Writing Yourself Into Existence: Podcast hosted by Avni Trivedi with Susanna Howard

“Everybody has the ability to communicate”

Text taken from Avni Touch Podcast Page. LISTEN HERE. 

Susanna Howard (she/her) is the founder and artistic director of Living Words. Susanna fell into working with people with dementia after a period of personal displacement when flow writing saved her. Living Words emerged out of the darkness of this period. All of a sudden the journey that took her into that first hospital ward, to work with people who were struggling with their own personal displacement, made sense.
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As founder of Living Words Susanna has led workshops and performed one-woman shows at events across the world promoting our work, including National Theatre of Taiwan; British Council; Tate; Wellcome; British Library; Stratford Lit Fest; BMJ Dementia conference at Excel; National Care Forum; UK Dementia Congress; RSPH; Quarterhouse, Folkestone; Cockpit Theatre, London; Tabernacle, London; Resonance Fm. Susanna is an international speaker and chair of dementia and mental health conferences and events. She regularly appears and chairs at book festivals across the UK.
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Her writing on Living Words has appeared in Journal of Dementia Care; Aging Care; BBC Culture; Wasafari; NAWE special edition Writing and Dementia, which she co-edited. For 5 years. Susanna has written research papers in collaboration with partners at Created Out of Mind.
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Susanna worked one-to-one with the acclaimed poet James Berry OBE and is very proud of the work they did together – enabling James to continue to define himself as a writer, whilst living with advancing dementia. In 2017 Susanna made the performance film Shutnell, exploring what it means to have worked with people with advanced dementia for over a decade and acts as director, dramaturg and actor in Living Words performance pieces.
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Susanna studied Drama at Bristol University (BA Hons), followed by Advanced Theatre Practice: Performance (Postgrad, Distinction) at Central School of Speech and Drama. In addition to running Living Words – when she can – Susanna works as an actor; behind the camera, directing TV/Film; writing for theatre and radio, and working in collaborative theatre-making.

 In this episode, we talked about:

  • Susanna Howard went through a difficult time where she felt disconnected from herself and didn’t want to take medication in that particular instance. She used ‘flow writing’ and wrote herself back into existence

  • Flow writing as a ‘dredging’ or way of getting the brain out of the way

  • She realised she could use flow writing with different groups of people to help them to reconnect with the wisdom inside them

  • At the same time Susanna wrote a play about memory and was commissioned to work with St Thomas’ hospital as an artist in the elderly care unit. She had a clear intention of working with “sounds and words, pen and paper”. She was fortunate to have the freedom to work in whatever way she felt

  • “The preconceptions about writers being ‘writerly’. If you can let the words go

  • Barriers about access to the arts

  • Class privilege that enables some people to step in to hierarchical institutions

  • “Everyone has an ability to communicate”

  • Carers being forgotten

  • In the current time (covid-related), Living Words have been working remotely with carers. Many carers haven’t seen their families and friends in order to keep people safe

  • Susanna wanted to share (with permission) the intimacy of the words that came up from the in-hospital and care home settings. It then involved to include carers and staff too to validate experiences

  • Living Words now also works with people going through mental ill health

  • The healing power of words

  • The need to start each artistic project by ‘walking into the unknown’ rather than relying on outcomes

  • There’s a need for labels but they can also become constrictive

  • A term within the dementia world that’s useful to consider “when you’ve met one person with dementia, you’ve met one person with dementia”

  • Julia Cameron – Morning Pages – three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning

  • Normal? Festival of the Brain  – a community-focussed arts and health festival in Folkestone, Kent, with people from around the world coming to give talks and run workshops. Using Open Space Technology

  • Growing Living Words in Taiwan and Hungary and training others in the methodology

  • Becoming a touring venue to connect – theatre performances

  • Living Words is about words and sounds, but the work is embodied

  • The importance of putting supervision in place, or at least peer-peer supervision so you don’t carry everything on your own shoulders

  • The importance of boundaries in order to maintain health and wellness without burnout and depletion