Hybridizing Creative Writing Research: A Creatical Self-Portrait

CRESP explores the eclectic discourses of nascent Creative Writing (CW) research, for the first time bringing together its practitioners from across language borders.

This will serve to decolonialize a discipline currently dominated by the English language and introduce CW into the field of artistic research, in which it has been absent due to its monolingual orientation.

My involvement in artistic research since 2010, my skills in ten languages as well as data collection, on-site networking and a multilingual video conference to be held during the fellowship will establish an international CW research network.

Likewise, the project will help to push the world leading research of Lancaster’s Creative-Critical Writing (CCW) group beyond its current English-language orientation.Benefitting from the above cutting-edge expertise, I will research an amalgamated epistemic-aesthetic kind of writing that I term ‘creatical.

My aim is to gain a better understanding of its discursive-stylistic workings, its manifestations in (un)controlled narration, its likely connections to second-language writing and its capacity to challenge existing orders.

To this end, I will combine methods of 1) literary exegesis, 2) qualitative research and 3) literary practice in stages of hermeneutical progression.

The resulting discourses – 1) metatextual writing, 2) polyphonic character speech and 3) stream of consciousness – will be merged into one creatical narrative.

Knowledge-endowing insights emerging during its revisions will be displayed in a poetological cartography.Securing the expertise gained through the proposed research is particularly urgent since Creative Writing is now a fully recognized form of research in the UK, whose participation in European funding programs is uncertain as of 2021.

Overall, the fellowship will strengthen Europe’s role as innovation leader by giving future Creative Writing researchers a head-start in a linguistically pluralistic culture of creatical writing.