Elizabeth's book

 

Lost and Found at the poetry readings

I'm getting my value from the South Coast writers' centre! On Saturday I went to the launch of Ron Pretty's poetry volume 'Postcards from the Edge'. It was wonderful to sit back and let those beautiful words wash over. Ron lives in the Illawarra and was the former Head of writing in Creative Arts at the Uni of Wollongong. He has a whole bunch of credentials and prizes. I loved his poems set on beaches and the one called Dog Days, (to mention a few). I'll try and find the beautiful cover and post it as well.
Then today to celebrate Science Made Marvellous as part of National Poetry Week, they had a poetry reading at the Uni. Christine Paice is the poet invited to write a dedication to the Janet Cosh herbarium. She has a great sense of humour and gave a lively reading. I met a few other SCWC members, including Elizabeth Hodgson, (winner of the David Unaipon award for her novel Skin Painting) who admired my pashmina. That started the scarf story. I told her I had lost my autumnal scarf somewhere and had tried in vain to find it at all the lost property offices I could think of - Cityrail, library, Uni. Regretfully I had bought another (the one she admired) though I hadn't lost hope that I would one day still find the favourite. She said - well - could I have lost it at Uni, as she had found an autmumn coloured pashmina in the car park. We swapped contact details and she said she would drop by at work to see if it was mine! I said if it was I would buy her a pashmina exactly like mine as I had spotted one the other day in Thirroul.
Karma - I just have this feeling that I will see my autumnal coloured pashmina again! Poetry connects...

Questions about the psychology of writing

Well, I’m not sure that doing a PhD is really my cup of tea, only because I think I am too much of an extrovert to be cooped up in front of a computer for long periods of time, much as I enjoy writing and reading, I also have to get out and move around...actually that reminds me, my Myers-Briggs profile is surprisingly, INFJ – I’m actually introverted! The ‘I’ is the teetering-on-the-brink part of the profile. Yes I do like having time to think about topics – but not too much, as this latest stint at home has shown! I think about 3 days a week of work and 2 days writing, reading and thinking would be about right, oh and, of course, having coffee, going to the fresh food market and leaving a space at the end of the week to suddenly jet off home if the mood takes me.
ANYWAY. The point about this blog was to put some questions together, that relate to possible topics for further study, let’s say, whether just ‘further’ in my spare time, or whether I formally do something about it (as in further research) remains to be seen. There is so much interesting stuff out there; I have a whole pile of books to try and get through. But to make a start, I’ll put down my stream of consciousness questions about the psychology of writing, and then at least they will be recorded. So here goes, in no particular order:
“Writing is therapeutic” – yes, but under what conditions, for what kind of person, what kind of writing, what kind of process? How does the writing process help? Why is narrative so important? Is the satisfaction of a resolution important to the writer as well as the reader? Is writing in the first person more ‘dangerous’ than writing in the third person – since we know poets have higher incidences of mental health disorders and a higher rate of suicidality than narrative fiction writers, who more often write in the third person. How do writing and reading differ in terms of therapeutic benefit? Why do writers have elevated levels of depression and mood disorders? Do writers actually look after themselves? What kind of psychological or mental health profile do successful writers have? Are more successful writers immune to the vulnerabilities experienced by less successful writers? (Fear of failure, writer’s block, rejection). How important are turning points in a writer’s life? We know many famous writers have suffered from bipolar disorder – which comes first – the self-expression or the disorder? In what ways is writing similar to counselling or coaching? Both involve telling a story and making coherent sense of the various elements of experience. How does fiction writing differ from non-fiction and memoir, then? Is it safer to hide behind fiction and not get too close to painful experiences and emotions, as one does in memoir? How is writing related to motivational processes? In what ways is writing descriptively similar to mindfulness? Both seek to focus on the sensual aspects of an experience, and good writing draws you in to an experience as if you are living it ‘now’. How is writing - when it is going well – a creative process – how do ideas get triggered from other ideas, how does the writer free him or herself to deviate from ‘the plan’ and start generating ideas? Do negative emotions spark greater creativity? How does writing fit into a positive psychology paradigm? Does writing confer positive subjective experiences like discovering ‘flow’ and self-fulfilment, or is it simply finding those individual strengths and talents?
Phew. That will do for today.

Petit dej with Catherine et Francoise au matin calme patisserie

 

I've gone off that idea today...maybe tomorrow!

Could I do a PhD?

 

What do you think?

Arriving at a kind of hiatus in life (otherwise or commonly known as a mid-life crisis though I suspect I am actually past middle age – aagh!) and having recently attended a buzzy conference on Happiness, having some long-standing interests in creativity and writing and the cross-over with psychology, and having found some work at the University of Wollongong, the thought has occurred to me that maybe I could do a PhD. After all, it might prevent the onset of Alzheimers. But just having that thought immediately sets off the counter attack. The mountain seems immediately so massive and enormous, and how do you even find the pathway to start? (or the signposts to the pathway to start?) Well, I guess you talk to people and you bounce around a few ideas. Then you read a few articles and then you even go to the library, make an appointment to see someone and talk to other people who have done one and find out how it was for them. So I made a start - I went to the library – first I downloaded some articles at home – fantastic, you can just press a button and the article is there in a pdf for you...how far away is that from those treks to the library back in the 80s and even the 90s, into the dungeons to locate the journal you need, that much valued red tome with the right year and volume numbers in gold letters on its spine, lug it heavily to the photocopier, pull out your supply of 5 cent pieces and photocopy the article with great difficulty because it is a heavily bound and awkward red (or green) tome which, when you get home, you find is not all that pertinent.... but anyway, back to first steps, having downloaded some pertinent and fascinating articles about why the writing cure doesn’t help poets and why writers are 38% more likely to suffer from a mood disorder than the rest of us (of course, because the statistic confounds writers and poets!), another on cognitive distortions in the works of depressed and nondepressed writers and poets, and yet other articles on the therapeutic and health benefits of writing...I made that special trip to the library and found gold! Books on positive psychology, methods of positive psychology, creativity and flourishing, articles on hope theory and books on manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament, books on how to “write yourself a new life”. So now I have an even huger mountain – of books to read before they are due back at that library, with a stiff $2 a day fine for lateness – no mucking about! So now, what I need to do, is just to read all those books and articles and digest them all...and then come up with a topic! Again, the task seems mountainous – I have so many questions, but aren’t they all already answered in some of these books that have appeared in the last decade on positive psychology, on the health benefits of writing, on the science of creativity, on the psychology of creative writing! So in answer to myself, what I need to do is, actually, to write. Start writing. My central idea, my central passion, is that writing is beneficial – this despite the correlation between artistic temperament and mental illness – remember correlations are not causes and we don’t know which comes first – who knows, writing may serve to soothe manic-depressive restlessness – but back to the central idea – that writing does help - whether it is purely self-expression or simply to help organise ideas. That said, there are a myriad of subquestions that I need to consider. I’ve made a mind-map of all those questions from my preliminary reading. That will be tomorrow’s topic! But for today, I’ll stop with a quick comment on the first chapter of “A Primer in Positive Psychology” by Christopher Peterson, OUP 2006, which was a fun read. It describes the whole ’movement’- essentially not a movement but an attempt to correct the imbalance in traditional psychology’s focus on “disease, disorder and distress” at the neglect of studying “what goes right in life from birth to death”. Positive psychology, championed by the famous Martin Seligman (remember Learned Helplessness from Psych 1 back in the 70s?) dates back to 1998, but, as Ebbinghaus put it (for psychology) – while positive psychology has “only a short history”, it has “a long past.” Peterson’s book is wryly written – he is insistent that positive psychology is not a Pollyanna movement, and doesn't deny the ‘valleys’ of life while focussing on the peaks. So I need to read some more about positive psychology – there are at least a few textbooks on the subject now - as well as write up my notes from the fabulous Happiness conference at which much science, fun and inspiration was tossed around. I figure if I read one chapter a day of all these tomes I might be somewhat nearer to formulating a topic that is defined enough for me to be able to answer the question – “oh, so you are thinking of doing a PHD – what on?” If I am true to my passions and beliefs, the act of writing it all down will somehow clarify for me what it is I want to understand. It seems like a good start anyway. So tomorrow – all the questions I want to answer, plus a reminder about existentialism and humanistic psychology! Oh and the best quote I came across today “a pessimist is a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist” (Hubbard, 1927).

gifts from the neighbours to make Massaman curry paste!

 

We had these for dinner last night - yum!

Thai chicken pies
350 g raw chicken mince (or breast, free range of course)
80ml coconut milk
2 tbls sweet chilli sauce
2 teaspoons lemon grass finely chopped
1 ½ tablespoons lime juice
2 Tbls fresh coriander, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
(I added a tsp grated ginger too cos I love the smell)
4 sheets puff pastry (I actually think they would be even yummier with real pastry if you have time, haha)
I egg lightly beaten


Pre heat oven 220 degrees C
Cook chicken until lightly browned, 5 mins.
Combine everything and cool.
Cut pastry rounds - 8.5 cm for the bases and 6 cm for the tops. Press bases into greased muffin tins.
Fill in the pies with the mixture, then top with the 6cm pastry rounds, pressing closed (or not as you like)
Brush with the beaten egg
Bake 25 mins

This is from chefstoolbox – (www.chefstoolbox.com) - they promote their silicone baking trays and other products and I have to say it makes it easy to cook when you don’t have to clean out the sticky muffin pan – I used muffin cases but it wasn’t a good idea because the flaky pastry stuck to it and it was better to just put them directly into a greased muffin pan.
Bon appétit!

Tumbles and her 'sister'!