The possibilities for developing the poet Douglas Dunn’s archive (which includes the drafts and manuscripts for his collection Elegies, dealing with the terminal illness and death of the poet’s wife from cancer) for therapeutic benefit are explored by an English lecturer (C.J.) and a palliative care practitioner (C.M.). This has led us to explore the potential benefit of this resource for health practitioners working with those affected by cancer and other life-limiting conditions. This article offers a “written conversation” (an acknowledged oxymoron of genre) about working with the themes of death and loss: a conversation which includes Douglas Dunn, who was not actually there. We reflect on the value of this “confabulation” as methodological inquiry, and its potential influence on practice. Thus, an example of “creative writing” (the confabulation) becomes a piece of research into methodology regarding the use of “creative writing” resources (the poetry archive) in palliative health care.
AtkinsonP. (1990). The ethnographic imagination. London, England: Routledge.
2.
BergerA. (1988). Working through grief by poetry writing. The Journal of Poetry Therapy, 2, 11-19.
3.
BoltonG. (1999). The therapeutic potential of creative writing: Writing myself. London, England: Jessica Kingsley.
4.
DeleuzeG.GuattariF. (1988). A thousand plateaus. London, England: Athlone.
5.
DownieR. S. (Ed.). (1994). The healing arts: An Oxford illustrated anthology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
6.
DunnD. (1985). Elegies. London, England: Faber.
7.
FoucaultM. (1989). Archaeology of knowledge (Sheridan SmithA. M., Trans.). London, England: Routledge. (Original work published 1969).
8.
GordonT.KellyE.MitchellD. (2011). Spiritual care for healthcare professionals: Reflecting on clinical practice. Milton Keynes, UK: Radcliffe.
9.
JosselsonR. (1996). On writing other people’s lives. In JosselsonR. (Ed.), Ethics and process in the narrative study of lives (pp. 60-71). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
10.
JurecicA. (2012). Illness as narrative. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
11.
KatzR.JohnsonT. (2006). When professionals weep: Emotional and countertransference responses in end-of-life care. New York, NY: Routledge.
12.
KlassD.SilvermanP. R.NickmanL. (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
13.
LairG. S. (1996). Counseling the terminally ill: Sharing the journey. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis.
14.
LakoffG.JohnsonM. (1981). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1980)
15.
LawtonJ. (1998). Contemporary hospice care: The sequestration of the unbounded body and dirty dying. Sociology of Health & Illness, 20, 121-143.
16.
LieblichA. (2013). Healing plots: Writing and reading in life-stories groups. Qualitative Inquiry, 19, 46-52.
17.
MacLureM. (2009). Broken voices, dirty words: On the productive insufficiency of voice. In JacksonA. Y.MazzeiL. A. (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 97-114). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
18.
MazzeiL. A.JacksonA. Y. (2012). In the threshold: Writing between-the-two. International Review of Qualitative Research, 5, 449-458.
19.
NadeauJ. W. (1997). Families making sense of death. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
20.
NadeauJ. W. (2006). Metaphorically speaking: The use of metaphors in grief therapy. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 14, 201-221.
21.
NeimeyerR. A. (2006). Re-storying loss: Fostering growth in the post traumatic narrative. In CalhounL.TedeschiR. (Eds.), Handbook of post traumatic growth: Research and practice (pp. 68-80). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
22.
NeimeyerR. A.BaldwinS.GilliesJ. (2006). Continuing bonds and reconstructing meaning: Mitigating complications in bereavement. Death Studies, 30, 715-738.
23.
PennebakerJ. W. (1990). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. New York, NY: Guildford Press.
24.
PennebakerJ. W. (2000). Telling stories: The health benefits of narrative. Literature and Medicine, 19, 3-18.
25.
PennebakerJ. W. (2004). Writing to heal: A guided journal for recovering from trauma and emotional upheaval. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.
26.
ReedM.Speedy.J. (2011). Scrapbooks and messy texts: Notes towards sustaining critical and artful narrative inquiry. In TraharS. (Ed.), Learning and teaching narrative inquiry: Travelling in the borderlands (pp. 107-123). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
27.
RobinsonA. (2004). A personal exploration of the power of poetry in palliative care, loss and bereavement. International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 10, 32-39.
28.
RosenblattP. C. (1983). Bitter, bitter tears: Nineteenth-century diarists and twentieth-century grief theories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
29.
SchmidP. F. (2001). Authenticity: The person as his or her own author. Dialogical and ethical perspectives on therapy as an encounter relationship. And beyond. In WyattG. (Ed.), Congruence (pp. 213-228). Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS.
30.
SpeedyJ. (2013). Where the wild dreams are, writing, autoethnography and psychotherapy: Fragments from the spaces between research. Qualitative Inquiry, 19, 27-34.St. Andrews, University Library Special Collections, ms38640.
31.
St PierreE. A. (1997). Circling the text: Nomadic writing practices. Qualitative Inquiry, 3, 403-417.
