Paper short abstract:

The paper considers creative writing workshops as affective methodologies and analyses such workshops as affective assemblages. We draw attention to the collective and transformative potentials of creative writing workshops as affective research processes.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, the authors will describe and reflect on their experiences with planning, facilitating, and analyzing creative writing workshops.

Drawing on various traditions of creative writing from the New Critical Scandinavian tradition (Llambías, Ringgaard) to therapeutic writing (Bolton, McNichol) and writing the personal (Probyn), we argue for the creative writing workshop as an affective method. Using this method, we have worked with intangible and tabooed subjects in relation to e.g., students under COVID19 lockdown, young women victimized by digital assault, and high school students vulnerable to stress.

We view the creative writing workshop as an affective assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari) that includes bodies, texts, technologies, identities, and more. Approaching the writing workshop as an affective assemblage allows us to engage in modes of analysis that can grasp the collective dynamics, tensions, and potentials of the group workshops. We consider the therapeutic and political potentials of writing groups for vulnerable or marginalized people, arguing for their ability to perform affective modulations in individuals and in broader situated or abstract assemblages.

This leads us to discuss an ethics of transformation, pointing to how creative writing workshops as affective assemblages emerge and develop between people, interfaces, etc., and how different identities and positions come into play, calling for analysis and ethical thinking that is emerging from and emerged in the research process itself.