Gillie Bolton

Writing Works: Launch Talk
London, 14th April 2007

Professor Cecil Helman

I am privileged to introduce Writing Works, edited by Gillie Bolton, Victoria Field and Kate Thompson.

The book is about the why and the how of therapeutic writing. It is edited by three of the leading practitioners of the craft in the UK, with contributions by many others involved in the process therapeutic writing.

It is a rich feast – with many different dishes in it. To give a brief glimpse of the menu of this feast, it includes:

• Practical tips on how to actually start and run a therapeutic writing workshop
• Specific advice on forming a therapeutic-relationship with a client or patient
• Examples of poetry and prose produced by therapeutic-writing workshops
• Case-histories of individuals, and groups
• Accounts of actual workshops run by many different facilitators, both in the UK, the USA and elsewhere
• Personal narratives by those involved in the process, many of them both   moving and inspiring.
• Self-reflection of those involved in the process, illustrating that therapeutic writing involves not only the inner world of the client, but also that of the listeners themselves.

But why writing? Why stories?

As Gillie has written, in the Introduction to the book: ‘Writing offers a powerful avenue towards finding out what one think, feels, knows, understands, remembers. It can enable fruitful and open exploration of potential thoughts and ideas.’

In other words, writing – or telling - one’s story can also be therapeutic, and it is especially important in dealing with the ill and the dying, the depressed and the despairing.

But I would also say that it is also useful (and often therapeutic) not only to the storyteller themselves, but also to the listener, often at an unconscious level. I think it was Henry Miller who said that the sign of a good storyteller is that the listener becomes lost in their own reveries, long before the story itself is finished. In therapeutic writing, therefore, the inner story of the teller, and the inner story of the listener, often weave together into a new gestalt – meaningful for both parties involved in the process.

Stories of suffering or sickness are a special genre of tales. Howard Brody  has pointed out that telling such stories is a basic human way of organizing an experience, especially a traumatic experience, especially those that involve illness. It is a way of ‘making sense of it’, and of giving it a meaning. Story-telling is thus a fundamental human way of dealing with misfortune, and of imposing order onto chaos.

But as described in this book, the writing and the stories told are quite unique, for unlike the usual ‘literary’ stories, they are un-contaminated by the malign influence of the marketplace, by the allure of fame or money or literary prizes, or the pressures of agents and publishers, or the need to ‘publish or perish’. They are small private stories, told in small private encounters between two or more people. They are a ‘pure’ form of literature, and as such they remind me, as an anthropologist, of the oral tales, myths and legends told – and re-told – by people living in pre-industrial societies.

An image comes to mind here:-

Back in my native South Africa, the San people (formerly known as the Bushmen) have a rich oral tradition, one that has lasted for millennia. For much of that time, their traditional stories and myths have been told, and re-told, around their crackling campfires, their sparks rising up to join the huge canopy of stars in the dense African night. These stories were usually about great hunts or great heroes, but also about mythical animals and man-animals.  Stories told while in the deep shadows of the veldt around them, they could hear the rustle and roar of unseen creatures.

For the San, apparently, stories had an existence separate from that of their storyteller. They were believed to inhabit the physical landscape around them. They were everywhere. Stories floated around on the wind. They passed through mountains and travelled across the veldt, carrying the story from one story-teller to the next. The stories drifted especially to those who were alert to them, and could take them in - and then tell them to the rest of the tribe, before they moved on to the next teller. As one San elder in the 1870s put it: ‘I listen, watching for a story, which I want to hear… I sit waiting for it; that it may float into my ear.’ ‘I feel a story is the wind’, he said.

In this setting, each re-telling of a mythic story was unique. It was a performance tailored to a particular audience, at a particular time and place. The story told was always the same, but at the same time it was always very different. And the same, I think, applies to therapeutic writing: to private mythologies and legends, as well as to individual stories of bereavement, cancer or other afflictions.

I would say that Gillie Bolton, Victoria Field, Kate Thompson – and the other contributors - are catchers of these poignant human stories as they drift past them, in hospices and hospital wards and clinics, in self-help groups or in writing workshops. By gently encouraging those stories to emerge and be written, and then listening to them in a particularly focused and compassionate way, they are turning a genre of personal expression into a type of healing.

So the book both illustrates – and confirms - that writing does work – and for that reason I heartily recommend it to you all!

Cecil Helman
April 2007