The Creative Writing Workshop

Wasson, Sara (2025) The Creative Writing Workshop. In: Constructing Sites : Surveying Scenes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration. Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities . Bloomsbury Academic, London. (In Press)

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Abstract

Amidst the work of conducting interdisciplinary research, negotiating frameworks, and calibrating theoretical and methodological approaches, an informal creative writing workshop can offer relief and an opportunity to come together amidst differences and play to reach something new. The workshops I describe are not for creative writing specialists honing professional-level skills, but rather for informal experimentation among a group of people linked by another shared research interest; in other words, the creative practice is a supplement for a group with an existing shared interest as a unifying theme. This analysis explores fruitful practices emerging from three instances of informal, interdisciplinary creative writing workshop in which I was a participant or facilitator. I examine how the workshops produced, in turn, three more sites of interdisciplinary encounter: 'the creative manifesto', 'the erasure poem' and 'the online anthology'. The workshops’ benefits included engaging in futurity play where alternative futures are averted or welcomed. To adapt Jane Calvert’s metaphor of ‘safe harbor’, the space offered by the interdisciplinary creative writing workshop could can be seen as less a safe harbour, and more as an unfamiliar boat—one lacking recognisable technologies and tools of other disciplines, but offering strange and unpredictable new ones. The workshop becomes a site for the camaraderie of the curious.