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Events News

Writing Bodies – Creative Writing Sessions in London

As part of our Reading Bodies public engagement initiative, Dr Olivia Glaze hosted two creative writing sessions in London which focused on the theme of the body.

The first ‘Writing Bodies’ session took place at the Battersea Arts Centre on 7 November 2024, followed by the second session at St Marylebone Parish Church on 20 February 2025. These events provided a welcoming space for participants to explore or enhance their creative writing skills while fostering a sense of community.

Participants created a variety of writing styles, including fiction, personal essays, poetry, and haikus, focusing on themes such as ageing, illness, and body confidence. They also offered thoughtful feedback on each other’s writing, fostering a supportive and collaborative writing environment.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended and shared their creativity with us! We hope you continue to write and explore your storytelling journey.

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Events News

Reading Bodies at upcoming conferences

Prof. Katharine Murphy and Dr Olivia Glaze will be presenting research relating to the Reading Bodies project at the forthcoming Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland 70th Annual Conference in Edinburgh, 7-8 April 2025. Our papers are part of a panel on ‘Cultural Portrayals of Illnesses and Disabilities in the Modern Luso-Hispanic World’, in collaboration with academics in Hispanic and Portuguese Studies at the University of Leeds.

Our research findings for Reading Bodies will also be presented at TONGUES: Medical Humanities across linguistic and cultural frontiers, the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Congress, 21-23 May 2025 (online).

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Articles Events News

Reading Bodies Creative Anthology with Riptide

We’re delighted to share our Reading Bodies: Burnout, Overload and Resilience creative anthology, published in collaboration with Riptide Journal (2024). You can read the digital version as a flipbook and via our website here.

The volume presents fiction, poetry and artwork inspired by our research themes and explores how creativity can unlock different perspectives on burnout and resilience. For more information about this initiative, please visit our blog post about the creative workshop we held in June 2024.

The Reading Bodies anthology features on the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Hub, a knowledge-sharing platform for healthy practices developed in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe.

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Articles News

Reading Bodies Illustration

Artist Katharine Howell has illustrated the Reading Bodies collaborative process with Riptide Journal, in preparation for our forthcoming anthology on Burnout, Overload and Resilience. We’re delighted to share her illustration below:

You can find more information about the artist here.

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Articles

Burnout, Overload, and Resilience in Personal and Planetary Health: How Co-Creating Interdisciplinary Poetry Helps

By Dr Sally Flint, Project Partner for Reading Bodies and Creative Lead for We Are the Possible

‘We need / To leap / Right now / To the next stage / Of our evolution.’
Ben Okri

Burnout, Overload, and Resilience are words that in 2024 challenge analysis in literature, healthcare, and the media, especially alongside trending headlines which can often include crisisdoomsday, disaster, pollution, guilt, greenwashing, catastrophe, apocalypse, anxiety – all used to stress the global climate emergency, and the need to urgently change the way we consume and live. It’s like being in a crammed washing machine of words on a fast spin of environmental and societal problems. A recent article shows that neurologists are ‘alarmed’: ‘Everybody has a Breaking Point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains’  (C. P. Aldern, Guardian, 2024). While writing this, the latest pop-up on my PC reads – ‘but don’t confuse burnout with being busy!’  

Therefore, it was intriguing and timely to deliver a creative writing workshop where we can create a collection of writing inspired by the Reading Bodies project using Burnout, Overload and Resilience as launch pads. To do this, as a writer, editor, and creative writing lecturer working at the interface of science, health, education, translation, and the arts, I adapted a workshop and editing methodology I established to ‘share insights across languages and academic disciplines.’ At the workshop, we considered different approaches to the theme of burnout, including workplace and caring pressures, strategies for dealing with stress, and connections with individual health.

I used a unique collaborative creative writing approach developed in 2017 when working with Met Office scientists on ways to communicate climate data to the public through the arts and science. On a NERC-funded yearlong project, Climate Storiesled by renowned climate scientist Professor Peter Stott, a group of climate scientists and art practitioners shared and experimented with narrative forms. Both willing and wary, we joined in creative writing, performance, printmaking, and music workshops. As the Creative Writing Lead, I encouraged writing that ‘showed’ working in the field of climate change, and the scientists’ stories that erupted were startling, from ice cracking in the Arctic to fleeing forest fires in South America. This storytelling approach helped scientists understand how using the senses to explain data – what they could see, hear, taste, touch, and smell – brought to life what it’s really like on the frontline of climate change.

Then, as the Covid crisis spread and the world stalled, Cecilia Mañosa Nyblon (Director, We Are the Possible, University of Exeter), had an inspired vision to bring together science, health, education, translation, and the arts to communicate to broad audiences how human health relies on maintaining, restoring and protecting planetary health and ecosystems. Following a unique creative and editorial process, a collection of poems was published, and with the support of the Met Office UK, we delivered One Chance Left – 12 poems co-created by climate scientists and health professionals at an event in the first-ever Science Pavilion at the COP26 climate conference (Glasgow 2021). The poems, underpinned by science and health research, received such a positive reaction that by 2022 our team had grown to include not only scientists and health professionals, but educators, translators, youth leaders, and artists in the UK and Egypt, using a now proven creative collaborative way of working which resulted in We Still Have a Chance – 12 stories for 12 days of COP27  (Egypt 2022) which reached over 28 million people and counting.

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Events News

Reading Bodies Creative Writing Workshop: Burnout, Overload, and Resilience – 14 June 2024

Thank you so much to our participants and speakers for joining our Creative Writing workshop on “Burnout, Overload, and Resilience,” held at the University of Exeter on June 14, 2024. The event was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies), Dr. Sally Flint (Lecturer in Creative Writing), and Dr. Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher) and we were thrilled to welcome such a diverse group to the event – which included teachers, entrepreneurs, NHS practitioners, yoga teachers, a live illustrator, academics, and postgraduate students. 

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Events News

Reading Bodies Workshop II, University of Exeter, 23 May 2024

Thanks to all our wonderful speakers from the Universities of Belfast, Boston (USA), Cambridge, Exeter, Kent, London and Sheffield, for our second international Reading Bodies workshop, hosted by the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. The workshop was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies) and Dr Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher). Prof. Nicolás Fernández-Medina (Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University) delivered a brilliant keynote on Health, Disease, and Society in the Early Ramón Gómez de la Serna. The programme included specialists in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and German, and a hybrid Roundtable on interdisciplinary approaches to Reading Bodies in Literatures and Cultures.

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Events News

Reading Bodies Exeter Workshop – 23 May 2024

We’re looking forward to our second international workshop, hosted by the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. All are welcome to attend – please reserve your place here.

Highlights include speakers across 4 languages, a keynote by Prof. Nicolás Fernández-Medina (Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University), an interdisciplinary Reading Bodies Roundtable, and a Stage Rehearsal of Multilingual Medical Humanities (with Ants!). There will also be a short talk about Bibliotherapy by Exeter City of Literature. For more information about the programme, please visit our events page.

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Events News

Reading Bodies Workshop at the ILCS, Senate House, 26 April 2024

Thanks to all our fantastic speakers, chairs, and Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (University of Kent) for a wonderful keynote lecture. Thanks also to members of the research network and all attendees who came along on 26 April 2024 to support our first academic workshop, contributing to stimulating conversations about Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s). The workshop was organised by Prof. Katharine Murphy (Principal Investigator for Reading Bodies) and Dr Olivia Glaze (AHRC Postdoctoral Researcher). A recording of selected papers from the workshop is available on the ILCS website.

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Events News

Reading Bodies Workshop 2 – University of Exeter – 23 May 2024

The second academic workshop for this project will be held at the University of Exeter on 23 May 2024. All are welcome to attend – please reserve your place here. For more information about the programme, visit our events page.