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What Keeps Us Writing: What works and what is missing?
A free-to-attend event. In partnership with the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at the University of Brighton.
Join accredited coach, writer, and teacher Andrew Kaye Kauffmann for the first in a series of interactive and reflective fora on wellbeing for writers, as part of TLC’s work thinking about ways that we can help writers thrive in an environment which presents a range of challenges and barriers. We consider the question: what keeps us writing? What works, and what is missing?
Across three free-to-attend sessions, we will be exploring three key topics we have identified through member surveys, feedback groups, previous research studies and conversations with the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at the University of Brighton, our partners for this forum. The topics will be: Process, Pitch, and Publish.
In this forum, we explore wellbeing through the lens of process.
Through a series of break-out groups and open discussions, this online forum will explore such questions as: ´When you write what do you feel?´, and ´What might motivate you to keep on writing?´ Andrew will also lead the group in discovering how writing boosts us and where it can also bring us down.
Participants will have the opportunity to map and understand their own reactions to their different ´writing energies´and ´writing moods’ through this unique interactive forum, and have their voices heard and reflected in TLC’s ongoing Literary Culture report, which we will be developing over the next 2-3 years.
Upcoming Wellbeing for Writers fora:
Wellbeing for Writers: Pitching (for writers who are or have experience with pitching their work) October 5th 5-6.30pm
Wellbeing for Writers: Publishing (for writers who are already published) November 9th 5-6.30pm
These fora are Being A Writer events but are free to attend for all.
To learn more about Being A Writer, our community platform that focusses away from publication outputs and instead on how writers can cultivate creativity and boost resilience, please see here.
Andrew Kaye Kauffmann is a coach, a writer and a teacher of creative writing. Andrew completed the CPD-accredited Introduction to Therapeutic and Reflective Writing with the Professional Writing Academy, and is interested in the use of expressive and therapeutic writing. He uses stories, metaphor and narrative tools to help his coaching clients cope with life transitions. Working for over a decade in health campaigns, research and policy for a range of UK disability and health charities including Macmillan Cancer Support, Age UK and the RNIB, he is now the Centre for Mental Health´s Writer-In-Residence. He leads London Lit Lab´s Queer Storytelling course, and facilitates courses for Out on the Page and The Write Salon on writing from life and writing challenging material. He was shortlisted in 2022 for The Literary Consultancy’s Pen Factor award. He was a winner of the 2021 Spread the Word and Scribe UK competition for works of narrative non-fiction and in 2020 he was a winner of The Literary Consultancy’s LGBT+ Free Reads competition. A freelance journalist, his articles on health and culture have been published by HuffPost UK.
The Centre for Arts and Wellbeing has a membership of academics, creative practitioners and health practitioners across the University of Brighton. They work with our associate members, as well as local, national and international communities, to improve individual, social and environmental wellbeing.
Their work is focused on meaningful impact through an understanding of the practical wisdom that is accessed through the arts. They work inclusively and collaboratively with health and wellbeing partners, investigating priorities of mutual interest and developing new, interdisciplinary and community-oriented research approaches. The Centre’s expert arts practices include drawing, design, creative writing and media; their expert health and wellbeing practices include mental health, psychology, resilience, sustainability and medicine. They are particularly interested in how spaces can be specifically designed to facilitate motivated processes of creativity and wellbeing and how this can support writers to develop publishable texts.
The University of Brighton academic and postgraduate student members can be seen on the profile pages.
