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...

Born in 1942, John Welch has lived for the last forty years in Hackney in east London, married to the painter Amanda Welch. In 2008 Shearsman Books published his Collected Poems. Shearsman also publishes his memoir Dreaming Arrival which deals with the author's experience of psychoanalysis. Until his retirement John Welch worked as a teacher, mainly teaching English as a Second Language in local comprehensive schools, and at the same time helped run the South Asian Literature Society, an organisation that promoted interest in the literatures of the Indian Subcontinent. He has worked with the...