‘We cannot change the past, but we can change how we look at the past’: The use of creative writing in facing up to personal histories at the Danish Welfare Museum

Narrative medicine is an international research discipline connecting the science of literature with the science of health. This article is based on the thesis that reading and writing fiction can help mentally and physically ill people in actively contributing to their own recovery, as well as traumatised people in recreating their own identity. But why and how? The author conducted writing workshops with (grown-up) orphans as part of a large research project, ‘Uses of literature, University of Southern Denmark’. She reflects on the potential, the challenges and the results so far with this particular group. The workshops, involving many participants who are amateur writers, were partly based on models for conceptual writing and focused on aesthetic recognition as opposed to therapeutic recognition. Once again, the museum’s ‘therapeutic model’ is challenged, in favour of a different, more actively creative approach to recovery of self.