Crafting a Path Through Illness: Exploring creativity while chronically ill

An accessible, encouraging and inspirational self-help book that unites a broad selection of creative pursuits with the subject of living well with chronic illness. Crafting a Path through Illness offers ways to live an enjoyable, meaningful life despite chronic ill health and shares how the associated experiences and perspectives can have a valuable impact on creative output. It is both a how-to and a why-to for living creatively with chronic illness. Through its many insights: * Learn how arts and crafts can affect your physical and mental health. * Discover how the arts have been used alongside medicine over the centuries. * Feel inspired by other disabled and chronically ill artists and crafters, past and present. * Be guided in how to connect creatively with the space around you and the wider world, including other people, when isolated by illness. * Find tools, hacks and suggestions for making creativity more accessible to you. * Have a go at the suggested ideas and projects. Chronic illness is, by definition, ongoing. Patients need to find ways to be fulfilled and live well amidst their symptoms. Not only does this book offer ways to achieve that but it also shows how living with the experiences and perspectives of ill health can have a valuable impact on creative output and the uses that can have within the wider community.

ermaine Hypher has been disabled by chronic illness and fatigue since childhood and has found arts and crafts to be her constant best allies, teaching her to live a well-adapted, meaningful and joyful life while predominantly housebound and often bed-based. Her writing experience has included providing content for the eco-store Natural Collection, founding and editing a nature-crafts magazine for seven years, contributions to various anthologies, winning the Hastings National Poetry Competition (2005), winning a bursary from The Literary Consultancy.