This article describes a critically-creative research collaboration wherein co-researchers use creative re-writing strategies to critique normative assumptions and interrogate bigotry. Our group is a university-based collective with a shared interest in creative methodological approaches to investigating sociocultural issues. Combining creative practice and social justice values within an academic setting, this article shares excerpts of poetry and flash fiction produced through creative re-writings. Using workshop-based methods of revisionist adaptation, we each produced creative responses to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in which the changes made to the base text offer critiques through the (re)incorporation of subaltern perspectives and ideologies. We then shared our responses, recognizing points of similarity, difference, and connection prompted by the breadth of possibilities the single narrative provided. Through these comparative and reflexive discussions, we came to deeper understandings of our own intersecting but distinct relationships to multiple axes of social privilege and marginalization. We provide a model for writers, artists, and researchers looking to challenge bigotry and related forms of injustice in and beyond academic settings through similar workshops that utilize the potential of creative practice-led dialogues and exchanging ideas in pursuit of social progress.
This essay explores the themes of urban solitude, mobility, and emotional connection through the lens of a sandwich shop in Chengdu. By intertwining the stories of Hao, a newcomer navigating alienation, and Li Haiou, a Taiwanese expatriate who found love and a new rhythm in the mainland, the narrative examines how individuals 'float' between cities and find anchors in small gestures and shared memories.
In a previous paper, I noted Anglophone Creative Writing's tendency to apply craft principles as if they were somehow universal and beyond cultural and social boundaries. I showed how these principles spread, without due critical attention, into other traditions of literature production. I argued the subject risked a process of cultural imperialism, overlaying local writing traditions, crafts, and pedagogies. Useful to the enterprise of unpicking such cultural bias, I suggested, might be to consider alternative pedagogical paradigms. This article discusses the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, which opened in Moscow in 1933, at almost the same time as the U.S.A.'s Iowa Writers' Workshop (1936). Both may be considered 'ur-institutions' for their particular styles of new literature production training, as well as their enormous influence on the subject's global expansion. However, little has been published in English about the Gorky Institute. To address this significant research gap, this article charts the Institute's first decades, comparing and contrasting with Anglophone Creative Writing models, contextualising particular pedagogical and craft practices in both sociocultural arenas. It is careful to illustrate, throughout, important author agency, resisting or embracing such institutional craft direction. It suggests the 'personal' in Soviet pedagogy as distinct from the Anglophone model.
This article explores Bahbi, a little-studied subgenre of Ahidous specific to the Iqbliyen Amazigh communities of southeastern Morocco, particularly in the oases of Ghriss (Goulmima) and Ferkla (Tinjdad). Rooted in oral tradition and characterised by metaphorical language, untitled verses, and dialogic couplets, Bahbi serves as a vehicle for emotional expression, communal memory, and socio-political commentary. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, performance recordings, and archival fragments, the study foregrounds Bahbi as both a cultural artifact and an endangered form of intangible heritage. Focusing on dynamics of power and identity, the study examines how social status and poetic lineage operate as symbolic capital, particularly amid intercommunal rivalries and the historical marginalisation of Black Amazigh communities. It also highlights Bahbi's gendered choreography, wherein men and women engage in symmetrical, egalitarian performance. Despite its expressive richness, Bahbi faces critical endangerment due to shifts in media consumption and weakened intergenerational transmission. Although grassroots revival efforts have emerged, institutional support remains limited. The study calls for urgent documentation and recognition of Bahbi as a vital resource for linguistic, cultural, and historical research, and as a testimony to the aesthetic resilience of marginalised Amazigh communities.
According to English author, essayist, and playwright Fay Weldon, every writer has two personalities: A, who produces first drafts, is 'creative, impetuous, wilful, emotional, sloppy', and B, who edits them, is 'argumentative, self-righteous, cautious, rational, effective.' But can editing itself be a creative act? This article will focus on two separate projects carried out by the author involving editing interview material. Creative practice as research undertaken for a PhD in Creative Writing involved interviewing mothers and shaping the material, using a range of creative processes to produce a form of hybrid life writing, combining edited verbatim material with creative responses (poetry, re-imagined scenes, lyric essay, and collage quotation). A subsequent life writing project, an auto/ethnography on menopause, further developed the author's appreciation for the art of editing. Links will be made to oral historians' work, including Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, described as a 'novel of voices', for which she received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and John Banville's comments on Tony Parker: 'By means of arrangement and pattern, rhythm and tone & mldr; he makes out of these tape-recorded testimonies a kind of art', exploring the extent to which editing interviews can be seen as a creative act.
This study examines how participation in a creative writing seminar shaped preservice teachers' perceptions of writing, composition instruction (slohov & aacute; v & yacute;chova), and their anticipated classroom practice in the Czech educational context. International research suggests that teachers who experience creative writing as writers are better positioned to support students' writing development; yet many future educators enter teacher education with low confidence rooted in predominantly rule-governed, product-focused school writing experiences. Drawing on and adapting Morgan's (2010) work on preservice teachers as writers, a six-session seminar was implemented at the Faculty of Education, Palack & yacute; University (N = 68), and qualitative data from written reflections were analysed using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2006). The findings indicate shifts in writing confidence and emerging writer identity, a re-conceptualisation of composition teaching as a process-oriented and student-centred practice, and concrete intentions to integrate transferable strategies (e.g. low-stakes timed writing, mind mapping, peer feedback, and reading contemporary children's and YA literature as mentor texts). Alongside these positive shifts, responses also highlighted perceived constraints related to time, assessment, and institutional expectations. The study argues that experiential creative writing in teacher education can support future teachers in repositioning writing from compliance to exploration and in imagining more inclusive approaches to composition instruction.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become available as research tools, creative writers face questions about what they might gain or lose through AI intermediation. Yet discussions of AI's impact focus primarily on efficiency and values, with little examination of what research actually does for creative writers. This gap matters because creative research functions not as information retrieval but as distributed cognition - what this article terms 'intimate cognitive coupling' - where sustained engagement with sources generates new insights. Drawing on extended mind theory and cognitive writing research, the article argues that AI intermediation risks compressing the slow accumulation of tacit knowledge into instant delivery. Through case studies of four science fiction writers - Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, and Andy Weir - the analysis documents how research practices generate distinctive writing through temporal depth, embodied engagement, intuitive observation, and collaborative networks. These writers demonstrate that effective research couples thinking with a surplus of materials in multiple ways simultaneously, creating textual effects that often reflect how research happens. By examining what research actually does - how it generates texture, insight, and distinctive voice through material engagement - the article provides grounding for writers to make informed choices about when and how to use AI tools.
A contemporary interdisciplinary reflection on empathy as central to creative writing is presented here, with a focus on emotional contagion and embodied creative process. The centrality of empathic practice to creative writing has urgency as the discipline responds to generative Artificial Intelligence writing, which lacks empathy. The work undertakes a definition of empathy and its deployment, both within and beyond creative writing, and examines intentionality from the perspective of social research and creative writing process. Considering the centrality of empathy to the Romantic poets, the model of Keats' concept of 'negative capability' is reviewed in relation to Maibom's concept of 'emotional contagion'. A reading of empathy in the poet's sonnet 'When I have fears' is undertaken in order to test the concept as it applies to creative production of literary works which foreground emotion. The work explores aspects of empathy in relation to research on emotional contagion in social situations and considers the implications for creative practitioners and academics.
My doctoral research uses ethnographically-oriented arts-based workshops and semi-structured interviews to look at how Year 10 students' experiences of creative writing affect their authorial identities. Before I started data collection, I noticed that I felt like an imposter, as high workload as a teacher on top of doctoral study commitments left very little time for me to continue working on my own creative writing and I simply had not prioritized my own art. I took part in National Novel Writing Month, aiming to write 50,000 words in one month. This is an autoethnographic reflection on how taking time to prioritize my art reignited my passion for novel writing and restored my confidence in my abilities. I have chosen a braided autoethnographic approach, balancing theory and emotion, and will view my self-reflection through the theoretical framework I created for my doctorate, based on Gee's (2000; 2018) affinity spaces and Craft's (2001) theories of creativity.
This article introduces a way of thinking about form that has implications for the composition and editing of semantically disjunctive poetry. This approach proposes that the cohesive stickiness of formal elements can counterpoise what is semantically fractured so that disjunction, which registers as an interruption or discontinuity of meaning, can be answered - or balanced - by formal continuity. After explaining how the approach works, and defining my terms, I apply these concepts in the analysis of three poems by the late-twentieth-century Australian poet John Forbes. I close by considering form's adhesive qualities in reader experience. This conclusion draws upon neurocognitive research to explain why form, with its suggestion of authorial presence, can temporarily stand in for meaning, enabling a reader to stay - or 'stick' - with a poem, and so hazard disjunction's potentially alienating effect. It is this adhesive stickiness that enables a reader to experience the pleasure of poetic resistance.
Collaborative poetry evokes discussions of the myth of the solitary genius. Though Caren Florance does not identify as a poet, she explodes this tendency through her collaborations with poets who are open to the advantages of collaboration. In her letterpress work, Florance often does more than merely typeset a poem; she collaborates with it, and, effectively, expands the aesthetic range of the poetry. Florance's methodology is inherently interdisciplinary, employing typesetting, book design, printmaking, video design, gallery installation techniques, and various other forms of public display. She creates new kinds of pages for poetry and extends the environments in which it is possible to present poetry with astute employment of diverse technologies - she both shares and frees the pages. Two key thoughts that underlie Florance's collaborative practice are the belief that both poets and poetry as a genre are particularly conscious of their own materiality, and the idea that poets are natural designers, because they think so much about how their work will look on the page, which makes collaborating with them a natural extension of her practice. Florance's focus on materiality sees her work engage in fundamental and generative ways with technology.
In this article, I explore forms of sexual knowledge formation from a queer perspective and through writing practices. The starting point is the idea of a confessional sfumato: an aesthetic and methodological approach in which the queer self is not seen as clearly delimited, but as blurred, layered, incomplete and affective. Practice-led autofictive creative writing serves as a research method through which I map the conceptual unity of the epistemological trinity of the closet, passing, and gaydar in relation to the logic of confession, embodied knowledge and silence. The article is situated at the interface between artistic research and queer theory. The process of creative writing not only produces material, but is itself a knowledge medium that enables the affective and non-verbalizable aspects of queer experience to be written out. The aesthetics of the confessional sfumato serves as a means of resisting the linear, revelatory autobiographical narrative, opening up space for knowledge that moves on the border between light and shadow, the visible and the hidden, the identified and the obscure.
This article examines how The Empty Book (1958), a novel by Mexican writer Josefina Vicens, presents writer's block not as a temporary setback in the writing process but as an intrinsic condition of creative practice. Through the character of Jos & eacute; Garc & iacute;a, the novel explores the persistence of the impulse to write in the face of physical exhaustion and an internalized intense sense of failure. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks - among them affect theory and scholarship on creative inhibition - this article argues that the novel enacts a paradox relative to writers block, where the sheer obstinacy of continuing becomes the only form of affirmation the text can sustain.
Like Glenn Gould's return to Bach's Goldberg Variations decades after the exuberant recording of them that launched his career, Adam Rapp's long-awaited Broadway debut, The Sound Inside, revisits thematic material he adopted as a young playwright bursting onto New York's downtown theater scene with his Pulitzer-nominated Red Light Winter. Drawing connections between these two plays, which both feature writers as protagonists and end in the snowy suicide of a writer's muse, this paper explores the way that narrative matures and the relationship to the muse deepens. The real-life story of Takako Konishi - particularly as she is presented in Jana Larson's memoir, Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay - is also considered, not only as a chronicle of suicide in winter that parallels Rapp's works, but ultimately as an investigation of the artistic process a writer undergoes when invoking the muse. Weaving through personal ethnography that relentlessly chases down the muse in the physical world, we take an inside look at Rapp's Red Light Winter through the actor's process of crafting character. Time alters the timbre of the sounds inside, but the artist's connection to the muse is perennial, resounding ever more poignantly when played da capo.
While many novelists redraft their work repeatedly, the narrators they create often seem to reject the idea of revision. In first-person novels, the narrative is often presented either as an oral performance, a spontaneous speech act, or as the product of a single draft, hastily scribbled down. But this article argues that there is much to be gained from giving fictional narrators a drafting practice as rich and complex as their author's. Positioning the narrator as a reviser opens up a wealth of narrative possibilities that shed light on character, motivation and change. In the case of confession narratives, revision can be especially revealing, expressing profound ambiguities inherent in the act of confession. Through a critical examination of confessional literature (including autobiographies such as Rousseau's Confessions and Jean-Paul Sartre's Words, and confessional novels like Ian McEwan's Atonement and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending), and practice-based research in the shape of the author's own recently completed novel, Montreal, the paper explores the paradoxical challenge of a revised, polished text that invites the reader to consider the drafting practice that created it, and suggests ways in which this practice might be revealed.
Interstitial ghosts is an account of a questing beast of a research project in pursuit of my doctoral creative and critical thesis. Like all questing beasts it has taken several unexpected twists as the researcher has followed the spoor of the primary concept: that sword-&-sorcery, particularly Robert E. Howard's initiating form of the genre can potentially exist as a kind of ghost genre or genre of echoes, in fact a mode rather than a genre. The essay incorporates metafictional techniques, balancing storytelling and academic methods in an unorthodox attempt to not only give an account of the research but an account of the research process. It begins by investigating the term 'mode', suggesting a worldview implied by Howard's fantasy stories and discusses earlier forms of fragmentary literature before characterizing the type of intensity engendered by both of these. The essay attempts to identify some of the symbols that recur in Howard's fantasy fiction and notes where these have influenced later sword-&-sorcery writers, before following the questing beast in attempting a poetic tarot of such elements and finally testing this by reference to and analysis of two texts which pre-date the Howardian creation of a distinctive sword-&-sorcery form.
