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How can we harness the power of creativity? A report from the Creative Power Conference

Last Friday, December 9th 2022, the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning and the MA in Creative Writing and Education hosted a conference on ‘creative power’, which explored the value of creativity, its impact and how it might be harnessed and generated in the world. Professor Vicky Macleroy introduced the conference, and explained how it was children’s books who really inspired her to read and sent her imagination soaring. After a brief explanation of the schedule of the conference by myself, performance artist and alumni of the MA in Creative Writing and Education, Sally Horowitz, acted out a washed up writer in a bar, searching for inspiration; this writer though found inspiration in people’s suggestions for being creative which the bar tender (played by me) had collected in written form and put in one of her wine glasses. You can see the introductions by Vicky and Sally’s performance here:

This wonderful performance was followed by a keynote speech by the incredible children’s author and illustrator, Guy Parker Rees, who gave such a refreshing, light-hearted and profoundly serious talk. He said that everyone can draw in their own way and we can all use drawing to unlock our creativity. His talk can be seen here:

Guy had talked quite a bit about the therapeutic power of art to heal childhood traumas and understand them. Moreover, he had suggested that psychotherapy provides a useful framework for understanding how art works both for artists and for its receivers: its readers, its appreciators, its devotees. Dr Eric Harper and Rozina Anwar, both psychotherapists, explored these themes in even more depths. Rozina talked about the ways in which life is full of knots that can be untied and explored in part by the psychotherapeutic practice. Eric put great emphasis upon psychotherapists providing a safe space for people to speak their desires, their fantasies, their darkest and most optimistic visions. You can see their talk here:

Alumni of the course Danja Sanovic, an experienced teacher and rather wonderful writer, had us all in stitches with her fantastic impersonation of a strict, narrow-minded English teacher teaching GCSE English, and the creative writing component of the exam. Through this powerful role play, she showed how restricting the ‘recipe’ approach to teaching creative writing can be, and generated much laughter by showing her deliberately bad examples of creative writing, which illustrate many of the issues that children exhibit in their creative writing when forced to write to strict models. A current student on the course, script writer Emilia Amodio, then illustrated how collage can offer a great way of inspiring the uninspired to be creative. It was a perfect antidote to Danja’s satire; we all got cutting and sticking to produce our own collages. She generated the same spirit as Guy in encouraging playfulness within certain constraints. Here are Danja and Emilia’s talks:

There was a break for lunch, and then alumni of the MA in Creative Writing and Education, teacher & author, Seb Duncan showed us how Google’s Streetview can be used to inspire and guide writers to write meaningfully about place. Taking James Joyce’s Ulysses (the Wandering Rocks section in particular) as a starting point, he cleverly related Joyce’s writing about Dublin in this experimental novel to using Streetview. It’s an ingenious, sophisticated talk, and well worth watching carefully. Here it is:

Alumni of the MA in Creative Writing and Education, teacher & auteur, Rhys Byrom, then showed us how the classic structures of stories can be ‘hacked’ (in a techy sense) to create new forms. Drawing upon the ideas about story structure from Kurt Vonnegut, he showed how classic story structures can be used and subverted to create new enlightened, non-patriarchal, non-hegemonic narratives. Here is his talk:

A current student on the MA in Creative Writing and Education, Syeda Salmah, then showed us how certain techniques such as freewriting and ‘diagrarting’ (a mixture of using drawing, writing and dialogue) can be used to investigate your memories. Her work showed how she was able to explore her own East London, British-Bengali heritage and her parents’ experiences through the use of fiction and non-fiction. It’s another innovative, ground-breaking talk:

Much of the work of the conference delegates is in two anthologies: Diversity and Inspiration, and Creative Power. The editors of the former anthology, Deborah Friedland and Gabe Troiano, discussed the work in it, reading some moving extracts about creativity in it.

The conference closed with a fantastic spoken word performance from Christian Foley who rapped the key concepts of it in dazzling style. The cover illustrator of the aforementioned anthologies, Georgia Cowley, then showed us her illustration of the whole conference. You can see her explanations (and Christian’s rap) in this video here:

Her incredible illustration of the whole conference is here (the video contains a full explanation of what’s in it):

But even though that was the end of the official conference, the literary celebrations continued with Autumn Sharkey and Sally Horowitz hosting a fun-packed ‘Literary Cabaret’; this is a concept of their own making and is truly a marvellous creation. I attended with a number of other MA Creative Writing and Education and PGCE students; we played some brilliant games such as ‘pin the poem’ (very similar to pin the donkey); musical writing (musical chairs with creative writing thrown in); spin the bottle and read with a particular emotion (furious, angry, seductive, exhausted etc). It was such fun! Such larks! It was also really creative; it super-charged our imaginative energies, and it was lovely to share all of our writing through these crazy games. Autumn and Sally were lovely hosts, offering us both a safe and challenging space to be creative in.

So to sum up, what were the ideas, concepts, strategies and suggestions from the conference which showed us all how to harness the power of our creativity. I would suggest they were:

Find your inner child; learn to play again, to set yourself free by drawing (Guy Parker Rees), collaging (Emilia Amodio) and role-playing (Sally Horowitz).
Generate flow by regularly freewriting and diagrarting (Syeda)
Use modern technologies such as Google streetview to stimulate and enliven (Seb)
Use ancient ideas such as Aristotle story structure ideas to shape stories (Rhys)
Be mindful to step out of hegemonic, colonised ways of thinking (Guy, Rhys, Syeda, Emilia)
Learn about the therapeutic and healing power of art and dialogue, and create space spaces for expression of feelings and opinions to untie the knots of trauma (Eric and Rozina)

How to teach creative writing: Niall Bourke’s key note address at the Inspire Conference

Niall addressed these key questions: What does it mean to write creatively? What are the barriers to facilitating creative writing practices in the current educational landscape? How might we overcome them? Why should we bother? Can writing creatively be means to a wider academic end? Does this matter? Should we, as educators, try to justify creative writing as having tangible benefits for students? Can we afford not to? Is it important that educators make time to be creative themselves?

His keynote address sought to answer these questions and more, while also providing practical ideas, exemplars and resources to help educators of all persuasions facilitate creative writing exercises with their students.

You can find his PowerPoint here and his notes here. Please note you will need a OneDrive account to open these documents.

Niall’s reflections

It wasn’t long ago that I was a Goldsmith MA student myself, so it was a great pleasure and a privilege for me to deliver this keynote speech for the Inspire Creativity conference.

My focus was to look at some of the barriers to fostering creativity (and particularly in the domain of creative writing) in the current educational landscape, and then offer ideas, resources and suggestions as to how educators can foster creativity in students. Although I stressed that, in general, educators should resist pseudo-justifications encouraging creativity (i.e. – being creative is almost always a valuable process in and of itself and regardless of outcome), being the Head of an English department myself I was particularly keen to be pragmatic when acknowledging the pressures teachers are under. Therefore, I sought to suggest creative exercises which, while excellent in their own right, can also be used to develop understanding of some of the core threshold concepts of English Literature and Language curriculums. Through a series of short activities, I looked at how educators can encourage ‘low-stakes’ creative exercises, and then go on to foster creative response from students by using high quality style-models. The extracts used on the day included the Lyrics of Barrie Louis Polisar’s ‘All I Want Is You’, Leone Ross’s ‘The Woman Who Lived in A Restaurant’ (from her collection ‘Come Let Us Sing Anyway’ – Peepal Tree Press, 2017), John McGregor’s ‘The First Punch’ (first published in Granta Magazine) and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, by William Carlos Williams. It was a lot of fun!

Biography

Niall has taught English for sixteen years (in Ireland, New Zealand and the UK) and is currently Head of English at St Michael’s College, in Bermondsey. He completed the Teacher/Writer MA (as it was called then) at Goldsmiths in 2015. His writing has been published widely in magazines and journals, in both the UK and Ireland, and his poems and short stories have been listed for numerous awards, including twice for the The Costa Short Story Award, The ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award, The Mairtín Crawford Short Story Prize, The Hennesy New Irish Writing Award and the Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize. In 2017 he was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series. His debut poetry collection Did You Put The Weasels Out? was published in April 2018 and was longlisted as one of The Poetry Schools’ books of the year. In April 2021 Tramp Press publishied his debut novel, Line. In 2020, The Arts Council Awarded him a grant to develop a ‘Choose Your Own Poetry Adventure’ collection called The Erection Specialists, which will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. He is represented by Brian Langan at Storyline Literary Agency. He blogs on his website about both creative writing and education.

www.niallbourke.com

Twitter: @supersplurk

Note about the Inspire conference and anthology

‘Inspire: Exciting Ways of Being Creative’ was a conference hosted online by Goldsmiths’ Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, on 15th and 16th April 2021, 9.30am-4.15pm.

The conference explored through a series of dynamic online workshops and lectures how we can inspire people of all generations to be creative. It was in part a celebration of the publication of Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing (ed. Brankin, Gilbert & Sharples: 2020). You can access a free copy of this wonderful book here: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29515/

Mark Kirkbride’s reflections upon the Inspire Conference

Please note: Mark was an attendee and workshop leader at the online Inspire conference (details below)

The timeline of my experience of the ‘Inspire: Exciting Ways of Being Creative’ conference begins at 9:30am on Thursday 15^th April when I get to attend the introductions from Dr Vicky Macleroy, Dr Francis Gilbert and Carinya Sharples, then promptly have to log off to give an online workshop elsewhere.

In my lunch break, I catch Jake Smith’s presentation on ‘Re-writing Narrative’, championing nonlinear narrative, and wish I could adopt a nonlinear approach myself because by then it’s time to switch platforms and deliver another workshop. That finishes at 4:30pm, by which time the first day of the conference has already ended. I’ve missed so many great sessions with fascinating topics but at least I’ll be able to catch up via the videos and while I wish I could have been present for the whole day, the dipping in and out has certainly had an energising effect on the external workshops.

The second day starts with Camilla Chester’s presentation on ‘What Makes A Successful Author Visit?’ As well as being informative, it’s also hugely entertaining, with the highs – effectively being treated like a rock star – sounding like they make up for the lows.

At 9:30am it’s time for my presentation on ‘Promoting Active Learning’, exploring the dilemma inherent in teaching creative writing that knowledge acquired second-hand doesn’t have the same impact as discoveries made for oneself, and setting out to demonstrate that if as much learning as possible is embedded in prompts and exercises, that sense of discovery can still be retained. I illustrate what I mean by running through how I would teach characterisation for beginners. We each construct a character from two or three traits, together with a flaw, then describe that character as if to a friend. The workshop is even more interactive than I’d hoped with some really astute comments in group chat and complex characters emerging. For example,

Bill enjoys the company of others but often overshares his thoughts.

Sadly people avoid him. He has no idea this is happening.

Next we convey our characters’ qualities without describing them at all. Instead, we dramatize them, using action and dialogue, and more work comes through in chat, including

I rap my knuckles against the reception desk as they continue to sift

through my belongings, removing a laptop, pens and a six-pack of

Dr Pepper. The sign next to me says, ‘Please keep noise to a

minimum on arrival.’ I rap a little harder, the micro-rebellion

thrilling me.

The tiny red-head manager pulls one final item from my case.

‘Oh, come on, I’m not allowed biscuits?’ The words slingshot out,

high-pitched and pink-cheeked.

In just this mini-scene, one really gets a sense of a fully-formed person acting and speaking for themselves.

The half an hour goes quickly, so I race to the conclusion. While new writers might think, perfectly reasonably, that adding more and more layers of detail to the description of a character will bring that person to life more vividly for the reader, they demonstrate, to themselves, that characters live or die on the page by what they do and say. The trial and error involved in writers working in isolation and figuring things out for themselves is designed into the workshop, so that they have a sense of making their own discoveries. Loading prompts and exercises with key knowledge, so that the lightbulb moments happen during the writing, enables new writers to become active participants in their learning, thereby increasing engagement.

The half an hour comes to an end and it’s time for me to introduce Emily Davison’s presentation on ‘Using social media and fairy stories to inspire creative writing’. I at least get to enjoy all of that before having to rush off again, this time to take a family member to a hospital appointment, a trip that takes longer than expected, meaning I once again miss a lot of the day but at least get back in time for the Plenary. It’s a privilege to witness the progress of Emma Brankin’s drama pupil and be there for the launch of Niall Bourke’s book.

Somewhere between work and life, we reflect.

Biography

Mark Kirkbride is the author of two novels and a novella published by Omnium Gatherum in LA. His most recent novel was a semi-finalist in the Kindle Book Awards 2019. His short stories have appeared in Under the Bed, Sci Phi Journal, Disclaimer Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He teaches creative writing and writing for wellbeing and is currently an Arts Facilitator for OPEN Ealing arts centre and a Creative Workshop Tutor for the University for the Creative Arts.

https://markkirkbride.com/

Note about the Inspire conference and anthology

‘Inspire: Exciting Ways of Being Creative’ was a conference hosted online by Goldsmiths’ Centre for Language, Culture and Learning, on 15th and 16th April 2021, 9.30am-4.15pm.