Call for Creative Work Creative Manifesto, Translating Chronic Pain\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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Emerging from the\u00a0Creative Manifesto,<\/a>\u00a0I invite submissions<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0‘FLASH\u2019 ILLNESS WRITING,\u00a0short-form creative work\u00a0\u2013 which expresses a moment or fragment of experience of persistent pain;\u00a0\u2013 which takes either the perspective of a person experiencing the pain or the perspective of a witness (carer or healthcare professional);\u00a0\u2013 which captures any dimension\u00a0of experience \u2013 physical, emotional, social, economic, institutional, medical, spiritual, or creative;\u00a0\u2013 which communicates in any emotional register, positive or negative;\u00a0\u2013 and which can be shared\u00a0and used by others to try and communicate the vivid, contradictory, and diverse realities of living with chronic pain.The parameters:\u2013 short-form creative writing, from 5 to 150 words,\u00a0\u2013 in any form (e.g. prose or poetry; autobiography, fiction, or a blend);\u00a0\u2013 optionally can be accompanied by a single image (photograph or artwork);\u00a0can also take the form of a single comic \u2018panel\u2019 or short sequence, to fit on a single screen;\u00a0\u2013 the fragments\/moments\/glimpses to be shared online with attribution, under Creative Commons Licensing (BY-NC) 4.0.\u00a0\u2013 authors can choose to be anonymous, pseudonymous or named.Deadline: \u00a0I will be adding submissions to the project throughout 2018, \u00a0but the earlier the submission the more likely it is to receive wider exposure, so early submission is encouraged.Please see the Creative Manifesto\u00a0<\/a>and Information for Participants<\/a>, and you are welcome to submit work here.<\/a>MANIFESTOSINCE\u00a0people living with persistent pain often suffer invisibility\u00a0and struggle for legitimacy and credibility;since long-term pain is often wrongly assumed to be a\u00a0temporary and unnatural\u00a0state;since pain experience is diverse\u00a0and must be understood intersectionally\u00a0 (through interweaved categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and class);since pain\u2019s causes\u00a0can be cryptic, multiple, personal, social, environmental, transgenerational, and hidden;since pain science\u00a0is neither widely understood or well-funded, and requires wider dissemination;since pain experience exceeds the language of medicalisation;since pain undercuts illusions of human autonomy\u00a0and self-sufficiency, showing that all people are vulnerable and interdependent;since pain may impair the ability to work, in which case those living with it may be wrongly seen as not living a \u2018useful\u2019 life;since witnessing pain\u00a0makes profound claims on \u2013 and poses challenges for \u2013 carers, family members, and healthcare practitioners;and since chronic pain affects every dimension\u00a0of life \u2026\u00a0… I call for creative work which engages these invisibilities, these lacunae, these intersections \u2013 moments in public or in shadows, in loneliness or connection.YET – pain experience may not lend itself to established forms of either illness narration or survivorship story:the experience may lack an ending, where resolution is reached;it may lack a beginning, its causes hidden;it may break the positivity imperative \u2013\u00a0to be hopeful, a warrior, a survivor, a meaning-finder;it may be incommunicable, resisting representation, yet may simultaneously engender language;it may be a story not (only) of a personal journey, but also of wider social\u00a0calamities and inequalities, both contemporary and transgenerational;it may\u00a0resist plot, instead\u00a0being a thing of fragments, glimpses, and moments.SO\u00a0I call for\u00a0‘FLASH’ ILLNESS WRITING –\u00a0short-form creative work\u00a0– which expresses a moment or fragment of experience of persistent pain;\u00a0– which takes either the perspective of a person experiencing the pain or the perspective of a witness (carer or healthcare professional);\u00a0– which captures any dimension\u00a0of experience \u2013 physical, emotional, social, economic, institutional, medical, spiritual, or creative;\u00a0– which communicates in any emotional register, positive or negative;\u00a0– and which can be shared\u00a0and used by others to try and communicate the vivid, contradictory, and diverse realities of living with chronic pain.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.———-Sara Wasson, Translating Chronic Pain: Creative Manifesto (2017), http:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/translating-pain<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"