Emerging from the Creative Manifesto, I invite submissions of ‘FLASH’ ILLNESS WRITING, short-form creative work
- which expresses a moment or fragment of experience of persistent pain;
- which takes either the perspective of a person experiencing the pain or the perspective of a witness (carer or healthcare professional);
- which captures any dimension of experience – physical, emotional, social, economic, institutional, medical, spiritual, or creative;
- which communicates in any emotional register, positive or negative;
- and which can be shared and used by others to try and communicate the vivid, contradictory, and diverse realities of living with chronic pain.
The parameters:
- short-form creative writing, from 5 to 150 words,
- in any form (e.g. prose or poetry; autobiography, fiction, or a blend);
- optionally can be accompanied by a single image (photograph or artwork); can also take the form of a single comic ‘panel’ or short sequence, to fit on a single screen;
- the fragments/moments/glimpses to be shared online with attribution, under Creative Commons Licensing (BY-NC) 4.0.
- authors can choose to be anonymous, pseudonymous or named.
The brevity of the works produced by our network and their public availability will also make the resource immediately usable by a range of groups: pain charities can use the material in outreach and patient support, medical educators can use the material to enhance student engagement alongside clinical work, people working in healthcare policy can draw on the resource to give rich, humanising detail, and carers and members of the public can draw on the resource to help in understanding the experience of people living with chronic pain.
Please see the Creative Manifesto and Information for Participants, and you are welcome to submit work here.
