IN-PERSON Prague Research & Teaching Conference
Abstract
Contemporary neuroscience locates creative capacity in the right hemisphere. In nearly 90% of people, however, detailed language processes occur in the left-brain (associated with logic and sequential reasoning). If both findings are true, then the concept of ‘creative writing’ presents a paradox, as creativity and language are predominantly processed in opposite sides of the brain. Our research was stimulated by years of pedagogical practice in creative writing, leading to a desire to better understand what that practice was doing at neurological level. It has led to facilitating a workshop on creative writing and dopamine reward at the 2023 conference of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes in Madrid and masterclasses at the Oslo Institute for Writing for Children. In this paper, we explore how pedagogy informed by neuroscience might exploit this paradox to instigate and support creativity and insight in the creative writing workshop. Key ideas that we will be discussing are problem solving via insight, coarse semantic linguistic association and simulating the semi-conscious states of REM sleep that support creativity and language processing. Methods include disrupting linguistic pathways, and problem-solving in the context of playful learning. We demonstrate classroom exercises designed to harness unconscious processing power and stimulate right-brain thought patterns to produce both neurological and creative rewards for the student writer. We also elucidate how the effects of these exercises are underpinned by understanding of how ideas and language are produced.
Dr Barbara Cooke (she/her) is Chair of the British Association of Modernist Studies (BAMS) and Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, where she is the Undergraduate Programme Lead for English and convenes BA and MA modules in creative writing and staging literary events. She has published creative-critical works including Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford (2018) and Love and Landscape (forthcoming: both Bodleian Publications). She has presented on English discipline pedagogy at the Oxford University Writers and Their Education symposium (2018) and the BAMS postgraduate training programme.
Dr Kerry Featherstone (he/him) is Lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Loughborough University, where he is Programme Lead for the Masters in Creative Writing and the Writing Industries, supervises doctoral research and teaches on the undergraduate programme in English with Creative Writing. He is a poet with over forty poems in print, and a songwriter, and has performed his work in England, France and Germany. He has been writer in residence facilitating workshops at two heritage sites in England. He has also published work on Mark Goodwin’s experimental poetry, and on contemporary British travel writing.
1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Tuesday 10th June, 2025