What can a poem, and the creative process of writing it, tell us about refugee history? Existing research on creative writing by refugees tends to focus either on the writing process or the writing itself. Research on the writing process is usually situated within the social sciences and examines the effect of this process on language acquisition, confidence building or wellbeing. Refugee literature is a field in itself, one that looks at the texts first and foremost, and even then mainly texts produced by published writers. Creative methods including collective poetry are a way of combining both of these approaches, allowing us to experience, document and analyse both the process and the output.