Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 12, Issue 1-2, 2019

The articles in this double edition emerged out of a symposium that we held at the University of Brighton in March 2017 entitled Storying the Self and it is with huge thanks to Julia Goldsmith and everyone at the JWCP and Intellect that we present this body of work.

Critical analysis of Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes and Imagined Sons by Carrie Etter is illuminated by reading both texts against the rhetorical strategies and conventions of elegy. Birthday Letters and Imagined Sons are engaged in communicating strong feelings of grief following serious losses within lived experience, for which both construct first-person speakers. This article recognizes the presence of the conventions of elegy in both texts and suggests that despite thematic and structural similarities, there are significant differences in the ways the speakers in these texts are configured and how they address their audiences.

Combining creative writing excerpts from my Ph.D. work-in-progress, ‘The Other Mothers: Exploring adoption, surrogacy and egg donation through life writing’, with reflective commentary, this article will discuss the ways in which writing the lives of others can serve as a process of self-reflection. Inspired by my personal experience as a biological and adoptive mother, my Ph.D. project involves creative practice as research, alongside critical approaches, to culminate in the production of a multi-subject biographical narrative of women who have become mothers through adoption, surrogacy and egg donation, and their silent partners – birth mothers, surrogates and egg donors – whose stories remain largely untold.

This article will firstly account for the role of the graphic designer as a custodian of stories and their transcriptions into visual form. This is a mode of storying the self through the production of different graphic formats. Secondly, it will address the mixing of narratives from out of the archive: between the researcher as narrator and the archive source (in this case, Edward C. Rigg). Thirdly, the benefits of this project will consider how graphic design students engage with storytelling as a means to develop brand and content strategies. This approach examines the role of storytelling in type and image selection and its relevance within graphic design. The process will be analysed through the mechanisms of autoethnography, cultural analysis and the reinterpretation of oral, written and physical ephemera. The article argues that these are the building blocks for creating new narratives and design concepts.

The article follows writing what becomes a satirical poem about the writer’s imagined death. It is written after a cancer diagnosis brings on a fear of dying. A period of counselling poses questions to turn him towards how he might live: his compulsion to write leads him to write in a more experimental voice; challenging ‘new sounds’ are explored to help reduce a fear of dying, including a satirical ‘sound’ to sharpen the poem and narrow a gap between his poetry, cancer and himself. Writing the poem also confirms that ongoing changes in his cancer are best expressed through experiments with his poetic voice.

This article traces the experience of four arts educators as they consider ‘self as subject-matter’ through living inquiry. Anchored in arts-based approaches, storying the self four ways offers both an individual perspective and an a/r/tographic métissage of becoming through the weaving of narratives that derive from sociocultural and historical contexts. The practice of narrative as research considers the following questions: how does the presentation/communication component of life writing colour a narrative? What common and potentially universal experiences occur within life writing research? Through the collaborative exchange of four narratives, a fifth emerges: in response to the creative journey of others, and in documenting our entanglements with them, we open spaces. Illustrating how the introspective and extrospective interact with the visual or performative as a vehicle for revealing the self, this article posits that the self-in-relation to theory and practice becomes a way of knowing that broadens educational discourse among artists/researchers/teachers.

This article is an autoethnographic account of my experience of becoming a working-class academic. I have found that, in addition to overcoming structural inequalities, ‘escaping’ a working-class home to seek a new life in a strange world has required the construction of a new identity that is neither entirely ‘academic’ nor entirely ‘working-class’. I discuss my perspective on class privilege and inequality through my experience of being part of a group of people who tend to exist in academia as invisible individuals. I have written this article as a practical exercise that contributes to increasing this visibility because, by becoming a more visible and collective community, it is possible to challenge existing notions of what it means to be working-class, to be an academic or to be both.

In this article I explore my creative textile practice as an auto/ethnographical investigation into my work. I examine how my work methodologies have altered over the past few years as a result of research through practice and as I have attempted to hide, yet reveal stories through my pieces. I note how my work has become more concerned with finding ways to express my own personal story visually through the medium of second-hand garments, in particular dresses. I show how, as I attempt to illustrate narratives through my work, each dress also reveals a story of its own through its deconstruction or embellishment within the piece; the wear and tear of the dress hinting at its past lives and stories. In turn this multilayered medium allows me to hide my own stories in plain sight and also allows viewers of the pieces to draw their own narratives from the whole.

By combining the sensorial and narrative ways of knowing, I consider sensory embodied experiences and autobiographical narrative as a means of producing ‘academic knowledge’, as described in Sarah Pink’s Doing Sensory Ethnography (2015). Sensory embodied experiences and autobiographical narrative not only expose us to the life of the researcher, but also to a culture and to those being researched and how they are making and remaking meaning. In this article, I explore my use of a reflexive approach and my autobiographical narrative to tell the story of my experiences of Caribbean diaspora festive culture and tradition in the United Kingdom. I consider my sensory embodied experiences in both culture and academia, seeking to discover the making of self in culture and academia.

In this article, we outline and explore a plural and flexible methodology for engaging with the contemporary music memoir. These are texts in which narrative experimentation and self-conscious interrogations of voice shape content. They are texts that blur and blend the lines between memory, storytelling and myth. They offer a literate and culturally engaged reader the opportunity to shape their own musical histories and memories. We view these titles as a new and emerging genre. Our work, which we are developing in a forthcoming edited collection entitled Music, Memory and Memoir, approaches this fluid genre with a fluid methodology. We combine scholarly rigor and critical analysis in our readings of text but these combine with an open-ended and reflexive approach to our own critical and cultural voices.

This article explores the storytelling practices employed in Malala Yousafzai’s life-writing texts as examples of collaboration in the co-construction of an activist agenda. It tracks the narrative ‘I’ and its movements in and out of the plural pronoun ‘we’ as it moves across communities and embraces the legacy of testimonial accounts by both former and contemporary human rights activists. In line with that tradition, it is necessary to include the stories of other victimized people in the life-writing text, so that the result advocates for change on a sociopolitical, not just individual, level. The fact that the texts are mediated by editors, translators, co-authors and collaborators every step of the way paves the collaborative path Global South young women activists traverse, a path fraught with potential pitfalls and ethical difficulties for them and for scholars alike.

Using theory and analysis, I story my experience of being in-between ill and well as a teacher. First, I employ the work of Turner (1991), Massumi (2002) and Butler (2002) to define in-betweenness. Then I develop a tool for exploring the values of in-betweenness. Finally, I conduct discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003) on a small archive of non-fiction writing on teacher burnout in the Canadian north. I discover three possible values of in-betweenness in educational settings: (1) validation of diversity, (2) support of open dialogue and (3) development of self-reflection.

Verbatim work places a premium on the invisibility of the artist. This is in tension to Neo-Romantic conceptions of the ‘writer’s voice’, often characterized as the expression of the sovereign individual. Such a tension raises the question of to what extent an expression of self is desirable and what we can learn about artistic voice in verbatim work. This article discusses such questions through the lens of a commission to creatively respond to the National Archive’s material on mental health. This resulted in a piece of ‘contrapuntal radio’ that dramatized the voices of militant suffragettes (c. 1907–14). By consideration of the process of production, the article will argue that often, considerations of self-expression (where the artist is a unique voice transmitting their individuality), threatens a more productive self-expression, where an artist is a disinterested expresser of human feeling.