A creative approach to sharing research – turning ‘data’ into found poetry, allowing participants to breathe on the page

• Online
• 22nd Jan '25 11.00 am – 1.00 pm

Being the storyteller not the story: in the same way that we hold space for our clients in therapy, it is possible to hold space for our participants in research.

As researchers, we are the conduit between our participants, co-researchers, or interviewees, and the reader of our work. Most qualitative research methodologies care about the genuine inclusion of our participants, acknowledging their input into our work, acknowledging that our work cannot exist without them.

Despite this acknowledgement, the voices of the co-researchers are often reduced to ‘data’, human beings and their lived experience shrunk to tables, their quotes used to ballast our hypotheses rather than allowing them to live on the page. Often this reduction of our interviewees is unintentional, brought about by the pressure of creating and disseminating a finished document.

This experiential workshop connects research and creative writing into creative research writing. It offers a creative and playful way to work phenomenologically with participants’ material, using their interviews to generate found poems that offer a sense of the spirit of the co-researchers – getting closer to what it is like to be them.

Stella Duffy is an existential psychotherapist and has recently completed a doctorate in Existential Psychotherapy at NSPC. Her research is in the embodied experience of postmenopause. As well as her private psychotherapy practice, Stella has worked in NHS cancer psychological support and a hospice bereavement service.  

Alongside her therapy work, Stella is the award-winning writer of seventeen novels, over seventy short stories, and fifteen plays, she worked in theatre for over thirty-five years as an actor, director, facilitator and improvisor. The co-founder and, for eight years, the co-director of Fun Palaces working with communities and inclusion across the UK, she has been active in equalities and diversity work in the arts and LGBTQ+ communities for many decades. Stella is also a yoga teacher, leading regular workshops in yoga for writing.