Marie Beauchamps is an Amsterdam-based poet, a creative entrepreneur, an academic, and a policy officer at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She leads our writing workshops.

Juliet Scott is Business Curator, Practice Director Arts & Organisation and Principal Consultant at TIHR and she is Director of our Deepening Creative Practice programme.

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Marie, we are looking forward to the Spring workshop series: Writing with the Poetic Lens. What’s the story behind the workshops and your collaboration with TIHR?

The writing workshop emerged in a time when I was participating in the first cohort of Deepening Creative Practice (aka DCP) in 2020. 

The pandemic had taken the world into a completely different zone, and a big part of the work was to adapt to new forms of working and finding meaningful ways of connecting despite the distance and the flatness of the screen. 

DCP has made me delve into my own creative practice and discover new facets of it; it made me consciously engage with the roles I take within a group and organisation; it made me struggle and it made me take risks.

My workshops Writing with the Poetic Lens were born out of that space of experimentation and reconfiguration.

Juliet, you attended the first round of writing workshops that Marie led with TIHR. What was it like and did you work differently afterwards?

The first workshop came at a point where I was struggling with writing about my practice in a way that honoured my artist identity. Marie gave us an exercise to write about something that had happened in our work with a focus on sensory experience. 

I wrote a short paragraph which involved a dilemma about washing strawberries as part of an oral history project I was working on at the time. We then got into peer pairs and read the pieces to each other. I was with a clinical psychologist who immediately spotted the traumatic context of the project through the sensory detail. 

I’ve developed this piece since and written others and am now enjoying writing more and finding it much more resonant with my preoccupations with still life. 

The writing now takes on the form of still life.

Juliet, did the creative writing experience resonate with, or influence, your expanding programme, Deepening Creative Practice at TIHR?

Yes. Marie was influenced a lot by social dreaming and wrote poems from matrices that we held as part of Deepening Creative Practice. 

What is social dreaming?

This was similar to the drawings that I had been doing, sort of aesthetic associations. I collated the dreams into a new image and Marie made the dreams into poems. The poems are now on the walls of the Institute along with my drawings.

We later collaborated with Bongsu Park and her Dream Auction.   Marie also brought collaborative writing methodologies into the programme which we have included ever since and have also used in some of our OD work. 

The collaborative writing offers ways of developing dialogue around difficult and abstract issues. DCP has also been a space concerned with re-evaluating epistemologies and that was an important part of what Marie brought into the programme and connects to the Organizational Aesthetics journal that I edit.

As the world and our place in it is changing we need to carefully examine how we know, research, intervene, disseminate and talk about our work.

Marie, as a secret poet, I love the idea of looking through a poetic lens (although it is scary). What if we don’t feel very poetic in our work?

The Poetic Lens is not only for poets, secret ones or not. 

The poetic lens explores a state of mind centered on curiosity and wonder. It is an open playing field: play and associative thinking are at the forefront, as well as getting into our senses.

Exploring this playfulness as well as the sensory can be very helpful in finding new ways of writing about our work and practice, within our work, or in response to our work.

Marie, what kinds of questions do you find people bring to these workshops? And if you have seen people find new means of expression, what does that look like? 

A theme that comes back in every workshop is the participant’s thirst for finding joy in one’s writing practice.

In our world where efficiency-driven structures have become the default, it is a real struggle to create pockets of time and space where writing is not associated with an immediate product, but allows a time of reflection. 

The poetic lens is a door to finding that space while practicing and exploring different modes of writing.

To some participants, the practice becomes a structural habit that nourishes deep reflections about their work and brings in an element of pleasure. To others, the practice helps them find a way to express a more intuitive, embodied facet of the stories they work with. Some of those writings end up in publications, others contribute to the sense making process.

The Spring Writing Workshops are open to applicants now. The Early Bird discount is available until Tuesday February 18 2025.

Deepening Creative Practice 2025 is also open to applicants.

In conversation with Lucy Lloyd, TIHR.