Writing & Thriving for Visionary Writers: Scott Thurston Interview

In this interview, I'm joined by my good friend and mentor, the Poet-Professor Scott Thurston.

Scott and I dive deep into the intersections of dance, performance, language and poetry, exploring Scott's long-established cross-disciplinary interest that stems from his practices in experimental poetry and Five-Rhythms movement.

Scott was an early advisor and advocate for my own poetry during my PhD studies, when we met on an Experimental Poetry Writing Retreat at Arvon, Lumb Bank, which he was co-hosting with Harriet Tarlo. We've since remained friends and colleagues, and have often connected through various embodied experimental poetics practices.

Here's Scott's current bio, and you can find him as Professor of Poetry and Innovative Creative Practice at the University of Salford:

"I first began writing poetry in the vortex of the London experimental poetry scene in the late 1980s when I regularly attended the Sub-Voicive poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project workshops. Following my first degree in English at UEA, I moved to Poland to teach for a few years. On my return, I studied for a PhD in Poetics under the supervision of Robert Sheppard at Edge Hill. I joined Salford in 1994 to set up our degree in English and Creative Writing and later established our Masters in Creative Writing: Innovation and Experiment and our PhD pathway in Creative Writing.

I am passionate about poetry that dares to do different. I co-organised The Other Room – a reading series promoting experimental writing in Manchester for ten years and I co-founded and co-edit the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry (since 2009) – the first and only journal of its kind in the UK.

Since 2004, I have been developing a practice integrating dance and poetry which I call kinepoetics. This has involved me studying with dancers in Berlin and New York and collaborating with three dancers in the UK. I worked with Sarie Mairs Slee on the Arts Council funded project Vital Signs, with Julia Griffin on Dancing the Blues and Together Un/Tethered (both linked to the Arts for the Blues project -- see below) and currently collaborate with dancer and researcher Gemma Collard-Stokes.

Following this interest into a collaboration with Dance Movement Psychotherapist Vicky Karkou and Counselling Psychologist Joanna Omylinska-Thurston, led to the founding of Arts for the Blues, a new creative group psychotherapy model.

I am also studying for a Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Salford."