The Writing Cure: Managing PhD Stress Through Creative Writing (Part 2)

Part 1:

This half-day workshop will be aimed at discovering the values and uses of creative writing for confronting the often heavy mental and emotional toll that the busy academic lifestyle takes on researchers, especially experienced in times of crisis and historic global anxiety, like ours are, and when artistic outlets are reached for as a route to rescue. The workshop will thus aim to help academics practise writing in an entirely different style. It will also help them tap into their creative potential and spur them to develop a style of expression that could add vigour to their overall writing.

Developing a dissertation project is a demanding, often solitary process that does not only engage cogitatively but also affective brain mechanisms and can even send them into overdrive. The cycles of reading, writing, deadlines, fieldwork and administrative work pose a great challenge to our affective capacities and often leaves little time or mental space to process negative emotions. Practising creative writing can provide a medium for venting such feelings in a playful and creative way.

By learning the basics of short poetic and prose forms, the participants will practise thinking of their objects of study in a non-scientific way. The first part of the workshop will focus on poetic expression, how to structure a poem, how to think about descriptions, associations, and construct metaphors. We will delve into haikus as a condensed form of expression and imagery. As output, the participants will try their hand at writing a short poem and will be invited to reflect on their experiences with poetry before and after the workshop.

Part 2:

This half-day workshop will be aimed at discovering the values and uses of creative writing for confronting the often heavy mental and emotional toll that the busy academic lifestyle takes on researchers, especially experienced in times of crisis and historic global anxiety, like ours are, and when artistic outlets are reached for as a route to rescue. The workshop will thus aim to help academics practise writing in an entirely different style. It will also help them tap into their creative potential and spur them to develop a style of expression that could add vigour to their overall writing.

The second part will revolve around prose and writing very short stories on specific subject matters sourced from the researchers’ work or their academic environment. The workshop input will contain exercises for developing character and plot, and concise and precise descriptions. Exercises will include vocabulary building through the use of collocations, descriptors, and synonymy. Participants will be invited to produce a piece on an emotionally or intellectually challenging topic of their choice. 

Trainer Profile: 

Marija Spirkovska is a PhD researcher of 20^th and 21^st-century literatures in English, urban (literary) studies, and psychology. At higher education level she’s taught Modernist literature and given workshops on spatiality in literary study. She’s also an experienced and award-winning literary translator and has worked as a teacher of English to children and adults. Her semi-academic and creative writing has appeared in the Random Walks blog, where she is also one of the founders and editors.