducing our care-giving responses to the Gaia that resides in and around us all.

An overview of Mark’s research was accompanied with some stone-based writing exercises, so we brought a favoured pebble, a pad and pen, and ventured imaginatively into deep time both forwards and backwards, beyond and before the Anthrobscene.

About Mark

Mark Smalley is a former BBC Radio 4 producer of features and documentaries, now freelance, who completed an MSc in CWTP at Metanoia in 2023, an effective corrective to uninhibited egos in the media sector.

His research folded together a response to the climate and nature polycrises and the use of creative writing with climate activists, accessing deep time through an engagement with the lithosphere – the world of rocks seldom that far beneath our feet.

With an abiding love of rocks and landscape, the series of BBC Radio 3 talks he edited by 20 contemporary poets and writers entitled ‘Cornerstones‘ is published by Little Toller. His first poetry pamphlet, ‘Touchstone’, which is emerging out of his research project, is in preparation.

Jon helped us to investigate how poems can help us recognise and sustain tension between conscious and unconscious material, holding onto conflicting ideas, thoughts and feelings without any – as Keats described it – “irritable reaching after fact and reason,” and can ultimately shore up our moral strength to take action.

Jon also shared his explorations in the intersections between Jungian psychology, poetry therapy and expressive writing, showing how holding the tension of opposites is central to Jung’s theory of Individuation: each individual’s growth towards wholeness. He introduced groupings of poems, with associated exercises, that can assist us in all three parts of the opus: achieving insight into our inner conflicts, enduring the associated tensions and resolving them through action.

About Jon

Jon Sayers is a poet, coach and journal facilitator based in London. His poems have been published in leading UK magazines and his radio play, A World Full of Weeping, a supernatural thriller whose plot revolves around a poem by WB Yeats, was twice broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and was a Radio Times Pick of the Week. With Reinekke Lengelle and Geri Chavis, he co-wrote the chapter on Poetry Therapy for Writing for Wellbeing: Research, Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2023).

As a journal facilitator, using a biblio/poetry therapy model, Jon has worked with, among others, older teens moving out of the care system, older women carers, church communities, newly qualified life coaches, members of the British Guild of Travel Writers, and inmates of His Majesty’s Pentonville prison.

He has trained extensively with the Therapeutic Writing Institute of Denver, Colorado. Jon draws on a range of psychological models in his facilitation work, with a particular interest in the ideas of Carl Jung, and has delivered Jungian themed writing workshops in the UK and USA.

We joined one another in taking a step back and observing what is in the footnotes. Which aspects of life and death are so delicate that they are kept to the footnotes? How might words and the art and act of writing capture these moments so they are not hidden or forgotten?

Kate brought examples of work with individuals and groups including staff, patients and families from her work in the NHS and the range of life moments captured in that chapter. Our time together formed of poems, examples of joining the written word with other tangible acts, noticing how each enhances the other so therein contains the possibility of connection and meaning.

About Kate

Kate Fox Robinson has had a squiggly career to date encompassing youth and community work, sibling support work in a children’s hospice, chaplaincy and bereavement work in mental health services & acute hospitals, learning disability support work and student support in further and higher education. These roles have spanned the charity, healthcare and education sectors.

Kate’s Masters research explored spiritual care for children with complex needs and their families throughout palliative care. Writing has been a common thread across her work and her approach has adapted accordingly to the role and setting.

Kate started to write in March 2020 and her blog footnotesonlife.co.uk chronicles impact of the pandemic and beyond. Latterly, Kate has begun to engage in writers groups, poetry events and making connections and is enjoying discovering the breadth of work that is taking place.

We joined Hayley as she reflected and discussed The Right Words Project; a programme of workshops that uses grief as an expression of ‘love without a home’. Through the project, Hayley supported the experiences of mothers navigating baby loss.

Hayley unpacked the cause, affect and findings of the project, shedding light on the profound emotional journey of grief. Through the lens of contemporary understanding and societal shifts, we explored how artistic expression serves as a conduit for healing and meaning-making in the face of loss.

About Hayley

Hayley Frances is a poet from Birmingham who uses poetry as a therapeutic medium. Her first collection Administer the Laughing Gas is out with VERVE in September 2024, and she is the founder of OdeHeart, a multi-poetry movement encouraging self-authorship for creativity, awareness, strength and healing.

In this session, Steph presented an overview of findings from her PhD, including the first whole-of-human model introduced in wellbeing-through-writing literature.

She also introduced us to the pioneering concept ‘languaging the feeling body through writing’, which leading academics have described as “overlooked wisdom that is a significant outcome” and “illuminating the precise ways in which a writing program can transform lived experience.”

About Steph

Dr Stephanie Dale is a researcher and writing program developer with a background in newspaper journalism. In 2014 she founded The Write Road, a wellbeing initiative that pioneered writing programs in rural and remote Australia. In 2023, on completion of her PhD, Steph founded the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute, the purpose of which is further work in the field in mainstream policy and practice: www.iwwi.com.au

In this session Natalie introduced the emerging field of experience design, explored some of its crossovers with lived research approaches, and shared some short reflexive writing and drawing exercises that are integral parts of the experiences she creates.

About Natalie

Natalie Silk lives between East London and the Blackdown Hills (Devon/Somerset borders). She is a creative event devisor and community organiser working across regenerative food, independent music and community settings.A co-founder of the ground-breaking Field Day festival, Natalie has also recreated live community barter in the Good Food Swap.

Natalie’s background is in comparative literature and environmental art, and she has recently trained in the US in the emerging interdisciplinary field of experience design. Currently setting up a rural retreat space, her playful ‘Village Mentality’ approach always has community exchange and creative health at its heart.

Jo talked to us about her recent HEIF-funded project in which she led a team of researchers from the University of Hull to deliver bespoke writing modules at HMP Hull and HMP Manchester in order to support staff wellbeing and staff-prisoner relations.

About Jo

Dr Josephine Metcalf is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies & Criminology and the Co-Founder of the Cultures of Incarceration Center at the University of Hull. Jo’s research centres on representations of gangs and prisons in a range of cultural forms and the ways in which these have been received by audiences.
Jo is currently working on a monograph entitled The Culture and Politics of Contemporary US Prison Literature, and has particular interests in the act of writing while incarcerated.