Telling (My) Stories: Potential Uses of Autofiction to Enhance Wellbeing in a Community Arts Setting.

Abstract

This paper reports on Telling (My) Stories, a two-month community writing project that was held at Bournemouth University in 2023 with the aim of elucidating the life stories of 12 participants to enhance their feeling of wellbeing and their mental health. It evaluates the applicability of autofiction to community arts projects with a focus on writing and wellbeing. In doing so it takes the evolution of autofiction to a new a stage, treating it not merely as a fashionable fictional genre in the literary marketplace, but also as an active tool for potential utility in the kinds of community writing setting where the public gesture of publishing a finished, written work of fiction is not the goal and where achieving some kind of wellbeing benefit through writing is a valid end in its own right. It suggests that it is possible for autofiction to be employed in a community writing project in such a way that enables a modest benefit to their wellbeing to be achieved by the participants. It also makes some observations on the status of the university as an institution perceived by project participants to be both a safe space and a somewhat prestigious venue that they wanted to attend, provided that potential barriers to attending (most notably, social anxiety among those unaccustomed to doing so) can be sensitively overcome.