Looking ahead to Creative Bridges 2025

Lapidus co-Chair, Mel Perry, looks ahead to Creative Bridges 2025, including opportunities to take part in the conference.

Have you saved the date yet?  Lapidus International’s flagship conference, Creative Bridges, will take place over Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th September 2025. 

What is Creative Bridges?

This conference is arranged by Lapidus for you, its members, and other people and communities who are interested in the breadth and depth to which  words and writing for wellbeing can reach.

Creative Bridges is a major opportunity to connect with and be inspired by others.  Whether you are new to this world, a student, or long-experienced, this conference can inform and connect us;  it nurtures and refreshes.

We live in troubling times and we invite you to help us build a conference programme that will debate and show where words and writing for wellbeing can make a difference.  Be it in activism, social change,or amplifying marginalised voices, do share and tell us about your work.  For all the dark challenges we face in the world there is also light and laughter. We want to know about where you, your participants, and your work have found joy in the face of adversity. 

Call for papers: share your work at Creative Bridges

We would love to hear about how your practice has stirred further inquiry. What are the practice implications of any research in which you have engaged? Is there an issue in our field that you would like to debate with colleagues and illuminate for the conference? If you already know that you would like to offer a workshop, host a panel discussion, or present a paper then please submit through the submission form on the website.

In addition to regular conference sessions, this year we are scheduling some brief online moments for reflection and refreshment through complementary activities. If you would like to make a proposal to deliver one of these sessions then look for the information on the website.

There is also an opportunity to document Creative Bridges for a poet-in-conference (PiC). Our previous PiC, Georgiana Blake-Hall, sped through the back stage corridors of our Zoom sessions to participate in as many sessions as she could. Georgiana then created beautiful poetic responses to what she had seen, heard and sensed. Could you or someone you know spread that final comforting blanket of words around us to close this year’s conference?

What to expect from Creative Bridges 2025

We are just finalising the details of our keynote speakers and we are very excited to welcome two women whose work in writing, performing and other arts is informed by their lives and experiences in South Africa, Colombia, United States and Europe.

Finally, we aim to celebrate some special contributions through a series of awards which will be conferred upon key people in our field at the end of the conference. More on this plan to follow.

Like the daffodils and crocuses which push through in my garden, our Creative Bridges 2025 place on the Lapidus International website is beginning to flourish and we aim to offer you more information as our plans flower through the year.