A growing body of academic work from a range of disciplines and across the developed world, suggests that there is a link between engaging in creative learning activities in older age and feelings of confidence, community, health and wellbeing (Panayotoff, 1993; Fisher and Specht, 1999; Withnall, 2006; Flood and Phillips, 2007; Narushima, 2008; Cohen, 2006). A burgeoning of government and third sector funded festivals, centres and programmes devoted to this idea also testify to its popularity as policy and practice. However, there is still very little literature on this topic from an educational perspective. Furthermore, as many have pointed out (Chen et al, 2008; Field, 2009; Withnall, 2010) the perspective of the older adult learners themselves has only been partial, or neglected altogether. The research presented in this paper aims to redress this through an ethnographic study of an adult creative writing class. It takes the claims of some members of this Group– that creative writing made them ‘feel younger’ – as the starting point for exploring this connection further. By placing these claims within the context of anthropological literature (Hallam and Ingold, 2007; Cannell, 2011;Degnen, 2012) it questions some of our cultural assumptions about creativity as a future oriented practice, and older age as a period of retrospection. These are two assumptions on which much educational planning for older adult learners is based. It argues that, for the subjects studied here, the value of creative writing lies in its relationality, rather than in an exertion of individual agency. It also argues that for them the process of creativity contributes to feelings of vitality and youth because it is oriented on the present moment, not the past or the future. These findings have implications for the way in which we might plan and deliver educational activities for older adults which needs to take account of the changing relationship to time and to self as people age.

The paper takes an anthropological approach to both creativity and the ageing self. The work of Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold questions our cultural assumptions about creativity – its individuality, its location in the imagination, its objectification of time. It hence provides a useful alternative model of how we might discern the value of creative processes. The work of Cathrine Degnen, who conducted an ethnography of older people in a former coal mining village in the North of England, provides a further framework. Degnen is concerned with time, memory, selfhood and the category of ‘old age’; she inspects epistemological assumptions and cultural practices about old age from the perspective of older people themselves. She questions both normative models of self and normative models of temporality which, I argue, have determined many aspects of educational planning and practice and resulted in the normalization of metaphors such as the ‘lifelong learning’ and the ‘learning journey’.

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