Chapter I

Creative life writing for personal and professional development

As I said, the CWPD programme emerged in 1996 out of my experience of teaching an autobiographically based undergraduate creative writing course and the suggestion that this could be developed into a professional postgraduate programme with an explicit focus on using creative writing developmentally. But there was a wider context. Concurrently with my teaching I was working as Literature Officer at the South East Arts Board, one of the then regional arts outposts of The Arts Council of England, where a large part of my remit was to set up writing projects in the community. This involved employing published writers to run writing groups or to work with individuals in education or health and social care, partly with the aim of helping people develop their writing skills and partly to provide them with an opportunity for gentle self-reflection. Through meeting these writers I became aware of the increasing number of people wishing to facilitate ‘developmental creative writing’ (Nicholls, 2006) and the dearth of formal training or study opportunities for it. Around this time the National Poetry Society set up a discussion group for those of us interested in this work, and this group eventually evolved into Lapidus, the networking organisation representing the diverse field of creative writing and reading for health and wellbeing (www.lapidus.org.uk). One of the people I met through the discussion group was Fiona Sampson, who at that time was writer-in-residence for the Isle of Wight Health Authority, the first long-term healthcare residency in the UK. It was to Fiona that I turned when asked to set up the Postgraduate Diploma at Sussex, and together we developed a structure for it.

The programme's first format was a one-year part-time Postgraduate Diploma, with three one-term courses: an experiential, practice-based course, followed by a theory course, and culminating in a research project. The rationale for this was that in order to be able to facilitate developmental writing with others, future practitioners needed not only experience of doing their own developmental writing, but also a solid theoretical grounding. Further, engaging in research, whether qualitative or text-based, would extend their understanding of the relationship between theory and practice and help to build a body of evidence for the developmental and therapeutic effects of creative writing. The initial tutor team consisted of myself as convener, Fiona, and some of the other people I had met through my work at South East Arts or the Poetry Society's discussion group, including Cheryl Moskowitz and Graham Hartill. From the outset the programme attracted a wide range of people, mostly women, a mixture of health and social care professionals, teachers, and people from the business world seeking additional practical skills; established and aspiring writers seeking to deepen their writing or overcome writing blocks; and people seeking to develop their creativity or to find deeper self-understanding or more meaningful employment opportunities. This latter category often included people in transition between jobs or countries, or between work and retirement. The programme operated in its one-year Diploma format for five years.

In 2001 Christine Cohen Park joined the tutor team, having just returned to Britain after 10 years working with writing in healthcare at universities in Vancouver. She suggested that people wishing to acquire professional skills to undertake work with creative writing in developmental and therapeutic contexts needed opportunities to learn from experienced practitioners about the practicalities of working in different contexts, and to have an opportunity to facilitate an actual developmental writing group. Neither of these possibilities was available at the time within the Diploma. This suggestion coincided with a move at Sussex to increase the credits of Postgraduate Diplomas and led us to extend the programme to 16 months (four terms), with the addition of two new ‘professional development’ courses: Contexts for Practice and Writing and Groups which Christine devised. This, however, necessitated dropping the research project. Subsequently, in 2002, the Diploma was further developed into a two-year part-time Master's programme with the addition of two terms of independent study, in which students had the option of undertaking a research project or preparing a portfolio of creative writing with critical introduction. Two further one-term courses – Writing Practice and Projects: Practical and Theoretical – were also subsequently introduced as options for students not wishing to take the professional development courses.

With these options in place, the programme offered two distinct strands: one for people wishing to develop their own creative writing within a personal development context, and the other for people wishing in addition to acquire skills for use in professional contexts such as education and health and social care. All students took the three core components – the practice course, the theory course, and the two terms of independent study – together with two option courses of their choice. In 2005 a full-time option was made available in addition to the part-time. This necessitated a further restructuring of the programme, so that instead of the two terms of independent study taking place at the end of the programme, these were now split, with the first at the end of Year 1 and the second at the end of Year 2. The programme continued in this form until its discontinuation in 2010.

For most of the 14 years of its existence the CWPD programme was unique in Britain and was always heavily subscribed, with some 60 students attending at its height. As teaching took place all day on Saturdays – once a fortnight for part-timers and once a week for full-timers – people living at a distance from Sussex were able to attend in addition to those living locally. For example, people commuted from as far afield as Glasgow, Aberystwyth, Belfast, Cornwall, Cumbria, Rutland, and even Holland. This was in part facilitated by the University's proximity to Gatwick airport. When the full-time programme began to gather pace, people from the USA, Canada, India, and Thailand came to study with us. In view of the programme's popularity and manifest success, it has been heartening to see other universities in the UK setting up related programmes,¹ so that the approach pioneered at Sussex is not entirely lost.

Structure of the programme at the time of the research project

When the research took place (2004–06), the programme was a part-time, two-year (six-term) Master's, with the independent study component occupying the last two terms, as follows:

Course 1 (core) – writing for personal development

Students engaged in creative life writing exercises and shared the results in small student-led groups. Alongside this they read and discussed a small number of creative and critical readings that introduced them to psychodynamic understandings of the creative process and literary writers' accounts of it. Students kept a course diary for recording their experience of the course, drafting writing exercises, and making notes on their reading, both during the class (15 minutes were devoted to this each session) and between classes. Students' learning was assessed through a 5000 word essay reflecting on what they had learned about their writing process and themselves from the experience of the course and the creative writing they had done, 3000 words of which they were expected to append. The creative writing was not formally assessed (see Chapter 11).

Course 2 (core) – creative writing and the self

This was the main theory course designed to extend and deepen students' learning from Course 1. The critical readings focused on psychodynamic, neuroscientific, cultural, and linguistic understandings of subjectivity, the ideas arising being explored also through a range of literary texts and specially designed creative writing exercises. Assessment was via a 5000 word critical paper in which students were expected to demonstrate their grasp of one or more conceptual frameworks for understanding the developmental or therapeutic effects of creative writing. The small student-led groups for sharing creative writing continued as in Course 1. In addition there were student-led groups each session for discussion of the critical readings.

Course 3 (option 1) – writing and groups

This course explored both experientially and through textual study the way groups work, with reference to the particularities of writing groups. In the mornings students participated in a tutor-led developmental creative writing group, engaging in a series of writing exercises specially devised by Christine Cohen Park (see Appendix). The afternoons took the form of a tutor-led seminar discussion of students' experience of the morning in the context of a range of texts on the theory and fundamentals of group process and practice. Through being both participants and observers, students had the opportunity of reflecting on the life of the group and of identifying the distinct stages of its growth. Students kept a learning journal for reflecting on their experience of the course. They also developed their creative writing through peer and tutor feedback. For assessment they submitted a portfolio of work consisting of a 4000 word essay reflecting on their learning and the process and learning of the group, in relation to the dynamics and facilitation of writing groups; 3000 words of creative writing produced in response to the exercises (not formally assessed); and notes on facilitating a writing group.

Course 3 (option 2) – writing practice

Students prepared 6000 words of creative writing for assessment, accompanied by a 2000 word critical introduction reflecting on the writing and/or personal development issues arising from it. They could focus on long or short fiction, autobiography, or poetry. Published examples of literary forms were read and discussed, according to students' writing priorities, and students shared their creative writing in progress, receiving feedback from the tutor and student group. Critical and self-reflective approaches to the creative writing were also discussed, to prepare for the critical introduction.

Course 4 (option 1) – contexts for practice: healthcare, therapy and education

This course had two distinct components. In the mornings, writer–practitioners with experience of working in health and social care, therapy, and education were invited to share their knowledge of the practicalities and challenges of working with particular client or student groups and to introduce students to writing exercises they had found useful. In the afternoons, students took turns to lead a writing group consisting of a small number of their peers and, when not leading, received feedback on a small creative writing project in progress (3000 words), whether a chapter from a novel, one or more short stories, or a collection of linked poems. Assessment was by a 3000 word critical paper either reflecting on issues arising in one or more contexts where creative writing was being used developmentally or therapeutically, or outlining a series of workshops designed for a particular context; and the creative writing project, this time assessed by literary criteria.

Course 4 (option 2) – projects: practical and theoretical

Students carried out small qualitative or text-based research projects on a topic of their choice within the broad field of developmental creative writing. Whilst this was largely an independent study course with supervision, students met as a group at regular intervals to study research methods and share work in progress. Assessment was by an 8000–10,000 word dissertation.

Independent study (core) (2 terms)

Students had three choices. (a) A portfolio of creative writing with critical introduction (20,000 words), the critical part occupying 5000–15,000 words. The creative work could take the form of long or short fiction, autobiography, poetry, or a dramatic script, and was assessed on its literary merits. The critical introduction could reflect on the development of the writing, or personal development experienced through the writing, or discuss a literary genre or technique or structure used in the creative writing, or a combination of these. (b) A personal development project (20,000 word dissertation), that is, a critically self-reflective piece of work containing up to 6000 words of creative writing. The creative writing was not assessed on its literary merits but on the way the writer had reflected on and critically evaluated the process of producing the creative writing and the effect of this on his or her personal development. (c) A research project (20,000 word dissertation), either exploring, via primary or secondary literature, a topic or theme arising from or relevant to the field of developmental creative writing, or the experience of a group, or one or more individuals in education, therapy, or health and social care where creative writing was being used for personal development. A maximum of 2000 words of creative writing, whether the researcher's own, written as part of the project, or that of research participants, could be included in the body of the dissertation, but was not separately assessed.

Key writing exercises in course 1 – writing for personal development

Over the life of the programme the tutor team developed a wide range of creative writing exercises for personal development and also drew on those developed by others. At the time the research took place, the main exercises in Course 1 were as follows:

Web of words – devised by Graham Hartill

This is a group bonding exercise. Students individually brainstorm the theme of ‘beginnings’, then share with the group the words and phrases they have unearthed, whilst the tutor collects them on the board. Each person then chooses one of these as a focus for freewriting (see below), from which they craft a short piece of writing to share. Whilst students are doing this, the tutor draws on the collected words and phrases to create different versions of a ‘chorus’ for use in the final stage. The web is created by each person reading out their writing or an extract from it, with the tutor interspersing each piece with a line or two of the chorus. Students are asked just to read their piece without introduction or apology, so as not to disturb the web's creation (Hartill, 1998: 47–62).

Freewriting – devised by Peter Elbow

This involves writing without stopping for a given period (e.g. five minutes) and without paying attention to spelling, grammar, or punctuation. The aim is to let language flow in a freely associative way. A development from this – ‘open-ended writing’ – uses several periods of freewriting, pausing after each one to locate significant words or phrases that have emerged, one of which is then used as the starting point for the next period of freewriting. The exercise culminates in a final, more leisurely writing stage that involves extracting something from the last (or, if preferred, an earlier) freewrite and developing it into a short finished piece for sharing (Elbow, 1998: 13–19; 58).

Creating a poem out of words or sayings from childhood – devised by Cheryl Moskowitz

This exercise involves students in recalling and listening to everyday words or sayings that were significant to them in childhood, and then using them to create a rhythmic and/or rhyming poem. Cheryl's instructions for creating the poem are ‘to identify a rhythm that appeals to you. This may come from everyday life, such as the rhythm of the train in which you travel to work, or from a poem you particularly like, such as a standard five-foot line (iambic pentameter), or from a remembered activity in childhood, such as swinging on a swing, a clapping game or skipping rope. Live with it for a day simply as a rhythm, playing it in your head from time to time, moving your body in time with it; only when you are fully familiar with it – when you have felt your way into it – start to add some words to the rhythm and develop it into a poem’ (Hunt and Sampson, 2006: 38–9).

Imagining your future self – devised by Cheryl Moskowitz

Cheryl's instructions for this exercise are ‘to project yourself forward in time, whatever feels like a comfortable distance. It could be 5, 10, 20, or even 30 years. Into that projection imagine a person who will be a significant figure in your life at this time. This should be someone you have not yet met and do not yet know about. It could, for example, be an as yet unborn child, a partner or lover you have yet to meet, a benefactor, a friend, a boss, a daughter-in-law or son-in-law, or an unknown relation who unexpectedly comes into your life. Your task is then to write a narrative, from whatever perspective feels right, which includes your future self in relation to this significant other’ (Moskowitz, 2009).

Self as source – devised by Cheryl Moskowitz

This involves identifying a polarity in oneself around a dominant identity, for example ‘good mother’ and ‘bad mother’, or ‘diligent student’ and ‘lazy student’. Characters are then created out of these two poles, first by finding metaphors for each of them and then ‘fleshing them out’ using a collage of cut-outs from magazines. These two self-characters are then brought into relation in a story where they exchange something of mutual value (Moskowitz, 1998: 35–46).

Imagining the reader – devised by Celia Hunt

This is a guided visualisation in three stages. It requires participants to imagine that they are able to go away for a year on their own to write. They can go anywhere in the world, and they must choose and describe the location and the room they have rented, and say how they are going to arrange the room, etc. They then settle into their room to write and, whilst they are writing, they are directed to become aware of who is present for them in the moment of writing. In the next stage this imagined reader enters the room in the writer's absence and reads the writing that the writer has done. This section is written from the imagined reader's point of view. In the final stage, the writer returns to find the reader in the room, and the task now is to write down what these two characters say to each other (see Hunt and Sampson 2006: 90–3).

In addition to the above, there was an exercise that involved participants in evoking a significant place in their lives through long, descriptive sentences, following the example of Marcel Proust (devised by Christina Dunhill). In many of these exercises there was an emphasis on writing about the past in the present tense, and on writing about the self by using first, second, and third person. (For key writing exercises in Course 3 – Writing and Groups – see Christine Cohen Park's Appendix.)

Finding an identity for the CWPD programme

From the start of the CWPD programme one of the challenges was to make sense of the programme in academic and professional terms. Because I entered the academic world as a creative writing teacher I conceived of the programme as a variant on the craft-focused creative writing Master's fast evolving across the academic world at that time. However, there were significant differences. Whilst many students of our programme were indeed developing their creative writing skills and some achieving publication, there was comparatively little focus on developing the craft. In addition, many people taking the programme were undergoing the kinds of changes more readily associated with psychotherapy than with academic learning, but the programme was not a form of therapy in the generally recognised sense. Again, when in 2001 we introduced the two professional development courses, the programme provided the only university-based training in the UK for people wanting to facilitate creative writing in therapeutic and developmental contexts, yet students did not graduate with a formal accreditation for undertaking this work.² So the programme was a strange hybrid straddling different kinds of personal and professional development and in some students' experience fell between several different stools.

This rather unwieldy hybrid was an inevitable consequence perhaps of developing something completely new, with tutors coming from different backgrounds and with a range of different priorities. We did consider the possibility of re-structuring the programme primarily for people wishing to acquire skills for working in the community (this was a significant recruiting factor), providing them with an opportunity of undertaking a placement with an appropriate organisation and working towards accreditation by a body such as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. But that would have meant losing the significant numbers of people studying with us who were primarily interested in developing their creative writing in a personal development context or in exploring themselves through creative writing, the strand of the work that was at the heart of the programme from the outset. So we remained with the broad-based structure and, in spite of the anomalies, it did work well for many people, as I will be showing.

During the research project my cogitations about the identity of the programme took a rather different turn. Having more time to think and read, I began to see that there were, of course, other approaches to teaching and learning with similarities to our work. Peter Abbs's (1974) approach to using autobiography in the training of teachers was, in fact, one of the most significant influences on my own intellectual development, through the MA Language, the Arts and Education at Sussex that I took in the 1990s. Again, the work of Duet – The Development of University English Teaching Project founded in 1979 by John Broadbent and others, now sadly no longer in existence – combined creative techniques and psychodynamic thinking for exploring ideas in the humanities (Knights, 1992: 11–12). Indeed Ben Knights, who was closely involved with Duet, was one of our first External Examiners. Essentially both these approaches to teaching and learning were about using the arts as tools for reflection, which was precisely what we were doing with creative life writing. But there was an essential difference in that these approaches did not, as far as I knew, give rise to the deep change in sense of self that I saw taking place in the CWPD programme.

However, further reading in the educational field revealed descriptions of learning much closer to this aspect of our work. These, mainly located in the USA and Canada, went under the name of ‘transformative learning’. They were not mainly concerned with developing the arts, although some did make use of the arts; nor were they aimed at helping people acquire profession-specific skills, although some of this work was taking place in a professional development context. Rather, the focus was on facilitating a kind of learning that gave rise to a deep transformation in participants’ ‘frames of reference’ for engaging with the world, which sounded rather similar to what was happening to students of the CWPD programme. In fact I had come across some of this work years earlier by its founder, Jack Mezirow, but had not found it conducive because his central idea of what facilitated change – critical reflection – was too consciously rational, and ignored the role of feeling and emotion in the learning process, which was centrally important in our work at Sussex. Now I discovered that there was much new work in the transformative learning field, but with greater emphasis on the role of feeling and emotion. I was particularly struck by John Dirkx's use of metaphor and imagery in a Jungian conceptual framework in his professional development work with adults, which enabled people not just to enhance their practical skills but also to reflect on the self. He called this ‘self-work’ or ‘soul-work’ (Dirkx, 1997). I also found helpful Lyle Yorks's and Elizabeth Kasl's approach to using drama to engage adult learners' cognition and emotions simultaneously in a collaborative learning environment. They called this ‘holistic’ learning (Yorks and Kasl, 2002), a term that resonated deeply with the conceptual frameworks we had been developing in the work at Sussex. Thus I began to see our work as a kind of transformative learning, in which students were engaging not just for their own personal development but also to acquire the skills to work professionally with others. This provided a way of bringing the personal and the professional dimensions of the programme together conceptually. The location of Dirkx and others in depth psychology also offered a way of bringing together the academic and therapeutic dimensions of CWPD.

A key part of the research, then, has been to relate my findings to the theory and practice of transformative learning. Whilst there is much in this rich and fascinating body of work that resonates with my thinking, as I have immersed myself in it more thoroughly I have found that in certain fundamental respects I am at odds with it, having come to it after years of working with other conceptual frameworks. The main difficulty I have is with its dominant ontological grounding in constructivism:

As far as any particular individual is concerned, the nature of a thing or event consists of the meaning that that individual gives to it. This does not negate the existence of a world external to us but only asserts that what we make of that world is entirely a function of our past personal experiences.

(Mezirow, 1991: loc. 47)

On this view, whilst each person constructs his or her own reality, in the first instance this usually means adopting the dominant constructions of their familial, social, and cultural environments. Making personal meaning involves liberating oneself from these dominant ‘frames of references’ and developing meanings that are ‘more true or justified’ (Mezirow, 2000: 8). However, this fundamentally relativist position does not account for how ‘more true or justified’ knowledge can be obtained. Epistemologically, ‘we have no criteria for judging between different mental constructions and therefore the mental constructions of each [person] are of equal value’ (Brown, 2009: 12). This is not to suggest that our knowledge is not in any way constructed, but leaving out of consideration a reality that can be accessed, even if imperfectly, leaves us adrift in a world of constructs that we cannot evaluate with any objectivity.

Another problem of this paradigm is that, whilst developing ‘a more confident, assured sense of personal efficacy, of having a self – or selves – more capable of becoming critically reflective of one's habitual and sometimes cherished assumptions’ is a central feature of the process of change in transformative learning (Mezirow, 2000: 25), like everything else in human experience the self is seen as a construct rather than involving anything innate, hence the focus on schemas, scripts, narratives, and discourses (McLeod, 1997: 82). As a result, in-depth discussions of the self in transformative learning theory have been largely confined to the Jungian strand (Boyd and Myers, 1988; Cranton, 2000; Dirkx, 2012). Seeing that Jung's is a realist – indeed, one could argue, an embodied critical realist – theory that posits innate structures in the psyche, such as the archetypes and the collective unconscious, and the ability to access them indirectly via images and symbols (Samuels, 1985: 10), it is difficult to see how this is compatible with a constructivist ontology.

In spite of this there is pressure within the field for a unified theory within an overarching constructivist framework (Cranton and Taylor, 2012: 8), which paradoxically may be why transformative learning theory is, according to some of its leading members, in danger of stagnating (ibid.: 10–12). One of the ways of preventing stagnation is to develop new thinking outside of the dominant paradigm. As Michel Alhadeff-Jones points out:

For transformative educators, challenging assumptions is at the core of what we promote among learners – despite the fact that we seldom consider questioning the legitimacy of the paradigms that frame our own educational practice and research.

(Alhadeff-Jones, 2012: 178)

I note that thinking outside of the dominant paradigm has already begun in Alhadeff-Jones's own work (2012), which brings a dynamic systems approach to bear on transformative learning, and in that of Mathison and Tosey (2008; 2009), which re-locates it in embodied cognition. In addition, E. W. Taylor (2001) looks towards the neurosciences for an alternative understanding of transformative learning, and Gunnlaugson (2007) applies ideas from consciousness studies. All of these are related to my own approach. Hopefully my bio-psycho-social perspective within an embodied critical realist paradigm will contribute to what Gunnlaugson calls the ‘second wave’ of transformative learning theory.

Notes

1 For example, the Metanoia Institute, Bristol, accredited by Middlesex University, offers an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, based on the Sussex model.

2 There is as yet no formally accredited profession of therapeutic or developmental writing facilitator, but individuals with appropriate qualifications and experience can apply to be accredited by bodies such as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. The National Association of Poetry Therapists in the USA also trains and accredits poetry therapists in the UK.