Postgraduate research students

Thesis - Writing suicide bereavement: narrative impulse, narrative crisis

My research sits at the nexus of creative writing, medical humanities and narratology. Through my thesis novel (working title CLOSURE) I explore how bereavement by suicide induces a crisis of protagonicity within the text. I am interested in how the temporally disruptive impact of grief in the wake of such a bereavement can be represented structurally within the novel; I suggest that this kind of bereavement is an ‘ethically impossible’ narrative event.

Alongside my thesis novel I am writing a series of creative-critical essays which explore affective and lyric modes; motherhood and embodiment; narrative (un)reliability; and walking as creative practice. These essays are formally experimental, resistant, disobedient and unsettled. Here I am interested in texts which frustrate and dissolve.  

List by: Type | Date

• Dr Carolyn Jess-Cooke
• Professor Zoe Strachan

• SGSAH AHRC DTP Scholarship 2020-2024 
• Graduate Student International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference award 2021

• Performativity(ies) of Memory(ies) Interdisciplinary Conference, Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo (Oct 2025): Writing the artist: the practice research diary as transtemporal communication between selves
• Creatical Idiolects Symposium, University of Lancaster (Dec 2024): Temporalities, essaying, and walking as creative practice
• International Conference on Narrative, University of Newcastle (Apr 2024): Writing the White Cart Water: stacked narratives of grief and motherhood
• Environment, Mythology and Storytelling Symposium, University of Bristol (Nov 2023): Writing the White Cart Water: a psychogeography of grief and motherhood
• University of Glasgow College of Arts Postgraduate Conference (June 2021): something from something: erasure poetry, writing trauma, and creative practice as research
• International Conference on Narrative (May 2021): Traumatic grief as a disruptive narrative device
• Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research 4th Annual Congress (April 2021): Grief made visible: experiments in narrative form through creative practice 

Semester 1

• GTA 1A Poetry and Poetics

Semester 2

• GTA 2B Writing the Body
• CW Experimental writing: time, space and form

Publications

'White ink' & 'Neither losing nor increasing' - two poems in Motherlore (Jul '25)

'four poems' - poetry pamphlet for 'Sorry About The Mess' exhibition by Babe Station (Mar '25)

‘The Rothko room’ – short fiction in Gutter (Feb '25)

'expulsion' - experimental creative-critical response text in What is Creative Criticism? Field Report (Feb '25)

‘A landscape of motherhood’ – poem in New Mothers’ Writing Circle pamphlet (Dec '24)

‘Food’ - short fiction in New Writing Scotland (Jul '24)

‘Behind Some of the Scenes at the Museum’ – flash non-fiction in the DeathWrites Newspaper (Jun '24)

’Birth lament’ and ‘Dispatch from now’ - two poems in Strix (Aug '23)

‘Allopoeitics as criticism’ – peer-reviewed experimental essay in Exclamat!on (Jul '22)

‘Grief, reading, and narrative time’ - essay in The Polyphony (Nov '21)

‘Empty Space’ – short fiction in Still Point Journal (Jun '21)

‘Covering Ground in Berlin’ – short fiction in Return Trip (Mar '21)

‘A Rich Man’s Game’ – flash fiction in Flash Fiction Magazine (Oct '20)

Other activities

• Creative resident at the Alasdair Gray Archive, exploring ideas of creative play, process, and practice - 2025
• Co-curated the exhibition of art and writing ‘Sorry About The Mess’, as a member of art collective Babe Station - 2025
• Research Assistant for the RSE- and ArtsLab-funded DeathWrites Network, coordinating a network of Scotland-based writers working on writing relating to dying, death, grief and loss - 2022-2025 
• Member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative - 2021-2025
• Co-editor of From Glasgow to Saturn - 2020-2021
• Novel-in-progress ORDINARY MIRACLES shortlisted for the North Lit Agency Prize 2021