Dreaming Arrival

Circumventing conventional narratives of trauma and recovery, 'Dreaming Arrival' presents a series of very personal reflections on the writing life set in the context of John Welch's experience of psychoanalysis. Intensely felt, but always retaining a significant degree of scepticism, the book's starting-point was in a journal the writer kept when in analysis and it refers back to an experience of breakdown and hospitalisation thirty years previously. Calling easy notions of creativity into question 'Dreaming Arrival' looks not only at the way 'therapy' affects writing, but also at how the writing may affect the process of the therapy itself.