The Potential of Creative Life Writing as a Liberatory Practice

Abstract

This chapter discusses my use of creative life writing as a community-based participatory research method to explore what happens when writers enter into a creative relationship with their life stories. Narratives are crucial to the way we see ourselves and relate to others. I wanted to see whether, by changing the narratives we lived by, we could give new meaning to our past and current experiences and achieve self-growth. I knew the importance of revising, reflecting and reconstructing narratives, which is difficult to do when we are telling our stories, so I thought about exploring the craft of creative writing. The chapter will cover the theory and logic of creative life writing, as well as offer a critical account of creative life writing as a liberatory method by looking at the effects on participants of a series of creative life writing workshops I facilitated at a hair salon/barbershop, serving a culturally diverse community of people of African, Caribbean, Asian and European heritage. I draw from disciplines of psychodynamics, cultural studies and literature in order to offer a greater breadth to my research, which emphasises the interconnection between self, family, community and society. The chapter includes a critical discussion of the four main observations I drew from my research and draws attention to the possibilities of adopting creative life writing in these contexts: (1) the practice of creative life writing enabled the writers at the salon, through their own writing, to “access and objectify” their personal material (Hunt, C. (2001). Assessing personal writing. Auto/Biography, 9(1–2), 89–94) and, by doing so, to distance themselves from life-held narratives and open up psychic space for looking at themselves from different perspectives; (2) through the process of creative life writing the writers discovered a sense of self that was multiple and embodied; (3) the notion of finding a voice in the creative writing process was intrinsic to the participants’ experience of finding personal freedom, allowing them to speak in the workshop with greater authority; and (4) creating a safe-enough and playful environment for creativity to take place was essential to enable participants to move with confidence into their own personal space and writing. The chapter reveals the complexities and ambiguities of adopting creative life writing as an unconventional method and by doing so hopes to offer a new perspective to emancipatory processes.