Inspired by the programme of Deepening Creative Practice, of which I was a pioneering participant in 2020-2021, I’ve designed a spinn-off of my workshop Creative Writing for Academics. In this workshop Writing with the Poetic Lens, I invite all professionals to use the poetic lens to re-encounter your work through writing, while paying attention to embodied, sensory knowledge.
In poetry, everything is allowed: play is at the forefront, as well as getting into our senses. Exploring this playfulness as well as the sensory can be very helpful in finding new ways of writing about our work and practice, within our work, or in response to our work.
The workshop is designed for professionals who seek new ways of writing about their work and practice, within their work, or in response to their work.
Why this workshop
Rarely do we associate professional writing with creative writing techniques. And yet, the choices we make when we write have profound effects on the reality that we observe. Embracing creative writing techniques when writing about our work, within our work, or in response to our work, opens spaces of reflection, experimentation, and clarity.
What to expect
In this workshop series, participants are invited to let go of any kind of neutral language to make space and embrace polyphonies of all kinds, including the unconscious. All sessions are designed around sample texts and include on-the-spot writing exercises. There will be time for peer-review, as well as time to reflect on what it takes to make space for creativity within our professional work.
Programme per session
The first session on March 18 focuses on the times and spaces we work with, while paying attention to embodied, sensory knowledge.
The second session on April 15 focuses on defining the main characters driving the story of our work, and on staging conversations between them.
The third session on May 13 focuses on how to grasp the full narrative of our work, pausing on where it started, on its importance for ourselves and for the world, and on the transformations it generates.
All sessions can be attended separately or as a workshop series.
What you will gain
A toolbox of creative writing techniques that will expand your professional writing practice and modes of expressing and communicating your work.
A poetic exploration of your work while experimenting with creative writing techniques.
A peer community to support and provide safe critique as you develop your new writing practice.
I took away a personal insight – writing is for pleasure! It can be creative if one allows it to be. All of the exercises, writing, reading and interaction with the cohort helped with my personal analysis and thinking about what I really want to express when I write.
-Programme participant, 2024
Fees and Timings
All sessions will take place online via Zoom, from 13:00 – 16:30 UK time.
This workshop series is comprised of three sessions. It is possible to attend one, two or all three sessions.
The fee is £225 for one session, or £600 for the entire series of three sessions.
Applications made before Monday February 3rd 2025 will receive an early bird discount – one session at £200 or all three for £550.
Next steps
To join this workshop series please complete the online application form (click to access); payment details will be sent after application. If you have any questions please contact me or Meg Davies, Professional Development Manager at the Tavistock of Human Relations at: m.davies@tavinstitute.org
Tavistock Institute office space, 63 Gee Street, London | 1 pm- 2.30 pm GMT
Once again, we’ll bring dreams into the workspace.
Grounded in our practices and the story of our collaboration with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, Juliet Scott, Bongsu Park and myseld invite you to join us in an inquiry that touches upon the power of dreams and their potential to change how we think about ourselves and the wider world.
This is also an invitation to explore the significance of the artist’s presence in organisational ecologies, including processes of archiving and translation, taking dreams and social dreaming into the digital realm.
The lunchtime talk is in dialogue with the current exhibitionSocial Dreams, Social Matters: Artistic Affluence in Social Dreaming, in which we bring together different practices inspired by social dreaming. The exhibition, taking place in the office space of the Tavistock Institute at 63 Gee Street in London, critically explores the generative and performative nature of dreaming, connecting the richness of artistic responses with the theory and practice of Social Dreaming – a radical exercise in sharing, associating to and working with dreams.
Social Dreams, Social Matters: Artistic Affluence in Social Dreaming
Image credit: Bongsu Park, Dreamscape
Join us on Thursday, 17 November, from 5-8pm GMT/UTC, for the Opening of this new art exhibition!
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London
In this exhibition, a range of art works critically explores the generative and performative nature of dreaming. Connecting the richness of artistic responses with the theory and practice of Social Dreaming – a radical exercise in sharing, associating to and working with dreams – this exhibition is not to be missed.
Come to the opening to speak to artists, researchers, academics, Social Dreaming practitioners, and Group Relations consultants. Come to think and enquire about the power of dreams and their potential to change how we think about ourselves and the wider world.
During the pandemic, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations held weekly online Social Dreaming matrices. Why were they so popular and what did they offer to those who came to them? Join us to find out and to experience the meaning of Social Dreaming yourself… What is the societal unconscious trying to tell us? Listen, see, feel, and sense… Think, envision, imagine, free-associate…
The event is open to all. If you would like to see the exhibition but can’t make the Opening, get in touch with Maria at m.markiewicz@tavinstitute.org to see the artwork another time. We look forward to dreaming with you!
Artist bios:
Bongsu Park is a London-based, multidisciplinary Korean artist and long-term collaborator with the Tavistock Institute. Her recent work is founded on how our innermost thoughts may connect with other people’s and how these can then be shared publicly through dreams. She has exhibited internationally including at Zona Maco Arte Contemporáneo, México, FIAC, France, and The Moving Image Istanbul, Turkey. Her performance work was shown at Camden Arts Centre, Gallery Rosenfeld, and The Coronet Theatre in London.
Marie Beauchamps is an Amsterdam-based poet, creative entrepreneur, and an academic working across humanities, social sciences, and law. She has published extensively on affective politics, national identity, and the politics of movement, now engaging with questions of pedagogy and knowledge-writing practices in their relation to knowledge production. She is an Associate Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, and one of the pioneering practitioners of the Deepening Creative Practice programme.
Juliet Scott is a visual artist with an interest in still life and object relations, and a social scientist interweaving between these disciplines through her studio research. She oversees organisational curation projects and the creation of dynamic learning environments including as programme director of Deepening Creative Practice with Organisations at the Tavistock Institute.
The event will take place on Thursday 17 November, from 5-8pm GMT, in person, in the Tavistock Institute’s office on Gee Street, London (3rd floor, 63 Gee Street, near Old St tube).
It was 2019 when I was asked to give a workshop on creative writing for PhD students at the University of Amsterdam. In retrospect, this was the start of the journey that has lead me to become a creative entrepreneur and to develop a series of workshops, such as Creative Writing for Academics and Storytelling for Grant Applicants.
This blogpost invites you on that journey, providing you with five tips to explore how to integrate creative writing into your academic work.
Curious about the foundation of this work? In my article Doing Academia Differently, I tell the story of what pushed me to explore creative writing as a tool in academic writing.
Creative writing is an effective tool to catch readers’ attention while grounding them into scenes. It is also a tool that helps develop a narrative even though you may think that your work is not a story—it is.
Academic authors who insert creative writing into their texts provide their readers with splashes of sensory experience. They draw their readers into the world that they researched; they take them by the hand, cracking the codes of conventions to help them enter some of the most obscure areas of our brain, of our bodies, and of our societies. Smells come to life; colours become pointers for grounding the reader into a scene; the light signals specific moments in time; shapes arise, taking the form of human and non-human characters.
With creative writing, an author is no longer only telling, but showing what their research led them to discover, and what that means for our understanding of the world. Creative writing endows a text with more space and more freedom for readers to appropriate it. A creative text doesn’t tell the reader how to read; it creates a setting from which subtexts emerge, there for the reader to immerse themselves in an experience.
Tip 1. Ground your
reader into a scene
A rule of thumb to get
your reader immersed in your material is to ground them into a scene, again and
again. A scene is like a zoomed-in photograph; it pauses on a specific moment
at a specific place, giving cues for the reader to experience that moment.
The broken white colour of the wall, the smell of coffee lingering around, the tic-tac-tic-tic-tac
of fingers pressing laptops keys, the moist eyes of the dog looking at you
while you write. Scenes transport the reader into another space and time.
A scene could be close to
you, a moment during the research process, such as when you open a dusty, classified
box in the archive; your first encounter with a respondent; your sensations
when arriving nearby the embassy hosting a political refugee. But a scene can
also be about something more distant. The setting of a speech, the atmosphere
of the parliament, the mood of a crowd, the frame of a report.
Not all your writing needs to be staged as a scene. But inserting a scene regularly will make the reader come with you along your research journey. If you lose them along the way, they’ll find you back at your old woden desk, by the window, or at the river side. Just allow them to be on your side, wherever you are.
Tip 2. Evoke all the
senses
Have you written your first scene already? Great! Now, check how many senses your scene evokes. The more senses, the stronger the scene becomes. Was the coffee bitter? Which noise came through? What kind of light shone on the walls? Was the room smelling of wooden floors, or was the building sweating with concrete off-gassing? Was the air crisp, thick, warm? Make your reader taste, hear, see, smell, and touch what you have been tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling and touching. Or even better: steer your reader’s experience by evoking those senses that will make them concentrate on the details you want them to see. Each sensory detail is a tool to attract their attention, paving the way for your theoretical and analytical claim to land naturally.
Tip 3. Keep the language
as simple as possible
Academic writers are
notorious for throwing expensive words at each corner of their sentences. Sometimes
those words have their purpose; they bring in nuances or technical details that
couldn’t be mentioned otherwise. Although they have qualities in common, metaphors
and metonymies are not the same, and identifying a synecdoche can at times be
helpful. But the most powerful texts remain those where jargon has been
replaced by everyday language.
Your best ideas will especially land if you can convert them into simple and elegant images.
Take Virginia Woolf’s credo for instance: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” No one can claim not to understand her claim because of the language. And yet, her sentence shelters a powerful criticism of patriarchal societies, which has resonated worldwide for nearly 100 years.
Tip 4. Establish who
and what are the characters of your story
While scenes should be cornerstones of your writing on a micro level, your narrative will especially thrive if you establish a conversation between different characters throughout your entire piece. A character can be human: yourself as the researcher, a respondent, a historical figure; but it can also be a non-human actor: a building, a document, a plant, a concept, a theory.
To get you going, here is a list of question that may spark a beginning: how do your characters feel? Are they introvert, extravert, complacent, stubborn, conservative, expanding? How do they make you feel and why? What would you like to know about them that you don’t know yet (think wild, imagine they are human)? Is it easy to communicate with them, why, why not, what do they keep secret? From experience, I noticed that these questions are particularly generative when your charachter is a non-human one.
The point is to
establish dynamic relationships between the various characters in your work. As
Helen Sword suggests in her fantastic writing guide Stylish
Academic Writing, you may want to play around and copy classic plot
structures, such as the murder mystery plot where the researcher searches for
clues, follows a few hints, and applies their deductive power to solve the enigma.
Or such as the Pride and Prejudice structure, where two seemingly incompatible
concepts are brought into a single conceptual space, where they flirt, dance,
argue and laugh to the point that they will never leave each other ever again.
For more examples of possible plot structures, see Helen Sword’s chapter “The Story
Net.”
Characters and their relationships
will help you create focus into your writings; they will allow you to play
around with points of view; and they will help the reader experience the
different facets of your truth.
Tip 5. Work on the overall
plot of your piece
Every writer experience at some point a writer’s block. I remember working on the introduction of my book and feeling completely lost in the myriads of possibilities to tell why I wrote the history of denaturalization law in the first place. I was saved by applying a very simple exercise: what was the story of that book? What happened? Why? And where was this going next? Instead of writing full paragraphs in all their details, I wrote a two-page sketch of my introduction plot. This allowed me to visualize the structure of the narrative. The rest came naturally.
In the end, every writer
is a storyteller. Developing the overall arch of your story will help you find
focus and directions, paving the way to insert scenes, sensory details, and
character relationships.
Conclusion: From
research to communication, and back again
Not only is creative writing an attractive means of communication for reaching a broader audience, but it is also a way to investigate the most complex aspects of our subjects of analysis.
Try it out, and you’ll be surprised by how creative writing doesn’t only change the way you write, but also the way you see and understand your own material in the first place. Five easy ways to start are: 1. Ground your reader into scenes; 2. Evoke as many senses as possible; 3. Keep the language as simple as possible; 4. Establish who and what your characters are; 5. Work on the overall plot of your piece.
As one of the participants in Amsterdam elegantly summarized: “When you are stuck, go and play.” A lesson that is not only valid for writing, but for life in general.
It has been a year since my article “Doing Academia Differently” was published. Writing the article had been a transformative experience. It inspired me to design my workshops Creative Writing for Academics, and it pushed me to start working as a creative entrepreneur, staying in touch with academia, but from a different position.
While the article was finding its audience, and after I had had the chance to experience the power of making space for researchers to explore their writings in new ways, I experienced one of the most severe winters of my life and had to shut down for a couple of months.
Reading Katherine May’s Wintering helped me make sense of that experience. I loved the way she pays attention to nature’s capacity to adapt to extreme colds. From afar, it then may look as if nothing happens. But when we look closely, we see all kinds of activities going on: burgeons have formed on bare branches, still closed, but ready to burst open when spring comes. Hibernating animals breathe differently, lower their body temperature, change their chemical balance.
Nature doesn’t stop when winter comes. It adapts; it transforms.
So did I, breathing through extreme nauseas, dizziness, and complete exhaustion that came with pregnancy. I entered a subterranean kingdom, a kingdom where time and space function differently. A kingdom of silence. A kingdom of untold stories.
The extremes of being in a woman body is full of silences and is such an untold story. An untold story that I may start writing, bit by bit, as I resurface into the world. Revisiting what it means to be a mother; revisiting what I do for work; finding new patterns in search of equilibriums.
What’s coming up:
And so, we are now a year later, as I gear towards a new season of creation.
These are a sample of activities I look forward to, and I hope to meeting you along the way:
New workshop for grant applicants:
Thanks to a request from Université Saint Louis Brussels, I’ve developed a new writing workshop for grant applicants. The workshop provides tools to uncover the research proposal’s narrative, one of those tricks that tilt a proposal on top.
Sounds like something for you or for your institute? Contact me!
Creative Writing for Academics:
I’ll continue providing series of workshop Creative Writing for Academics, with sessions already book for various institutes at the University of Amsterdam, Nijmegen University, and Queen Mary University of London.
These workshops make space for researchers to explore a diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in their academic writing practice. They are open to all disciplines, and welcome researchers from PhD students to full professors.
Following on previous projects on Social Dreaming, I’ll contribute some of my poems to an artistic exhibition on Social Dreaming held at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. Details will follow, but I already know that the opening is on November 17, 2022.
Loosening the Boundaries of Our Disciplining Writing Practices
Today is the day that my article has been published with Millennium, Journal of International Studies. I love Millennium for their honesty, for their curiosity, for their openness to invite poems and stories on the page of an academic publication. I love them for having embraced my invitation to loosen the boundaries of our academic writing practices, and to publish work (here: my work) that plays with the boundaries of genre, looking for spaces where that which has been repressed is allowed to speak.
This publication is for me an experience of possibilities. I wrote it with my whole self, speaking and writing with generations of scholars who have invested creative practices within their scientific work. The writing felt like a liberative practice that honoured the legacy of generations of women and men who, time and time again, have revealed an honest story of knowledge production and knowledge writing. As Donna Haraway reminds us:
It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
Donna Haraway
Writing the article has been a break-through in my own practice, and paved the way for designing my workshops Creative Writing for Academics, as one possible way of enacted the invitation that the article puts forward:
“To allow a more diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in the academic writing landscape, with the aim to recuperate the reparative in both research and writing by allowing the creative to be present, visibly present.”
Marie Beauchamps
You can book a workshop for your research group, institute, faculty, transnational research activities, and everything in-between! Contact me.
In my own story, the article has been a catalyst to transition from working within the structure of the academia to continuing doing academia differently as a creative entrepreneur. My hope is that the stories contained in the article will inspire you to craft your own way of creative practice within your work.
Whether you join a workshop or not, I would be delighted to hear how creativity finds its way in your work. Stay in touch!
It was such a joy to reconnect with friends and colleagues after the holiday. But I was saddened to witness how many of us are filled with apprehension to start the new academic year. The holiday hasn’t been short, but the pandemic weights on everyone’s shoulder, and there is so much to do.
I have an antidote: Inject creative practice into your work.
When I designed my workshop Creative Writing for Academics, I noticed how injecting creativity into our research and writing practice yields power. It brings fun and joy into our work. It unleashes energy to write. It connects us with our intimate stories. And it brings us in touch with the profound questions that inspired us from the start.
Yet making space for creativity isn’t easy. And this is why I keep offering these workshops:
To make space for you to experience a moment of writing where hands-on exercises not only boost your writing practice, but also make you experience your research and writing in a fresh, honest, and relational way.
Join us! During this two-session-workshop, you will invite sensory details on the page, turning your research into a vibrant text where data, concepts, and theories become characters who take you on a whole new journey.
No-one gives shit a word of praise, as if shit wasn’t precious. As if shit wouldn’t relieve bodies from toxins and skeletons, brown cores, white bones, orange beaks, and blue feathers. As if shit wouldn’t teach children that stickiness is best when avoided with a sidestep, a jump, a stop. As if shit wouldn’t stage equality between shepherds and wolves, queens and beggars, tyrants and peasants. As if shit wouldn’t seed green trees in grey cities, bringing oxygen to the streets. As if shit wouldn’t release amber smells of other times, feeding silvery flies while flirting with the gods, bringing flowers the strength to burst with pink, lilac, and lavender. As if shit wouldn’t invite life into decay, drawing poets to look at a blank page with the nuances of the nothing that illuminates the day. As if shit wouldn’t bring in patience there where speed was in focus, requesting attention there where habits stiffened. Shit is a wonderous waste, but no-one gives it a word of praise.
Script: write a list of 10 abstract nouns, then a list of ten concrete nouns. Match them to create metaphors and similes to use in your poem.
Understanding
Knowledge
Freedom
Idea
Beauty
Feeling
Experience
Whish
Fear
Derision
Skin
Eye
Hand
Bird
Water
Mouse
Pen
Table
Ladder
Lamp
I’m so tired I feel my entire body ache like a machine that stood for too long in the cupboard. I embarked on the metaphor exercise but the metaphors seem to work like this unbearable weight upon my body. So I switch gear, thinking I’ll go for the pattern exercise, but the patterns are like a ball of wool rolling down the stairs. What can I follow when there is no energy left to see? Perhaps it’s the metaphors that are still working. Knowledge like a skin that envelops your senses, ready to be shaken off in the midst of a good crisis. Understanding that comes as a hand, leading through the meanders of your own narrative, holding tight then letting go again for you to experience the ladder of your wish. See, I already managed to tell you three of them, and I feel the energy coming back little by little. No longer this eye of derision looking upon my shoulder as I try to craft sentences on the go. Did you notice the fourth one? Perhaps, when we are blocked and shattered by the pen of fear, it is because we don’t allow ourselves to just watch the bird’s beauty, by which I mean: to just stay by the words. In my first draft, bird was linked to feeling as in, it comes and it goes, but the bird’s beauty has the adventage to remind me of the simplicity of colours and the extraordinary expertise of nature to create just the right ones in the right order. I’m not sure which prompt I’m following anymore, but I know that many of my nouns have been matched. The remaining meeting time is one minute and nine seconds and already less than a minute. I’m going to have a cup of tea.
Make space to explore a diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in your academic writing practices.
The choices we make when we write have profound effects on the reality that we observe. Giving an account of our observations requires a multitude of styles of writing for achieving the greatest accuracy. Finding the most accurate style of writing for a particular purpose sometimes implies letting go of a seemingly neutral style of writing, instead embracing a plurality of voices, such as staging a dialogue or exploring a more poetic style.
In this introductory workshop spread over two sessions, we practice writing scenes, working with sensory details, defining the main characters driving the story of our work, and staging conversations between them. All sessions are designed around sample texts, and include on-the-spot writing exercises. There will be time for peer-review, and we will take time to reflect on what it takes to make space for creativity within our academic work.
What people say about the workshop:
I tried a few similar workshops recently, and I find Marie’s ones by far the best: they are not only extremely helpful but also a pleasure to do.
Chiara, associate professor
This course has inspired me to develop my own writing style in my papers. It helped me to be creative and productive (for it makes one want to write!), and it has given me perspective regarding the use of poetic, experiential and metaphorical language in crafting academic texts.
Rodante, PhD candidate
Resorting to our body feelings and sensations, bringing them to our awareness while entering a scholarly conversation, opens up a spectrum of alternatives to engage in discussion. Thank you for your expert guidance, so human, that allowed me to feel at ease while exploring “the feeling” of theoretical argumentation. Your workshop contributes to awareness in academic writing, to taking responsibility for choices, to freedom, to integrity. A real eye opener.
Marina, PhD candidate
Marie’s expertise lies in the fact that she used to be a highly successful academic, and is now both an inspired writer and a gifted teacher. This combination is what makes her creative writing for academics courses so inspiring!
Ida, PhD candidate
I’m grateful for participating in Marie’s workshops. The creative writing sessions have helped me enter the scenes of my research, and to shape these worlds while I write with all my senses. Marie’s prompts facilitate a somatic opening for engaging with my data in ways that my whole body is there; writing-as-inquiry from this space enhances fieldwork memory, feelings, creativity, and clarity. It has been a joyful experience to learn on-the-spot techniques for doing this. After these sessions, I wanted to keep writing! Thank you Marie for sharing your gifts with us.
