Practitioner Certificate Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes Staff
Faculty Head:
Head of Programme:
Academic Coordinator
- Ahmed Kersha
Fiona Hamilton is a writer, tutor, mentor and facilitator. She has extensive experience of working in community, healthcare and educational settings with creative writing, arts and reflective practice. Groups include people responding to climate change, refugees and asylum seekers, and people navigating challenging health conditions. She is interim Director of Studies, tutor and research adviser on Metanoia’s MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. She teaches poetry to medical students at Bristol University and regularly writes about aspects of therapeutic writing, for example Language, Story and Health (Journal of Holistic Healthcare, 2012), Medicine, Health, and the Arts (Routledge, 2013), and Words and Thresholds (Scriptum Creative Writing Studies, 2014). Other published writing includes poetry of place in Fractures (2016) and a play Dancing on the Rusty Brown Carpet (2020) adapted for online showing during the pandemic that explores narratives of body and mind in relation to music and dance.
Tutors:
Nigel Gibbons is a counsellor and psychotherapist in private practice, working with individuals, couples, and groups. He is a supervisor and a workshop facilitator using creative writing. He has particular interests in Focusing; the Person Centred approach within arts based therapies, therapy research, and narrative approaches. He is a tutor on the Diploma in Counselling at Network Counselling and Training and with Orchard Foundation, and runs sessions for the Medical Humanities course at Bristol. He facilitates workshops for, amongst others, Cruse and Relate. As a supervisor for Cruse Bereavement Care he works with groups and individuals. For twelve years he worked for Central TV, the ITV company in the Midlands, as a producer, director and researcher, eventually becoming a head of department. He has made over one hundred factual programmes for ITV, Central and Channel 4. He has published a number of articles and contributed to Writing Routes edited by Gillie Bolton, Victoria Field, and Kate Thompson, and MA2.
Graham Hartill is a writer-in-residence at HMP Parc, Bridgend. In 2013 he was the first writer-in-residence at Swansea University College of Medicine and, with Victoria Field, ran a popular course, Writing in Health and Social Care, for nine years at Ty Newydd, the Writers’ Centre for Wales. He worked for many years for the Ledbury Poetry Festival, as an outreach writer with elderly people and has worked widely in the fields of dementia and mental health. A founder member of Lapidus, Graham has contributed to seminal collections and conferences in the field. Papers include: Poetics of Memory: In Defence of Literary Experimentation with Holocaust Survivor Testimony, with Professor Frances Rapport, in Anthropology and Humanism (2010) and Versions of Events: Lies, Judgments and Poems in Poetry Wales (2017). His latest published poetry is a collaborative translation with Wu Fu-Sheng: The Selected Poetic Writings of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, for The Commercial Press, Beijing, 2020. Chroma was published by Hafan Books in 2012 and there is a new collection in the pipeline with Aquifer Books.
Foluke Taylor is a psychotherapist, writer and teacher. She has been in practice for over 25 years, drawing on Black feminist, relational psychoanalytic, and narrative approaches, and on knowledge gathered in nonconventional study spaces. Along with her partner and their five children, she spent 10 remarkable and formative years living and working in The Gambia. Now based in London, she works in private practice and as a school counsellor, and as creator and facilitator of various group writing spaces. Foluke has an MSc in Creative writing for Therapeutic purposes (CWTP). Her work engages therapeutics, poetics, and activism as dynamically interconnected experiments in being and living otherwise that support wellbeing in racialised and marginalised people. She has contributed to and participated in several of artist Barby Asante’s performance installations ‘Declaration of Independence’, in Britain and Europe. She teaches on trauma at NAOS Institute. Recent publications include a bio-mythography How the Hiding Seek (2018), and As Much Space as We Can Imagine: Black Presence in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2019). She has contributed a chapter to What is Normal? to be published by Confer in November 2020 and is currently completing a book on the development of a Black therapist’s praxis for PCCS Books
Claire Williamson has worked extensively using creative writing in therapeutic settings, including bereavement, addiction recovery, new parents, older people and cancer care. Claire’s M-level research explored the life-sustaining effects of writing, and as a doctoral candidate at Cardiff University, she’s studying ‘Writing the 21st Century Bereavement Novel’. Claire was for nine years Programme Leader for the well-established MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, the only Masters course in the UK on this subject. Claire has authored a number of book chapters and journal articles (e.g. on working with young people, creative process, a dialogue on the current CWTP field (with Dr Jeannie Wright), and is the author of four published poetry collections, the latest is Visiting the Minotaur (Seren, 2018).