An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Jonathan Wyatt (Sabbatical Fellow, 2025)
Writing, the Everyday, and Psychotherapy
I am working on a book, due to be delivered to the publisher, optimistically, though already two years late, at the end of my IASH fellowship in late July 2025. The current working title of the book is Writing the Everyday, the premise being how the everyday is not (only) mundane but replete with possibility, not (only) a given but riven with contingencies, not (only) prosaic but imbued with the poetic.
Like Phillip Pullman’s Will Parry, you can slice through the everyday with a ‘subtle knife’ into other, parallel worlds. The everyday, the ‘site’ of this text, is the everyday as a maelstrom of human and more-than-human forces, an everyday concerned with the flow of the moment, a creative-relational event replete with potentialities. Alongside a daily walking commute up an Edinburgh hill, one foot in front of another, heart rate rising, are stories of love and loss, masculinity and desire, illness and ageing, the body and what it can do, hope and despair, the planet and its future.
The book tells these stories through writing. ‘Writing-as-inquiry’ is this book’s through-line, its lifeblood. The book thinks, feels, breathes, aches, with writing, with what writing holds and offers.
In this work-in-progress seminar, I shall provide an overview of how the book is shaping up, including offering its current structure and chapter headings, and speak further about what the book is seeking to do. I am a psychotherapist by professional background and will present from one chapter, chapter 2, which connects writing, the everyday, and psychotherapy.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7