Showing papers in "Journal of Writing in Creative Practice in 2013"

Wing-Words and Frameways: Materialising the Critical Incident through Poetic Inquiry and Reflective Practice in Doctoral Supervision.

Abstract: This article is a critical-creative recount of my supervision of a traditional PhD thesis in the humanities in which the role of critical incidents in reflective practice is inspected as a materialisation of reflection. This research seeks to demonstrate how a creative approach to reflection can actuate and capture the critical incident in schemas and narratives in language. As a researcher, supervisor and poet I have been able to consider how the blending of contemporary reflective models can lead to a blurring of the creative and critical boundaries of discourse in order to materialise the critical incident in language, thereby crystallising it for the purposes of reflection of a non-traditional type. It is from this perspective that reflection of the supervisory relationship and its contextual baggage can be re-imagined; crystallizing processes of ‘re-genre-ing’ to suggest a new metaphor for visualizing doctoral supervision. The paper is in two sections, the first of which is an introduction and background to forms of writing as a performance of reflection and different types of critical-creative discourse and their development. The next section details recent supervisory dialogues and workshops with my current Humanities PhD student. Here, the text re-reflects specific exercises (based on techniques from Fine Art and Poetics) in poetic enquiry with my doctoral candidate, questioning current supervisory schemas to accommodate the performance and dynamism of the supervisory process. Creative-critical vignettes, visual poetic inquiries in their own right, flank each of these sections to demonstrate and perform the materialisation of the critical incident. As this reflection develops, what becomes clearer is the insufficiency of rigid genre (including visual) structures in the recording of research, process, and supervision which are inescapably related to each other in more problematical and pluralised discourses than our current nomenclature permits.

Publishing as a praxis of conceptualist reading performances

Abstract: Since 2006 I have been a co-editor of the independent publishing imprint information as material. This article is a position statement about my understanding of what we try to do together through a mode of 'publishing as praxis'. The first half outlines the intersecting concerns shared by Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and I, explaining how our collective identity functions as a self-publishing framework for writers who produce 'conceptualist reading performances'. Following this I explain how certain kinds of self-publishing can be differentiated from vanity publishing by analysing how the two differently relate to the subject-status of the authorial self that they make public. In the second half I speculatively map these ideas onto the emergent field of Conceptual Writing, re-positioning it as an extra-literary approach to writing that performs on the outside of literature's territory to alter the question of authoriality so central to how we understand literature's horizons. © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article.

‘… and I remember every single session!’ – on the usefulness of making reflective books as active note-taking

Abstract: This mainly visual essay attempts to give a glimpse of the potential reflective book-making has as note-taking through showcasing a variety of the artefacts produced during a number of Writing in Creative Practice workshops. It is interspersed with some of the quotations we use to put this activity into a larger context of making, thinking and reflective practice.

Sketchbook postal exchange

Abstract: This is a personal account of the re-evaluation of an artists’ sketchbook project, which I made during a period of struggle to write an academic Ph.D. thesis in a way that would draw on my creative practice as an artist. The Ph.D. research (for submission January 2014) explores the evaluation of qualitative impact of creativity in community projects, through empirical field trials. Part of this has included the use and development of creative evaluation methods, and an exploration of the issues of interpretation of data which these raise. This article describes how the experience of participating in a Writing-PAD HEA seminar using collage, earlier this year, prompted me to re-examine the personal sketchbook project and make a useful connection between my arts practice and academic writing.