Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2013

This article by the launch director of the first degree in Performance Writing, reviews the early 1990s intentions in the light of subsequent changes in the textual environment. The author argues that the original intention to take a broad view of textuality, seen as inseparable from the technologies, cultural practices and domains of conceptual enquiry that sustain it, rather than pursue the narrower, more established, literary and academic notion of ‘creative writing’, still hold good. He reconsiders the two words that make up the name, together with the related notion of performativity, and argues that it remains productive for writing to continue to treat these as problematic and unsettled. Significant developments in digital textuality are acknowledged within an argument that these can usefully remain within a Performance Writing frame of reference. Implications of changes to the ethos and funding of both arts and education are briefly considered.

This short text takes the form of a series of modular units focussing on performance readings at PW12, held at the Arnolfini gallery during the winter of 2012. The text consists of parodic aphorisms interspersed with direct quotations taken from the performance. This unusual configuration defamiliarizes the standard research essay format, and brings the readings in question into a more dialogic relation with the critical components of the aphorisms. There is also a tendency here towards the performative inscription of theory. To this end, the article offers a burlesque of critical prose which is sympathetic to the indeterminate poetics of the performances, as well as to the pluralistic character of the event.

In support of their belief that the truest test of a methodology is to apply it to a new set of questions/practices, Barbara Bridger and J.R. Carpenter embark on a conversation about Carpenter’s computer-­generated dialogue: TRAINS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]. As they attempt to find language appropriate to an extended notion of dramaturgy capable of both contributing to and critiquing a digital literary practice, their calls and responses to one another come to perform the form and content of the dialogue in question. The resulting discussion provides an example of putting performance writing methodology into practice.

This think piece about past present and emergent means for the exhibition of text works uses embodiment and proximity as its lens. Texts inscribed onto and through and from the body of the humanimal, both in terms of ongoing traditions and immanent capabilities are considered. Body-mind, skin, clothing, paper, architexture and landscape are drawn into play here. I wanted to stir memory and imagination and speculation, to incite ambition and reflection, more than to focus onto a few specific works in detail. In that sense its contribution remains rumination on our contemporary moment in terms of textual production and circulation.

This paper sets out to collaboratively explore the notion of the Performance Writing Network.  It documents and reconstitutes a conversation which took place between the authors in late-2012, across Facebook, Twitter and blogging services. The process of re-situating this conversation into a page format for the journal has resulted in a range of unconventional formatting decisions, which reflect on the nature of online writing as a performative and networked activity. The authors retain and draw attention to the stylistic quirks of online (and therefore public, and performative) writing – the incessant ‘paratexts’ of dating and html location, and the simultaneity of thought, composition and redraft.  Together, the style and content of the paper give an indication of the thematic and temporal folds which occur in textual conversation (or networking) in online space.

This article is a description of how the digital writers Andy Campbell and Kate Pullinger worked together to create a new piece of online fiction, Duel. Detailing their work processes, from conception through formatting a bespoke scripting process, and on to writing, creating digital assets, and technical experimentation, this article gives a clear and detailed picture of their collaboration.

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.