Mental Health Matters: May 16 2024

Along with several fellow trade union members, I signed up for a series of online creative writing sessions, gathering via video calls in small groups for tutor-led sessions in exploring the power of writing to support wellbeing.

The sessions used prompts including photographs, music and poetry supported by group discussions led by tutor Dr Catherine Deveney and one-to-one sessions with psychologist Dr Patrick Lawson to write poetry, prose and flash fiction.

Participants were encouraged and supported to dig deep into ourselves, writing from the perspectives of our own childhood selves, alter egos and empathic understandings for others.

The results were astounding, healing, brimming with truth and power.

My life was quickly re-consumed with other distractions so I did not sign up for the follow-up to the sessions, although I learned so much just from that first course that it has certainly shaped my own writing.

What the participants went on to create in subsequent creative writing for wellbeing workshops continued to grow and develop and one of the many outputs of this work is Patchwork Poetry & Prose - an anthology of writing for wellbeing. It is a beautiful illustrated book containing many examples of the outpourings of creativity from more than 20 of the participants.

The collection is a snapshot of the feelings of that moment in time, deep in the turmoil of lockdown, and a powerful gathering of creative, poetic writers delivering honest, thought-provoking and challenging pieces of writing.

There is humour, drama, sorrow, bliss and every other emotion in between. There are paragraphs filled with meandering prose and short sharp sentences of straight to the point detail.

I devoured the book in one sitting; laughing out loud, gasping in surprise, clutching a hand to my heart and shedding a tear as I was taken on countless journeys by the writers who have contributed.

In my head I could also hear the voice of our tutor Catherine as she guided our group of disembodied faces on a zoom call gallery screen to ‘show don’t tell’ when describing a place, a feeling, a moment.

I could recall the haunting faces of refugees on a boat used as a photo prompt to help us use the emotions we were familiar with to empathise and write about the emotions our fellow humans may be feeling even if we had not experienced those circumstances - fear, hunger, jubilation, relief.

This book is very special for those who contributed, for those who were there for part of the journey of the Creative Writing for Wellbeing sessions and, I suspect, for everyone who lived through the last four years and knows the rollercoaster of feelings associated with that experience and what it felt like to be sharing those emotions with so many others.

Patchwork Poetry & Prose: ISBN 9781738474103.