‘My heart is now filled with other things’: giving form to the formless in a creative writing workshop with children

This paper presents the design and implementation of a creative writing workshop I led online for a Year 6 class at a rural public primary school in Cyprus. Central to the workshop was the Greek picture book Phoebus and the Whale, which follows a young boy’s transformative journey from a generalised state of fear to calmness and creativity. At the beginning, the paper explores the book’s narrative through post-structuralist and cognitive linguistic lenses – highlighting the ways metaphoricity, labelling, and cognitive mapping give shape to the formless – while establishing the book as a mentor text. This theoretical insight (about the metaphorical movement of the formless towards the formed) spurred discussions among the students, exploring how the book’s metaphors adeptly articulate abstract experiences. Drawing from this background, the workshop’s writing exercises were crafted to help students visualise and express their internal emotional landscapes through metaphorical language and analogical reasoning and thus give form to the formless. Following a discussion of the students’ responses, the paper examines the feedback collected via a post-workshop questionnaire. These findings highlight the significant impact of creative writing – especially when informed by mentor texts emphasising metaphor understanding and creation – in nurturing safe spaces for emotional self-expression.