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The second issue of volume 2 of the LIRIC journal
The complete volume 2, Issue 2 of the Lapidus International Research and Innovation Community (LIRIC) research journal. Click to download, or you can read the online version here.
Author: Aathira Nair
Welcome everyone—new and returning readers, professionals and explorers, seekers and believers. This second issue of LIRIC’s Volume 2 midwifed itself through periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, a brutal ongoing war, teetering economies and recession worldwide, and unfortunate grief and loss...
Authors: Dr. Jeannie Wright and Dr. Poonam Madar
Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, she took as a pen name her maternal great grandmother’s name bell hooks and refused to capitalize it...
Author: Melanie Perry MSc
Abstract:
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? A case study using a phenomenological methodology.
Author: Fiona Hamilton
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.
Authors: Mel Parks, Jessica Moriarty, Hannah Vincent
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 coled the project to make recommendations for workshop facilitation with people who have experienced GBV.
Author: Geoff Mead
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 nonliteral 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.
Author: Mari Alschuler, Ph.D., LISW-S, MPTP, CM-PTR
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.
Authors: Esther Wafula and Phyllis Muthoni
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 Journal editor 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.
Author of Book: Trude Klevan and Alec Grant
Reviewed by: Reinekke Lengelle, PhD
If I gave this book review a title, I might call it a Troubling Trialogue: Joining the Conversation on Becoming a Qualitative Researcher. I say this because in reading Trude Klevan and Alec Grant’s book—a dialogue about becoming a researcher—I found myself scribbling in the margins often and wanting to engage in the conversation...