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Included in the Gathering: ELO2019 Gathering (Cork, Ireland) Against the backdrop of écriture feminine and e-lit texts, Ensslin et. al advance methods and findings of the "Writing New Bodies" project (“WNB”; SSHRC IG 435-2018-1036; Ensslin, Rice, Riley, Bailey, Fowlie, Munro, Perram, and Wilks) to lay the foundations of Applied E-literature Research. Their aim is to develop a digital fiction for a new form of contemporary, digital-born bibliotherapy. In following the principles of critical community co-design and feminist participatory action research, WNB engages young woman-identified and gender nonconforming individuals ages eighteen to twenty-five in envisioning worlds where they feel at home in their bodies. The workshops encourage them to engage, conversationally and through reading, co-designing and writing digital fiction, with key challenges facing young women today, including cis- and heteronormative gender relations, racism, anti-fat attitudes, ableism, and familial influences on the ways young women “ought to look” (Rice). This essay originally appeared as a keynote at the 2019 ELO conference in Cork, delivered by Ensslin. We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting this research with an Insight Grant (SSHRC IG 435-2018-1036).

"Writing New Bodies: Critical Co-design for 21st Century Digital-born Bibliotherapy" is a research project funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant (2018-2020). Using methods of feminist participatory action research and critical community co-design to develop an interactive digital story app (i.e., digital fiction), this project creates a tool for media-enhanced bibliotherapy to help young women-identified and gender non-conforming individuals from diverse backgrounds build resilience to body image concerns. The project is a collaboration between digital humanities scholar Dr. Astrid Ensslin (Alberta), body image psychologists Drs. Carla Rice(Guelph)and Sarah Riley (Massey, NZ), as well as award-winning feminist digital fiction writer, artist, and game developer, Christine Wilks.