Reading & Writing Death and Dying
This is an interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologist Dr Naomi Richards and creative writers Dr Elizabeth Reeder and PhD Candidate Amy Shea.
The trio have been working together since 2017 when Amy began her Doctorate of Fine Art, writing a creative non-fiction book about indigent dying in the us.
Via an interdisciplinary reading group in 2017/18 and a successful symposium: Deathwrites: Writing (May 2019), participants close-read cross-genre and interdisciplinary texts and discussed their own writing/work. Feedback indicates this supports individuals to produce work that is ground-breaking in form/content/approach and has inspired other writers to take up PhD projects with the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group (Julie Lang).
We have now become a successful Arts Lab within the College of Arts & Humanities at the University Of Glasgow. The focus of this Arts-Lab, as with the reading group, is to hone critical and creative skills on the universal topic of death, dying and bereavement. We aim to build a community of thinkers, writers, practitioners and makers who are interested in this subject and who want to generate collaborations across disciplines and contexts.
In january 2020 we held our second Arts Lab symposium, DeathWrites: Images.
Also in January 2020, Dr Reeder and Amy Shea are convening a course (CRWRT5044P) on Reading & Writing Death & Dying as part of the MLitt in Creative Writing.