Dr Carolyn Rickett is Associate Dean (Research), Senior Lecturer in Communication and creative arts practitioner at Avondale College of Higher Education. She is coordinator for the New leaves writing project, an initiative for people who have experienced or are experiencing the trauma of a life-threatening illness. Together with Judith Beveridge, she is co-editor of the New leaves poetry anthology. Other anthologies she has co-edited with Judith include: Wording the world, Here, Not there, and Away of happening. Her research and teaching interests include trauma and bereavement studies; writing as therapeutic intervention; memoir and autobiographical writing; medical humanities; journalism ethics and praxis; literary and poetry studies; the psychosocial and spiritual care of patients.

Judith Beveridge is an award-winning poet and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. She has published six books of poetry. The domesticity of giraffes, published by Black Lightning Press in 1987, received the Dame Mary Gilmore Award, the NSW Premier's Poetry prize and the Victorian Premier's Poetry prize. She has also worked on the literary magazines Hobo and Kalimat, and has worked as poetry editor of Meanjin. She attended the International Poetry Festival in Medellin in Colombia, and in 2003 was one of ten poets invited to Berlin to participate in the poetry translation project. Judith was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature in 2005, and in 2013 she was awarded the Christopher Brennan for outstanding contribution to Australian Poetry. Her latest collection of poetry Sun music: new andselected poems was published recently.

Jill Gordon was Associate Professor of Medical Education at the University of Sydney, where she established a program of postgraduate study in the medical humanities. She has contributed to a four-volume reader on medical humanities with an international group of scholars, which was published in 2011. She has also for many years been a medical psychotherapist in private practice. Jill is also connected with the Lifestyle Medicine Research Centre at Avondale College of Higher Education.

Associate Professor Paul Race is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Nursing and Theology at Avondale College of Higher Education. He teaches in the area of ethics and clinical dilemmas in the discipline of nursing and has research interests in the areas of preparation for practice in differing speciality areas in nursing, career development and specialisation within nursing, and the effects of health and social policy, and organisational structures on professional practice.

When ‘Someone is writing a poem’

The role of metaphor in transforming the inhabited experience of life-threatening illness
Abstract

But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an ‘I’ can become a ‘we’ without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers. (Rich 2003: 86)

The New leaves writing project was designed to provide people experiencing life-threatening illnesses the poetic tools to help gain self-confidence, literary skills and some kind of aesthetic satisfaction by creating their own poems. Because poetry often utilises the language of the subconscious, it has a unique capacity to help people uncover and listen to the deeper meanings of their lives (Harrower 1972; Mazza 1999). Poetry enables people to feel their lives, rather than to withdraw, or retreat into emotional numbness or states of paralysis in times of crisis. Participants in our project found writing poetry helped build an interior space and – when undertaken in a group led by Judith Beveridge, who is an experienced practitioner – connect their work to a wider community. This article focuses on the ways in which the creation of metaphors and symbolic images enabled New leaves poets to represent the knowledge and experience of illness while moving dialogically from an isolated ‘I’ to a connected ‘We’ by participating in the workshop and publication process.

Keywords: New leaves writing project – poetry – illness – wellbeing – practice-led research