Creative Writing -- the Art of Being, and Becoming a Writer

Creative writing has been a mainstay of my career as a music researcher, author, and occupational therapist. I love crafting words into descriptions of the environments that  I belong to, within: galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM sector), and working from home. 

My clients each have unique environments in which they study, work, live, recreate, and socialise. Our social environment is our creative milieu--the context in which we meet,  collaborate for research, writing, or therapy.

Being and Becoming Writers

Each person brings their own unique lens to their creative writing milieu. Listening and describing our surroundings is creative and empirical--based on what we see, hear, smell, taste. Our feelings and thoughts are complex, built from our experience, recollections, conscious and unconscious ideas. We respond in various ways, and we can choose to select aspects which we want to share with others, or ignore. This is our focus and our intentions for writing.

Our writing expresses our perceptions, thoughts and feelings. Our writing can in turn, shape our perceptions, thoughts and feelings as we decode and analyse our experiences.

Why Become a Writer?

To write is to know and become more knowledgeable in our milieu of this place and time. Writing and reading is part of our lifestyle. Literacy allows us to understand and shape the world around us as we communicate with others. Writing is an important, meaningful occupation for expressing who we are and imaging what we might become.

My Writing Spot

Dribbing, crescendos of rain muddy the grass, after too much downpours and floods this year. My second coffee of the day feels warm and aromatic. I'm defrosting/heating a steaming hot, frozen pie for morning tea as I tap out my blog in my favourite outdoor spot at home. The under cover area has been variously named as: 'the Bistro,' the 'Milky Way Cafe,' and most recently 'The Three Mugs Cafe.' The name was obliterated on the chalkboard by my Grandchild re-naming the cafe after herself.

It's Autumn cool and I'm surrounded by beautiful plants that transform the place into a rainforest in my imagination.There is a box of new-found crayons, pastels, water colours, and dual-tip markers and some scribbles I've made on a sketch pad. Semi-retirement has brought me more time to dabble in pastimes that I almost forgot in the decades of child-rearing, and working far away from home. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought me back to my calm, quiet, happy place. Doctoral studies gifted me with a laptop thanks to University of Newcastle (even though I never finished my PhD research). The perfect combination for this creative milieu... I seldom miss the long commute to work, nor leaving behind the tranquility of the Country for the City.

Now is the Time to Sing the Songs We Once Dreamed of

It is peaceful and serene here after the Earth Festival blasted music for 3 days from Ivory's Rock. I'm glad to have time to think back to the time when I wrote songs and music in my teenage and young adulthood. It is time to sing those songs again, and think of dreams and ideas to write about.

I have been reading, Flights of Fancy: Stories, Picture and Inspiration from Ten Children's Laureates (2019). The Children's Laureates share writing secrets and techniques that I am experimenting with. Malorie Blackman wrote about the importance of writing stories from different perspectives, such as the Lion, the Hunter, and the Blackbirds that look on from the nearby tree and discuss contested histories from their different viewpoints. I consider how I can write from the perspective of a therapist, and as a researcher, compared with stories from clients, or informants. 

The rain takes me to parallel thoughts about Frédéric Chopin's Raindrop Prelude that I played as a piano student, with the repeated note throughout, and the back story. I told my examiners about Chopin's romantic interlude at a monastery on an island. Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. I've long since forgotten the name of the island and the proper name of the 'Raindrop Prelude', but I can still hear that repeated note in my mind, and the gentle lyrical melody against the drone. The Romantic piano style is ideal for today, in this dripping wet rainforest milieu...dreaming about what I'll write, paint, or sing, as I wash the last of my pie down with coffee that has cooled while I've been typing.

As I listen to Lang Lang play and read about the Chopin Prelude on YouTube, I can almost hear an undercurrent in that piece, mysteriously foreboding in the baseline as a powerful river flows beneath the Majorca monastery, and my thoughts soaring about the vast tempest of the ocean encroaching. The YouTube information describes Chopin's waking dream as he composed the Opus 8, number 15 Prelude. George Sand interpreted that the composer saw himself drowned in a lake, while heavy drops of water fell in a regular rhythm on his chest. Not all is well here, either, with the threatening flood this week that follows earlier devastating flooding this year in this city for those living near rivers, creeks, and oceans.

 What Does the Future Hold for Us as Writers?

I'll need to ask people about this. Where does creative writing lead us in our professional lives as occupational therapists? Why has creativity in writing seemingly been abandoned by health professionals that seek to emulate scientific research and use all the digital shortcuts to save time and effort? I want to hear many perspectives on this and write more in the coming days when it is too wet to go out.

A Creative Writing Project

As you may expect, it is now 20 July and I have procrastinated, but return to this blog as threats of further rain are forecast in the news. I have been participating in discussions in the Australian Paediatric Occupational Therapist Facebook group (thanks to those who participate and Cindy Chuan who initiated and moderates the group). 

I raised this issue for discussion: 

I'm noticing that just about every referral I receive is for a child/adolescent with emotional regulation issues and many with anxiety, ADHD, suspected ASD, communication and socialisation issues. This never used to be something that was commonly referred to me, so is it becoming more common, or even fairly normal in these troubled times? Perhaps whole cohorts of children in certain transitional age groups may need wellbeing and stress management counselling, and positive directions in learning new ways of coping. Is it a dysfunction within the child, or more of a societal issue that we need to address at the population level. By the way, there is no funding to work in that kind of proactive way with children at risk is there? What children would be most at risk? I've seen children across a range of socioeconomic status; and it seems to be more a sign of the times to me. Any thoughts?

There was an immediate avalanche of replies from occupational therapists who had similar thoughts, and those who appreciated that these children who are now referred, may have gone under the radar in the past. Their difficulties are now being detected more. Consensus of thinking was that our attention to children's emotional disturbances is timely--give the recent disruptions to schooling, parent's work, and family life. Many valuable observations and interpretations of the situation were described. These insights are so important and we need to hear more.

I wrote: Love these insights and observations. Add to the mix: reducing music and physical education teachers from schools with less creative arts expression; cutting funding to Humanities courses in universities; education valuing STEM; and therapists increasingly using digitised testing with onus on parents for reporting online; and therapists turning away from arts/crafts movement or working with groups to only seeing individual children--needing to reveal deficits to get funding. But this is ripe for research, and Strategic Perspectives Analysis. I'm thinking we need to document our observations, and take some quantitative measures of the nature of our referrals to lend evidence to scoping new ways of working.

Proposal for Creative Collaboration with Paediatric Occupational Therapists in Australia

I wrote: We could publish some ethnographies with our new learning from our recent experiences over the last few years to highlight trends, and build resolves. I actually enjoy that because it is more proactive than being buffeted around by what funding authorities mandate as how we ought to work. A theme could be about what is transforming our practice? How creative can we be in response to our current predicament? Soaring petrol prices may result in implications for more group and neighbourhood-centred local initiatives with support for grassroots innovations.

I'm posting this here so I do not forget the momentum that was raised by creatively writing ideas to my peers about my observations of trends, and brainstorming what might be possible in the future. I hope to follow-on with further writing and publication, given this stimulus for research and creative collaboration. Natural disasters, such as floods and pandemics give us time to think and reflect, and write strategically to transform our practice.