Arts and mental health: Creative writing
This event brings together authors, teachers and students of writing workshops in order to explore the intersections between creative writing and psychological health/suffering. It aims to shed light on different aspects of therapeutic writing, but also on a variety of ways in which mental illness, emotional pain and ideas of the mind are constructed, developed and explored in creative writing (and in artistic practice more broadly).
The event is linked to the University of Copenhagen-based research project ‘Decolonising Madness’, which deals with the history of psychiatry and the mind in different cultural contexts (decolmad.ku.dk), and focuses on the role of social, cultural and political forces which shape our understanding and experience of mental illness. It is organised in collaboration with the Center for Kunst og Mental Sundhed.
The event includes a round table on creative writing in relation to mental health and therapy and continues with poetry readings by Orlando Mondragon, Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese, Birgit Bundesen, Sidsel Welden, and Anna Rieder.
Participants
- Orlando Mondragon, poet
- Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese, poet, translator and creative writing teacher
- Helene Grøn, writer and creative writing teacher
- Birgit Ærenlund Bundesen, psychiatrist, head of the Center for Kunst og Mental Sundhed and head of REWRITALIZE
- Thea Inuk Lønberg-Jensen, writer
- Karna Herland, writer