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While biographies are generally understood to narrate the lives of people, the biographical form can also be used to write the life histories of objects of material culture. This article investigates the object biography (sometimes referred to as the 'artefact biography') and proposes that this is a form with rich potential for creative writing practitioners and researchers. As well as defining the object biography and its use in various disciplinary contexts, the article also profiles how this form of life writing has been utilised by creative writers, in order to consider its capacity to contribute to practice and research in the discipline of creative writing. Contemporary writers discussed include Edmund de Waal, Bambi Ward and Marele Day, with reference also made to the work of Hans Christian Andersen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliza Cook, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anna Sewell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on issues over the superhero narratives given to nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the dangers they face due to poor working conditions and lack of personal protective equipment. Topics include the flaws of some nurses like ignoring or transgressing rules, the lack of appreciation of the role of mental health nurses, and the need for systemic change to address the flaws in the healthcare system that were revealed by the pandemic.

Learning from the lived experience of disordered eating is vital for contemporary mental health practitioners. While mental health practitioners need to understand the psycho-biological issues that impact the person and family with an eating disorder, there is much about this complex condition that eludes and escapes a bio-medical perspective. Use of an aesthetic lens on the issue can illuminate various challenges, tensions and insights that people with disordered eating experience along the journey of their ill-health and on to their recovery, but which often remain unstated in the clinical context. Scholars within the creative arts discipline are experts in making judgements about the quality of artworks they encounter and have highly developed aesthetic knowing. Yet, the central skills and knowledges embodied in creative arts activity are not widely utilized outside that sphere. This article reports on how aesthetics can be applied to sensitize mental health practitioners to appreciate the lived experience of a mental health challenge such as an eating disorder. Such mental health practitioners play an important role in the health service, yet the widespread diffusion of the bio-medical model into mental health, once characterized for its equal emphasis on the psycho-social-cultural, has led to criticisms of an over-focus on illness identification, at the expense of accommodating the meanings of subjective and unique experiences of mental health, struggle and recovery. Using Kate Grenville's typology of the elements of effective creative writing, we show how these elements contribute to the aesthetic power and impact of particular eating disorder memoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world prepares to commemorate the centenary of the First World War, it is timely to discuss meaningful learning activities that students of nursing could be engaged in to encourage them to reflect on the nurse's role then and now. Several films and television series about the war and featuring nursing have already been aired. No doubt there will be many more stories to come. Such stories have the potential to do more than eulogise nursing for students and practitioners. Stories, such as The crimson field, have potential to stimulate serious contemplation about values and cultural practices that have remained constant or have changed and to assist students to develop and articulate values that will be fitting for contemporary practice. Recently, excerpts from the series were examined with a group of nursing students and key learnings were found. These are shared in this paper for the benefit of educators planning to utilise public discourse as triggers to engage nursing students in discussions about nursing values, nursing history and representations of the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]