Broken Bodies, Fractured Places

Abstract

What happens when a place writes itself into our bodies, and when broken bodies write from fractured places? I have been immersed in a sick body after being born into the “kingdom of the sick” (Sontag 2013, p.1) when I was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis at nine weeks of age. Consequently, I have spent a substantial amount of time in hospital—a place we go to ‘get better’. My hospital bed is a place I have always written—often with friends dying around me and in the face of immense physical and existential suffering. Being creative in an institutionalised setting has allowed me to resist the feeling of confinement, where I’m able to establish routine and agency to try and create some order among the disorder. The concept of place became especially significant when I was placed in isolation due to being immunosuppressed following a double lung transplant in 1998. The landscape changed from one of community to one that was more solitary and dystopian. A liminality of place exists between home and hospital, and this creative work contemplates how a multidimensionality of creativity can exist, and indeed thrive, within an institutionalised setting.