Introduction: The mentoring context

The poems contained in this hybrid, critical/creative work were written in the context of my work as a creative writing mentor in the month-long intensive Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills (ARRTS) program, hosted by the University of Canberra. ARRTS mentors are not arts therapists but professional practitioners or ‘artist educators’, an approach described in an earlier paper (Williams et al., 2020). The program offers creative engagement to members of the Australian Defence Force who are injured or diagnosed with PTSD or anxiety disorders. It has been running twice annually (bar two Covid-19 interruptions) since 2015. We have recently been joined by Emergency Services personnel and, to date, the program has helped 379 individuals in their recovery, and sometimes in their transitioning out of the services.

This essay centres on the May 2021 program, with some reference to the November iteration of the following year. Most of our published research on the ARRTS program focuses on our teaching practice, but, in this essay, I reflect on the use of creative writing to foster my own well-being and, in that sense, it can be considered an autoethnographic study. Autoethnography seeks to describe and analyse personal experience to better understand cultural experience (Ellis et al., 2011); they are inextricably linked (Custer, 2014; Wall, 2006). Autoethnographic writing has the potential to create empathy, both in the author and in readers (Barley, 2020; Custer, 2014). The approach honours the subjectivity of research (Custer, 2014), and can be considered both a method and an outcome (Ellis et al., 2011).

I often write very little during the ARRTS program, as it is such an intensive experience. Each program is special and different to the last; it is participant driven, with no predetermined outcomes. The May 2021 program also proved very different for me for personal reasons, and creative writing became especially important in sustaining me. In times of stress, a creative outlet is vital. By this time, I felt a sense of fatigue that was of a different kind to anything I had felt before in my working life. It seemed my colleagues and I had coped well with the challenges of Covid-19, transitioning to online teaching, for example (even though it takes more time, and we don’t always have extra time to do it in). It’s the old story that during a crisis people act to do what they need to do and then, later, they can come unravelled. This unravelling for me was slow and, fortunately, not complete, and never to the extent that I could not function in my work. It simply left me with a strange weariness, and, in some way, I didn’t want to admit that to myself.

After another intense semester of teaching and looking after a cohort of 170 students –pastoral care assuming increasing significance during Covid-19 – I went straight into the May 2021 program. This was my ninth program, but I was anxious. In fact, I usually am, until the program begins. Then I feel the joy of spending time with people trying to change their lives for the better – hardly knowing how art will help but getting caught up in it and swept along by the collective effort. It gives me energy, and I embrace the experience wholeheartedly.

On this occasion, I was conscious of my need to write to stabilise my well-being. We know from the literature that informs our teaching, and from our own experience in this context, that creative writing has tremendous therapeutic efficacy (Bullock, 2021a; Bullock & Williams, 2021; Grey, 2022; Jensen & Blair, 1997; Pennebaker, 1993; Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999; Pizarro, 2004; Robinson, 2000; Watt & Kehoe, 2020). I know this as a distinct aspect of my writing practice; writing offers opportunities to process and absorb stimulus, to make sense of one’s life. The creative act frees the mind to consider new possibilities, to play and discover, as the literature attests (Csikszentmihalyi, 2013; Dolan & Metcalfe, 2012; Sharda, 2010) – this is therapeutic in and of itself.

One of the joys of my work lies in creating exercises for participants. I test-run these on myself first, to gauge their parameters and to help me imagine possible responses. I sometimes complete them again while we work in class if I sense that I don’t need to be monitoring the group continually and so that we have a shared experience. I have completed some of the exercises many times and created sequences of poems from these several iterations (see Bullock, 2021b).

After a first day of introductory workshops, ARRTS participants choose to specialise in one of three streams for the four weeks: Creative Writing, Music and Rhythm or Visual Arts. But on each day of the program, we come together again for a whole-of-program activity, led by the mentors of each stream, in rotation. These can be a lot of fun and provide additional opportunities to experiment. I sometimes create prompts based on the work of mentors from the other streams shared in these whole-of-program sessions, often seeking a writing equivalent to work in other creative fields (see comments on ekphrasis below). I share these prompts with the whole program or with the Creative Writing stream, if time allows; if not, I may keep these exercises for another cohort or to work on further myself, since they can present opportunities to explore ideas or emotions raised during the program. I find it important to develop creative outlets for reactions to mentoring in ARRTS. Since the beginning of 2020, I have also completed a daily mindfulness journal. My morning journaling routine is to write a sentence beginning, “I let go of…”; another beginning, “I focus on…”; and three things I’m grateful for. I gleaned this structure from the website Marc and Angel Hack Life. I make a gratitude list again in the evening, and often write 20 things, rather than three. I have shared this journaling strategy with ARRTS participants in the presentation about the benefits of journaling, which occurs on day one or two of the program.

It is necessary for teachers using arts practice in settings that involve the description of trauma to be mindful of their own mental well-being, since we know that hearing and reading stories about deployment is potentially traumatising (Hinton-Smith & Seal, 2018). The ARRTS program has an extensive network of support staff, a psychologist and at least two nurses present at all times. We sometimes refer participants to the support staff in cases where writing may have had a re-traumatising effect. The support staff are available to mentors also, and it has been useful to be able to talk with them about the impacts of trauma. The collegiality of the program, including relationships with mentors from the other creative streams, forms an important supportive framework.

Mentors hear some disturbing stories from service personnel. One account of atrocities committed in Afghanistan voiced by a participant in a 2017 program haunted me for some time. The situation described was one of complete moral compromise, a scenario in which there were no acceptable choices, resulting in a clear example of what the literature terms ‘moral injury’. Moral injury is caused by events such as perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations (Litz, 2009); it includes feelings of shame, grief, meaninglessness and remorse from having violated core moral beliefs (Brock & Lettini, 2012). It contributes to mental health problems (Jinkerson, 2016; Yan, 2016), particularly where those affected are less able to make meaning of their experiences (Currier et al., 2015). Though they are often co-occurrent, there is a need to distinguish between moral injury and PTSD (Dombo, 2013; Drescher et al., 2011; Farmsworth 2014).

I did not seek counselling at the time, but probably should have done so. I tried to absorb the story as information, fully focused on engaging with the speaker. When I got home, the tears came, but I couldn’t tell my partner about it for privacy reasons, and I didn’t want to speak about it in detail anyway, in case it traumatised her.

In some way, I was witness to the participant’s hurt, which, I acknowledge now, was traumatising. I felt morally compromised even hearing this story. Through writing, especially mindfulness journaling, and the expression of emotion to myself, these hurts have healed. This is a small instance compared with those who are dealing directly with trauma and with moral injury, but it helps me to understand their experience a little more fully. Reading accounts of trauma through the methodology of autoethnography has increased my understanding of how telling stories about trauma affects teller and listener (especially Barley, 2020). Researching moral injury since 2017 has made me aware of the subtle dangers of moral compromise. Though not reflected in the poems presented here, such an issue was present in the personal circumstances of my life in 2021, as my partner and I endeavoured to navigate our way through a painful negotiation with the gold mining company that threatened, and still threatens, our piece of land in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a situation where there is no good choice, a particular kind of stress and anxiety develops; this, as well as the stresses related to Covid-19, was troubling me in 2021.

Our group work includes field trips, where the whole cohort visits a gallery or attends a poetry reading or concert. These experiences can generate found material, which I use in my writing. In the May 2021 program, I felt an intense need to create, to bolster my own resilience and to help integrate experiences from the past year or more, to work through the complex feelings related to the subtle grief that Covid-19 had created, even though I had been fortunate enough to be living in an Australian state that had recorded relatively few cases, and very few deaths, and with surprisingly little inconvenience, compared to so much of the world. But we all felt it. The world had changed. In quiet moments, and in loud and chaotic moments, I did a great deal of writing, creating a program for myself within the program. The poems that follow form some record of that process.

Method: Creative expression through poetry – hybrid forms

Poetry has been described as autoethnographic data (Gildea, 2020). I would argue that creative writing is already a form of autoethnographic writing. Poetry has been described as an ideal medium for writing about traumatic experience, in which linear and temporal structures have collapsed and the world is experienced as a series of fragments (Gildea, 2020), especially since the fragment is a feature of postmodern poetry (Perloff, 1999). Hybrid forms have great potential for representing the multi-sensory experiences that characterise life in the 21st century. The diversity of contemporary experience needs literary forms that reflect the mutability of our lives. Expressing oneself through such a medium is liberating, as well as appropriate. It invokes innovation as a marker of well-being (Dolan & Metcalfe, 2012); autoethnography is said to embody innovation (Custer, 2014). The effectiveness of the use of hybrid forms may be seen as analogous to the identification of multicultural societies tending to generate innovative ideas (Csikszentmihalyi, 2013).

The work I include here forms part of a series I call ‘Fusion poems’, which blend linear experiments, prose poetry, haiku and/or tanka, and found material, taking the haibun (prose and haiku) as a model for other hybrid forms (Bullock, 2023). The found material celebrates the joy of language, often in its rawest forms: when I encounter a new word or phrase, I feel compelled to use it in writing as soon as possible; to own it, to celebrate and document it. Found material is given in italics throughout the series. Fusion poems accommodate reflections on the writing process, just as this hybrid essay reflects on the process of its own composition. The prose poem is already a kind of hybrid (fusing use of the sentence and sentence fragment with techniques more often associated with lineated poems) that sits well within the overall approach.

In the first poem I offer an impression of the context of the program, making use of found material from our field trip to That Poetry Thing at Smiths.

Program

strong feelings
all over
– ukulele tinkles

it’s not a pre-school splatter-fest

staring through the window

conniption

Don’t mention the Ess word in Week 1

*

inter-mit-tent
   a strop
      back into it

the way you say seagrass,
   some blow-in

you like words, don’t you?
   as in a lens

*

it’s contagious . . .

reptilian dark
   in-spire

In this poem, I respond to ARRTS participants’ growing fascination with language, which mirrors my own. The poem evokes the potential of autoethnographic writing to create empathy, mentioned above; perhaps it is also reflective of empathy. The last line is an in-joke reference to the Inspire Centre where the program takes place.

I wrote the second piece, ‘Galla’, during our field trip to the National Gallery of Australia. It invokes the way art can produce new forms of knowledge, and plays on the idea of layering, especially in relation to Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952), a feature of the gallery. In it I express my frustration at guided tours and hard-and-fast opinions about art. Participants in previous programs had expressed similar frustrations, so I felt that I was giving voice to a shared concern. As well as Pollock, the poem quotes Leonard Cohen (1984) in the last line.

Galla

crossing the bridge
this foggy morning
the day drifts in
   blue, teal, brown, cerulean
      pink, white, grey

let the morning
   into you
if we talk
   we share knowledge
if we listen
   to your hands

become
   in changing light
      (pinkred)

look withme
   withwords

a song line
   survival

why words the go?

they trap me now –
I don’t understand
guided tours

I’m resigned to accept it
but now they’ve gone
I can look at
the painting
(now I’ve gone)
bush plum

the tour words endure
I dispute them
it’s not ACTION PAINTING
it’s dribbles, drips
throws
not LAYERS
not NON-
   REPRESENTATIONAL
it tries to represent
what can’t be represented
and dooms itself   as it must
to glorious failure

it’s in layers   if
the other paintings
have words in them

what they say about
   your painting
is neither then
   nor here
you said
the modern painter
doesn’t have to look for a subject matter
   outside themselves
you painted the sub-
   conscious,
the sub-conscious layer 
(there is one
the prefix says so –
even that’s
   half a word)
but no words in this painting
we splash words on it
(thank you, Jackson)
words like ‘peace sign’
   (our bad) –
if we need information
   it’s not art

great art   makes you
   want to stroke the wall

I’m not looking for
   meaning
I’m looking for meaning’s absence
   that rare achievement
(the words
   the words won’t shut up)
like the fewer who don’t even care

The poem celebrates the importance of colour in art, and sharing through language, song and feelings. But it suggests that sometimes, one might just want the colours and shapes, without any talk, and to be free, as a viewer, to form one’s own relationships with the works, unmediated by any other party, including gallery blurbs. Great art is visceral, experiential, itself part of an ethnographic experience. Sometimes one wants to escape meaning, not encounter it: to simply have an experience and not have to process it. The autoethnographic approach here suggests that articulation of personal experience may help one better understand a cultural experience (as referenced above). The performative “I” reflects the subjectivity of autoethnographic writing, and is also in the process of becoming, rather than being predetermined (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008).

My third poem, ‘Connected three’, explores a three-part form suggested by the work of Sancintya Mohini Simpson, which the program participants and I viewed on another field trip that included the AUSTRALIEN exhibition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (14 May–11 July 2021). It summons connection, through our shared gallery visits and group activities; specifically, a vocal, counting exercise with the Music and Rhythm stream. The poem pursues my theory of radical ekphrasis: writing that seeks not only to respond to other art forms in terms of content, but to allow the structure of the poem to be informed or dictated by work from another medium (see Bullock, 2019). In general, these poems feature a kind of truncated syntax, which seemed necessary to capture something of the directness of detail in visual art, and the way in which, like music, it can seem to bypass thinking and access the emotions with immediacy.

Connected three

I

cloves / clearances /rice pud
          shelves / eucalypt / paper
saints / salve / burritas
          Orkneys / shield / sheep
nodding / thinking / air
          accentuate / cake / celebration
eclipse / cloud / eclipse

II

a blue ring round
the moon in three
   shadow / arc / reflection
red moon pulsing
hot coals
the stench
of space     a few
hundred yards away     hanging
by a bounce     a . . .

towering
over us
trees

III

eee
ooo
we sighed
counting
   numbers
eight
   (the rest clunky)
stands out
   ecstatic ‘e’
      excited ‘t’
today
we left out the numbers
except one
   slapped our thighs
      for the pattern of missing
it allowed
   aloud