Graeme Harper

Research methods in creative writing

Introduction Poetics and Creative Writing Research K.Lasky Non-fiction Writing Research D.L.Brien Modelling the Creative Writing Process M.MacRobert New Modes of Creative Writing Research K.Spencer The Creative Writing Laboratory and its Pedagogy J.Kroll The Generations of Creative Writing Research G.Harper Forward, Wayward: The Writer in the Worlds Text, at Large K.Coles Creative Writing and Theory /Theory without Credentials D.Hecq Transcultural Writing and Research G.Mort Conclusion Selected Further Reading

Creative writing you’re cognitive dissonance

Perhaps you are feeling it now: this Editorial’s title has produced an uncomfortable reaction. You are feeling what is sometimes called ‘cognitive dissonance’. Cognitive dissonance is defined as the condition in which we seek consistency between our expectations and reality. Inconsistency between these things produces cognitive dissonance. There are many conjectural discussions of cognitive dissonance, but in this case I offer two propositions. Firstly, that the grammatical shape of the title suggests an error or, at very least, a kind of provocation. Is there a word or comma missing? Is the word ‘You’re’ supposed to be ‘Your’? Is the title actually suggesting that creative writing is itself a form of cognitive dissonance? Yes, I am suggesting that creative writing might well be an example of cognitive dissonance at work. Secondly, then, if creative writing is cognitive dissonance in action and in result, how is this so? Creative writing can be a form of cognitive dissonance if it is an example of inconsistency between expectations and reality. So, for example, if writing is most often and most familiarly a tool for recording and communicating, and creative writing challenges the use of writing in that common way, then we could say creative writing, and the results of us writing creatively, are forms of cognitive dissonance. We can perhaps think of the work of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein with this notion in mind. Similarly, creative writing can be a form of cognitive dissonance if it challenges the beliefs of the creative writer in some way, during the process or after the process of writing. By this I mean that – and this comment is based merely on anecdotal evidence – when undertaking creative writing writers sometimes discover that the creative process draws from them alternate viewpoints that do not necessarily match their expectations or their perceived reality. Now they have in front of them in their working and work attitudes and ideas that might not feel to them something of their own, and yet there they are expressed by them. Situational knowledge (that is the knowledge required to resolve a compositional issue when creative writing) might also produce cognitive dissonance; for example, in that the expectation of a formal or structural solution might be overturned by the reality of the solution that ultimately follows. Situational knowledge in itself arrives from discoveries made at the point of attempting to solve a problem and, that alone, could be said to be the result of cognitive dissonance.

Practice-led research and the future of the creative industries

ABSTRACT Engaging in forms of speculation, or risk-taking as it might well be called, is naturally common in the creative industries, given the creative focus of the industries themselves. Speculation, too, informs research, and academic research is frequently funded because of its potential for uncovering new knowledge, based on speculative endeavour. Practice-led research in universities — research, that is, through creative practice — has grown significantly over the past twenty years, yet its connections with the development of the creative industries has not been widely mapped or often closely considered. If we examine the current conditions of the world around us, examine key elements and themes, it is possible to imagine a future in which practice-led research in universities and the evolution of the creative industries will be closely linked. Perhaps this is not fantasy, but equally it will not happen unless we begin to consider what the relationship is between creative knowledge developed in universities and that developed in the creative industries.

The Creative Writing Doctorate: Creative Trial or Academic Error?

At the 2005 American Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Vancouver I listened to a vigorous debate about the growth of Creative Writing doctorates in the USA. This debate, largely about the merits of an MFA versus the merits (or, more accurately, possible lack of merit) of a doctorate in creative writing, struck me as similar, but different, to debates that have arisen in Britain and in Australasia in recent years. Much of this has to do with the appropriateness of the idea of a ‘doctorate in Creative Writing’. To cast a long backwards glance: institutes of higher learning began granting degrees as far back as the 12th century. The word ‘degree’ referred to two steps the baccalaureate and the licentiate essentially the Bachelors and the Masters, leading to the certificates of ‘Master’ and, finally, ‘Doctor’ that were prerequisites for teaching in the medieval university. Though, naturally, so very much has changed in academe since the 12th century, the condition of engaging in higher learning hasn’t changed at all: the primary element of the experience remains the idea of ‘mentor’ and ‘acolyte’, or ‘apprentice’ and ‘master’. Of course, there are now vast numbers of apprentices and, by necessity, a great deal more masters. By the end of the 1990s the USA alone was awarding nearly 1.5 million bachelors degrees, nearly a 1⁄2 a million masters degrees and around 50,000 doctoral degrees. Each year! The Creative Writing Doctorate entered British higher education in the early 1990s. Not by coincidence, it entered higher education in Australasia around the same time; evidence of ongoing staff movements between countries once linked by empire. The Doctorate in Creative Writing entered higher education in North America around a quarter of a century earlier. The difference between the UK and US experience is widely known. Throughout the second half of the 20th century the USA expanded its Master of Fine Arts programmes, the MFAs and the AWP supported, and supports, the MFA as the exit degree for US writers who want to teach in college and university; that is, it gives support for what some time ago became known in the USA as ‘teacher writers’ or ‘writer teachers’ who are encouraged to see the MFA as their final qualification for entry into academe. And yet, despite this formal encouragement, the number of creative writing PhD programmes in the USA continues to grow. If this is the case, regardless of the AWP’s stronger support for the MFA, and similar to, but different from, the PhD programmes established and growing in number elsewhere in world, how then are the USA’s MFA-qualified ‘teacher writers’ to compete either on their home soil or

Creative service economics

Defining a service economy is straightforward enough, particularly given that our postindustrial world is defined strongly by the concepts, operations and outcomes of what is frequently called ‘the service industries’. But what about the notion of service defined another way? That is, service in relation to civic leadership or, more broadly, service in the selfless best interest of humanity. The notion that the creative industries might have a distinctive thread of social conscience running through them is worthy of thought. On the one hand, a range of human practices, and the products produced by them, that rely often on a belief or, at very least, an application of an individual or group’s imagination must surely encourage that individual or group to focus most on their own place in the world? By this I mean, creativity and creative practices have long been touted as evidence of unique or distinctive talent or particular aesthetic sense and, in this way, perhaps encouraged a more self-centering sense of the world. That is, not to say artists are egotistical by nature or creative practitioners only truly care about themselves. But it is to suggest that creative practices involve journeys between imagination, emotion, action and the end result and on these journeys a sense of producer (i.e. the self) as well as a sense of receiver (i.e. consumer or audience) logically relies on looking inward, engaging with the individualistic, the intimate, the innate, even the idiosyncratic. On the other hand, a range of human practices, and the products produced by them, that often relate directly to such things as leisure time for others, their entertainment and their pleasure must surely involve some concern for the well-being (or comfort or enjoyment or happiness) of others. The arts have often been touted as the most human of practices, our most humanistic of creations and finding creative achievement in the world, beyond our own (e.g. the musicality of whale song, or beauty in the design of butterfly wings) has been seen as evidence that creativity might exist in other species but it takes human kind to recognize and appreciate it. Somewhere in these thoughts sits a particular notion of service and how it might be seen in the creative industries. Recently, an American organization known as Colorado Creative Industries (http://www.coloradocreativeindustries.org/) announced the winners of its 2015 ‘Governor’s Creative Leadership Awards’. These awards ‘honor Coloradans who have demonstrated a significant commitment to the state’s creative landscape through civic leadership and volunteerism including advocacy, vision, collaboration or innovation’. The combination of these awards and the background to the State of Colorado’s initiatives in the creative industries provides a point of reflection on service in the diverse CI economic sector, not least because none of the economic engine of the sector is missing from the state’s sense of how to process, as the history of Colorado Creative Industries outlines:

Making Connections: Creative Writing in the 21st Century

Since the end of the 20 century, the nature of the global has changed. The 21 century global is something new, evolving from the impact of technologies that allow much of the world (though not all of the world) to be connected and not just in corporate or institutional spaces, but at home, not just occasionally, but anytime. Much less than one generation ago we could only imagine a letter delivered by computer. Until relatively recently, we could not easily telephone someone while on the move train and bus journeys were certainly quieter, but the chances of being late went unannounced and, for better or for worse, thoughts and feelings were exchanged with distant others in a less immediate fashion. We’ve not yet fully analysed what this change means for human evolution but so it has become nevertheless! Within this generation we have already grown used to the idea of talking to friends via ‘video’. Previously, Science Fiction was the only place to find those electronic ‘face-to-face’ gettogethers. We have come to expect the opportunity to connect easily and in multiple ways with others living beyond our local area, and we have come to personally assess the quality of such ‘connectivity’. Indeed, that particular word is now not the jargon of the digitalism: it is more or less a declared expectation of us all. In this increasingly connected world, we recognise also that a book no longer needs to be made of paper. Of course, a great many previous methods of distributing Creative Writing have not relied on paper. Nor have they been all that restricted, not even when writing and printing were more restricted activities, impacted upon by a narrower spread of education and limited ownership of dedicated machinery. The spoken word, the performed word, and later the filmed or broadcast word, have spread works of Creative Writing far and to a great many people. The developments we’re experiencing at present are almost certainly part of a paperless revolution no less substantial than that borne in the birth of the moving image and the broadcasted voice.

Interview with Elizabeth Grierson

Elizabeth Grierson is Professor of Art and Philosophy and Head of the School of Art, and a research leader of the Design Research Institute at RMIT University, Melbourne. She holds a Ph.D. in the philosophy of art education, and Masters in Art History (both University of Auckland). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts UK, World Councillor of International Society of Education through Art, board member of Australian Art Education, and appointed Visual Arts writer for the Shape Paper and Advisor of the new national, Australian Arts Curriculum. She is editorial board member of Educational Philosophy and Theory, Art Education Australia and International Journal of Education through Art, and executive editor of the journal, ACCESS: Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural & Policy Studies. Prior to her work in Australia she was an academic and practising artist in New Zealand, and spent a year as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Art and Architecture, University of Brighton, England. She is engaged in research projects on art and medicine, design and urban aesthetics. She publishes widely on creative arts research, aesthetics, design, cultural theory and philosophy of art education. Recent books include: Supervising Practices for Postgraduate Research in Art, Architecture and Design (forthcoming, Sense); De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice, Textures Series (forthcoming, Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield); A Life In Poetry. Nicholas Lyon Gresson (2011, Australian Scholarly Publishing ASP); Doctoral Journeys in Art Education (2010, ASP); Creative Arts Research (2009, Sense); A Skilled Hand and Cultivated Mind (2008, RMIT Press); Thinking through Practice (2007, Informit, RMIT Press).

America: what, a mess?

March 2018, and here I am at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference, this year held in Tampa, Florida. The weather is warm, the crowd is lively, if a little smaller than in previous years, and the atmosphere in the AWP Book Fair seems a little subdued but otherwise similar to that I have seen each year at this annual conference for a dozen or so years now. As many New Writing readers will know, America’s AWP is the largest of the world’s creative writing organisations – or, more specifically, the largest of those organisations connected with creative writing and the teaching of creative writing. Its conference is likewise the largest creative writing conference on the planet. It is no secret, at present the U.S.A. is somewhat unsettled. The current political circumstances have shaken some Americans to their core in a way that two years ago was almost impossible for them to imagine – not, perhaps, because they believed that all the debates in American society were resolved, but because many believed some of the ‘basics’ were at the very least widely agreed upon. To them America, for all its varied history and difficulties embodied in ‘the union’, was essentially heading forward together. It was a shock to many to discover those ‘basics’ were not settled, and that in some cases the variation in opinion and attitude, in this country of many opinions and attitudes, was so extreme that America might indeed be not one country but two countries. Many have watched with considerable exasperation as this new unsettled sense of the contemporary U.S.A. has emerged into the light. ‘Oh my goodness,’ they say, ‘what a mess.’ Now in an AWP conference panel that concerns studying for a Ph.D. in Creative Writing I am looking around and wondering how the Americans in the room – around 100 of them – are weathering the current state of their union. In so many ways it is clearly wrong to imagine that everyone in the roomwill have the same opinion. And yet, in that these are all people committed to the arts, all (or a great many) involved in higher education, and all believers in the wonders of creative writing – in these ways at least the people here are politically, socially, and possibly even economically, aligned. The panel begins. The Chair mentions that Ph.D. programmes in Creative Writing are new. I wonder on this – what does she mean, given they are not new? Perhaps she is talking about Ph.D.’s in Creative Writing in America? But even then... The next panellist starts to talk about taking courses in ‘literature topics’. This is potentially one element of creative writing study, undoubtedly, but it is being introduced here kind of uncritically. What is the knowledge base they are referencing, and why? How do ‘topics’ define our creative writing practices and our individual and group understanding? Now they are talking about ‘competency exams’ – but competency in what, I am wondering? There is no mention of the epistemologies of creative writing as explored in other nations over the past decades. There is no sense of comparison between elements of writerly knowledge – what is good grounding, what is not, why study one thing, how to research topics that relate to your own creative writing practice and to creative writing generally. Creative Writing Ph.D. graduates or current Ph.D. students, all of them – yet, nothing! There are people in the audience taking notes. Notes about what? The microphone is being passed up and down the five panellists yet no sense is emerging that there are debates to be explored that go beyond the anecdotal recounting of what it is like

What isn’t there is there. What?

For reasons at first best known only to mighty Fate, absence was a popular topic at the 21st annual Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference, held in London on 23–24 June 2018. Absence in the sense of non-presence (that is, not being there in the moment of writing). Absence in the sense of being disengaged (that is, being there but seemingly distracted from the task at hand). Absence in the sense of non-inclusion (that is, in terms of theme or subject the content of your creative writing lacking some element or another). Even absence in the sense of lacuna and redaction (that is, texts created where white space or blackened text suggested things removed). Given that many presenters had travelled from around the world to be a presence at Great Writing, this proliferation of absence appeared at odds with the presenters’ own actions. However, there were clues to what was going on, and because the conference was held not too far from Baker Street, a touch of Sherlock Holmes revealed what was indeed elementary. Simply, absence was suggested as also being presence because creative writing is more than inscription. In this way what appears on the page or screen also refers to what does not. In one sense, this might mean your creative writing is in memory or in imagination or in speculation, none of which directly are inscribed but all of which potentially influence the resulting inscribing. In another sense, the act of being distracted while writing creatively can also be the act of being focused on a feeling or a thought that deepens a line, a sentence, the choice of a word, other technical elements, in a figurative way as much as a literal way. Distraction is therefore also attraction, attraction to the visceral or emotive context of what you are writing about or in light of or because of. These things are not heightened in other forms of writing, where information flow predominates and emotion and attraction are less accepted, less used. Further, in this making present of the absent non-inclusion can be a referent for significance, the reader or audience recognising the absence and in their recognition making the absent present. Such a foregrounding, a reading in, engages the receiver, and the creative writer and audience are thus communicating, communicating through an absence. Finally, where the text physically refers to an absence by using graphic depictions of non-existence or removal – the white space, the black redacted word or paragraph – absence becomes a tool of creative writing practice, a clear indication a creative writer has been at work, making inscription live not only in linguistic terms but also as visual art. So it was that in a conference investigation of absence there was also a celebration of absence. To be present in the moment of writing creatively is not only to be physically there, typing away on a computer or scrawling on a page. To be present as a creative writer is also to be absent, allowing the work of the imagination, the mind, the memory, the art of text creating to occupy the moment. What emerges as we write is a representation of what we are trying to say, what we feel, what we believe. This is what we in our embracing of absence would aim to make present for those who encounter our works.

Performances in Space

Has Elon Musk and his SpaceX company created a new creative industries product, a new saleable performance experience? If so, how many other versions of this might be created? And how might these new creations evolve in the years ahead? When SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Tuesday 6 February 2018 at 3.45pm EST (8.45pm GMT) it was carrying beneath its nose cone Musk’s own red Tesla roadster. The roadster was being ‘driven’ by a dummy in a space suit, christened ‘Starman’. Now rocketing beyond the atmosphere in the direction of Mars and onward to the asteroid belt, the roadster’s radio, behind the navigation system screen reading ‘Don’t Panic’, began playing David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. Though the silent space-suited Starman might not have known it, the rocket’s cherry red payload was in not all that unusual. The personalizing of rocket payloads has been happening since human beings began to travel into space. Their popularity has long seemed to signal our desire to humanize scientific exploration with the added suggestion that going beyond our terrestrial realm makes us nostalgic for home. Astronauts have carried with them into space artefacts ranging from a pile of dirt from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium to golf balls and a six iron, from a treasured falcon feather to Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, from Lego bricks to a corned beef sandwich. So it was not the Tesla Roadster Model 3 on its own that made the Falcon Heavy’s load notable. Nor was it Starman listening silently to what we can imagine was an increasingly forlorn pop song. As payloads go, the car and the dummy – or ‘mannequin’, as the more generous reports called it – were part of a tradition of us sending human souvenirs out into the galaxy. What was distinctive about the Falcon Heavy was the performance of the souvenirs’ inclusion, the theatre of that. This was no low-key thing. Sure, the technology of the Falcon Heavy was notable. For one thing, SpaceX’s engineering of reusable launch systems aims to improve the costeffectiveness of continuous space exploration. It is also part of longer term plans to settle other planets, in particular Mars, where proposal systems and launch systems will need to be robust and usable over considerable lengths of time. However, what about the red roadster and Starman? Musk, who was widely interviewed, said that they included these because they were looking for ‘the silliest thing we could imagine’. A conscious decision then. This was not simply a quirky nostalgic inclusion; nor was it the frivolous act of an eccentric billionaire. The roadster, Starman, and the Bowie soundtrack were part of a wellrehearsed performance, a prepared and galactically distributed ‘silliness’. What we witnessed therefore on Tuesday 6 February 2018 at 3.45pm EST was the launch of a new kind of entertainment, a new kind of 21st Century spectacle. At last count, the 6 February Falcon Heavy launch had been viewed on Youtube over 19 million times. The market for