The goal of the workshop was to foster a creative safe space for the participants to unwind/unwound with a pen and paper. Using the self as a tool to navigate the boundaries of our shared vulnerabilities, we used creative strategies ranging from experimental poetry prompts to new materialist feminist research and arts-based methodologies. Collectively we created a time and space to write, reflect and reshape our woundings. After a short overview of the key theoretical concepts and inspirations, I proposed a series of writing prompts that engage with the relationship between the body, writing and the materiality of the paper. We worked both on individual as well as collective exercises. There was a space both to share as well as to contemplate in silence around our wounds.
With this activity, participants could (re)consider the potential of creative writing methods for contributing to feminist materialist research. My goal was to examine how to use creative writing prompts not only as a way of tapping into existing memories and generating material as they would be used in creative writing workshops, but as a creative methodology for researching intangible and painful topics.

The enclosed poems are a result of a collective writing process, inspired by Dadaist cut-ups as well as Bellamy’s cunt-ups.

Not her, she’s a stick
The pain, that’s the shape of mother
That is, her beach body on a new day
I’m squeezing my way into a place where I don’t belong
It’s present, physical, too intentional
I’m getting out, hard
Reject me on a new day
I’ll make it out there alone

(collected by Linda)

Her stick will hit right where
It’s the most painful, mother
Self-loving body day
Not physical, nor intentional
It is getting harder to be
Rejected anew
To make out alone

(collected by Wassan)

Cheating. Squeezing your way into a place where you don’t belong.
Getting out there every day anew.
They know you are fraud,
you know it too.
And yet, too opinionated, too stubborn,
You refuse to give up, to get out, to prove them right.
A scar is a healed wound —
it means not bleeding.
You have many of them.

(collected by Lusy)