Items where Subject is "Creative writing"

Since ancient times literature has been awash with tales of strange weather; accounts of nature’s real destructive power blending into mythology, fantasy and folklore. This new collection gathers the best stories of ecological upset, nightmarish meteorological extremes and inexplicable atmospheric phenomena from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when pioneering authors began to weave the otherworldliness of environmental disturbances into supernatural or uncanny experiences.

With stories from Algernon Blackwood, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Daphne du Maurier and many more, this foray into severe winters, stifling heats, roiling oceans and piercing gales offers the perfect read on a rainy day – or night.

'Lost Islands: inventing Avalon, destroying Eden' is a monograph published by Heart of Albion Press in 2008. It asks whether narratives of place can affect not only our perception of actual locations, but also our treatment of them: whether imaginary geographies can have real world consequences.

In this interdisciplinary examination of the cultural history of islands, the author draws upon folklore, mythology, literature, popular culture, and environmental science to delve into humanity’s long fascination with islands. Drawing upon extensive field research undertaken exploring islands off the coast of Britain (Iona; Lundy; Bardsey; Isles of Scilly; Isle of Man; Holy Island; St Michael’s Mount; Isle of Wight; the Western Isles), which included a week’s solo writing retreat on the tiny Bardsey Island off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, northwest Wales; as well as archival research pouring over early accounts of explorers; the experiential research as a professional storyteller enthralling audiences with tales of magical islands; and the latest climate science on the impact of Global Warming on sea levels and migration; Lost Islands attempts to understand our collective fascination with islands, real and imaginary. The way we have tendency to narrativize islands, projecting our desires and fears upon them (a tendency with antecedents back to the earliest of literature, such as the immramas of the Celtic saints), show that the island can be an act of the imagination as well as a geographical fact. Interweaving an erudite analysis with personal embodied anecdote, the text challenges the islandization of disciplines and traditions. A study of the littoral and the liminal, the monograph adopts a hybrid style blending the creative and critical to bring alive the ‘threshold’ quality of such places, sometimes described as ‘thin places’. The result is a kind of palimpsest of different texts and modes of thinking, and as such Lost Islands (illustrated throughout by the author’s own photographs) is research ‘for’ islands as well ‘through’ and ‘into’ them, via a creative-critical practice (Frayling, 1993).

This creative writing textbook introduces students to ecofiction: narrative writing that focuses on the environment. Also known as ‘climate fiction’ or ‘cli-fi’, an increasing number of short story writers, novelists and pioneers of emerging forms such as interactive fiction are taking up the call to develop their own creative responses to the climate crisis. This guide explores a cross-section of genres and ways of writing about our world, as well as the ethical and technical challenges involved. It offers a discussion of classic and contemporary texts, literary criticism and creative writing exercises. The book covers a broad range of themes and styles of writing, from works that engage with nature and landscape writing to those that take a more activist approach to climate change. With an awareness of the Global South and the subaltern, the framing of the Anthropocene, wilderness and nature writing is challenged. Each chapter offers a new perspective on ecofiction for the creative writer, with reading suggestions and connections to other writers and texts, and writing activities. Designed for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate writing modules on the environment, the book is also suitable for independent writers looking to expand their skillset.

‘Green Words’ is a walking & writing wellbeing project that will take place in the Bridport area of West Dorset in Spring 2023. The idea is to lead short inspiring walks in the local area to encourage those who would not normally go for a nature walk to learn to appreciate the biodiversity on their doorstep and at the same time improve their health and wellbeing. The walks will cover a variety of terrain appealing to a range of abilities from those with limited mobility to the confident walker. Guided creative writing workshops (also FREE) will be held in Bridport’s Literary and Scientific Institute on East Street following each walk led by an experienced facilitator, Dr Kevan Manwaring, who is the Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth, and a keen walker. Over 10 weeks ‘green words’ will be nurtured and honed, leading to an anthology co- designed and co-produced by the group – with contributions of poems, prose, photographs, and drawings. The anthology will be launched at a final showcase, held in Bridport Arts Centre.
The project, initiated by Bridport-based Dr Manwaring, is funded by the Dorset Community Fund, with the support of Mick Smith, director of Bridport Arts Centre, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023 with a range of events. The Arts Centre is keen to promote environmental initiatives and awareness-raising as part of its core goals.

While addressing the question of screenplay textuality, this Special Issue takes a close interest in the ‘media thickness’ of the screenplay in its textual form. In doing so, we wish to contribute to the exploration and affirmation of scenaristic processes as both cultural and intermedial practices, as in general, screenwriting and screenplays are indeed to be considered at the crossroads of different artistic, mediatic and social fields. This is a flexible editorial posture and assumed as such, one which above all aims to consider the constitutive plurality of given textual practices, not only in terms of conceptual and social anchoring, but also of styles, modes and languages.

Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training focuses on neuro and physical difference and dis/ability in the teaching of performance and associated studies. It offers nineteen practitioners’ research-based teaching strategies, aimed to enhance equality of opportunity and individual abilities in performance education.
Challenging ableist models of teaching, the sixteen chapters address the barriers that can undermine those with dis/ability or difference, highlighting how equality of opportunity can increase innovation and enrich the creative work. Key features include:
• Descriptions of teaching interventions, research and exploratory practice to identify and support the needs and abilities of the individual with dis/ability or difference
• Experiences of practitioners working with professional actors with dis/ability or difference, with a dissemination of methods to enable the actors
• A critical analysis of pedagogy in performance training environments; how neuro and physical diversity are positioned within the cultural contexts and practices
• Equitable teaching and learning practices for individuals in a variety of areas, such as: dyslexia, dyspraxia, visual or hearing impairment, learning and physical dis/abilities, wheelchair users, aphantasia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autistic spectrum.

The chapter contents originate from practitioners in the UK, USA and Australia working in actor training conservatoires, drama university courses, youth training groups and professional performance, encompassing a range of specialist fields, such as voice, movement, acting, Shakespeare, digital technology, contemporary live art and creative writing.
Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training is a vital resource for teachers, directors, performers, researchers and students who have an interest in investigatory practice towards developing emancipatory pedagogies within performance education.

"Fortunes of War evolved through an enquiry led (pre-internet) approach that focused on a Lamarkian preoccupation with the potential impact of an environment on collective and individual behaviour. The intention was to create anticipatory photographic images. A ‘retention vanish’ approach to composition placed the emphasis on framing the subject of the image from the perspective of the distraction and not the scene. Through this an attempt was made to counter pre-occupied states of mind, circumventing a censorship of expectation relating to the form of both the work itself and significantly that of its maker."

In this chapter I look at a cross-section of songs that emerged from the British ‘Indie’ music scene and Counterculture of the 80s (and its evolution into the 21st century) – songs evoke an eco-conscious awareness through their use of imagery and ambience. As an island nation it is no surprise that the surrounding seas and wider ocean have influenced and defined the collective ‘British Isles’ for millennia. One pervasive example of this is in the way it has manifested in the pop song (a 20th Century iteration of a long-running tradition of sea-inspired ballads and sea shanties – and one that has come full circle in the recent number one by the Scottish postman TikTok sensation, Nathan Evans). Focusing on three main ‘waves’ or creative approaches, we’ll consider the personal lyric, the political, and the ecological. Starting this tripartite survey, we’ll look at The Waterboys’ song, ‘All The Things She Gave Me’ (1984), which describes a journey to the docks to discard all the physical associations of a failed relationship. Other songwriters who have adopted this personal, lyrical approach will include Martha Tilston, with her album, ‘The Sea’ (2014); and Johnny Flynn, with ‘Country Mile’ (2013). We’ll then move into more explicit political waters with The Levellers’ apocalyptic song, ‘On the Beach’ (2008), and equivalent acts of the more radical protest scene, including Seize the Day. In the third section we’ll look at more explicitly ecological songs, specifically ones with a potentially redemptive message – in particular, the song ‘In the Anthropocene’ by Nick Mulvey (2019), which raised money for Surfers Against Sewage. Whileas some of these examples will be seen as very contemporary, it will be argued that such songs of solastalgia (Glenn Albrecht) draw upon a long tradition of folksongs that explore liminality and longing, songs such as ‘Carrick Fergus’, ‘Donal Og’ and the ‘Skye Boat Song’ – the Hebridean tradition of the ‘cianalas’, which eco-songwriters are bringing into the modern age.

Focus: Researching and writing an ecological short story about endangered species.

‘We Are a Many-Bodied Singing Thing’ is an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry inspired by endangered species, commissioned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ‘Back from the Brink’ project and published in 2020. The brief was for positive speculative writing that raised awareness about 28 threatened species highlighted by the project, including the Violet Click Beetle, the Royal Splinter Cranefly, Eagle’s-claw Lichen, Coral-tooth Fungi, Knothole Moss and the Noctule Bat. Using the ‘Back from the Brink’ resources as a starting point, the author researched a cross-section of endangered species. He combined this with field research, visiting ancient oaks in situ, various botanical gardens, the insect house at Cotswold Wildlife Park, and the Eden Project in Cornwall. The challenge was to then turn this scientific information into a creative narrative. When contemplating current and imminent species extinction it is very easy to slide into despair. As with much contemporary fiction that contemplates the stark existential threat of the Climate Emergency the predictable pathway (in terms of the storyworld paradigm) is one of dystopia. Utopia is a lot harder to imagine. But perhaps a more nuanced and realistic conceptualisation is one Margaret Atwood called ‘ustopia’. And so, this is the approach the author takes. His near-future narrative imagines a world with many problems, but like Pandora’s Box, there is also, critically, hope. ‘The Rememberers’ in Kevan’s story are a group of ecological resistance fighters who use their memories as storage for the minutiae of endangered species. This co-opts Cicero’s ‘method of loci’ (from De Oratore) and turns it into a kind of ark. As a professional storyteller and performance poet, the author has made a study of mnemonic devices and has used them extensively in his performance to memorize text (see The Bardic Handbook, Gothic Image, 2006). This long-term experiential research (1998-) has informed the story in this anthology. The story has been ‘tested’ out on live audiences (via virtual open mics during the 2020 lockdown), including during ‘Writing the Earth’ (AUB, April 2021), the 2-day symposium exploring creative writing and the environment organised by the author, in which creative responses to the climate crisis were extensively discussed with students and a range of guest speakers. ‘The Rememberers’ encourages readers to commit to action, while demonstrating the power of words, especially when embodied. The effort required to learn something by heart is an act of honouring. As a regional organiser for the national annual recitation contest founded by former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, ‘Poetry by Heart’, the author has seen this first hand: how committing a text to memory can be very empowering – which is the dramatic arc of the story’s main protagonist. Thus, the story itself explores the mnemonic process and the valuation of ecological knowledge within ‘storied’ communities. The short story that resulted from this range of research was included in the published anthology from the RSPB.

Despite their many political and philosophical allegiances, Deleuze and Derrida might— in accordance with Deleuze and Parnet’s dictum—be best described as the opposite of a couple. While their mutual hostility towards conceptual stasis, overly linear approaches to temporality and excessively centred notions of subjectivity targeted a number of common philosophical opponents, this apparent unity of purpose arose out of some seemingly incommensurable tensions: Deleuze’s mode of ontological enquiry squared poorly with Derrida’s rejection of metaphysics; Deleuze’s positive engagement with the sciences, and his prioritisation of material-sensation sat awkwardly with Derrida’s more pervasively textual and somewhat idealist orientation; and Deleuze’s development of an impersonal concept of Husserlian expression served to check Derrida’s rather more stringent and single minded rejection of phenomenological presentism.

It is important to remember, however, that like Derrida, Deleuze was predominately a writer—albeit a writer with an at once affective, performative, and corporeal agenda. Indeed, when taken at face value, it would seem to have been Derrida who more directly explored the graphic potentialities of experimental writing. Deleuze’s emphasis upon performativity, emergence, and onto-genetic construction nevertheless serves to extend and supplement the Derridian account of textuality by exposing its neglect of the process of writing. In so doing it foregrounds the potential for Deleuzo-Derridian philosophy to instantiate a genuinely aesthetico-conceptual image of thought.

From the beginning, the Risiera di San Sabba, the only concentration and extermination camp of the Axis in Italy, had been the central character in the film San Sabba (2016). However, in 2014 the project was denied access to the premises. This chapter explores how and why the initial treatment, featuring interviews with survivors and tour guides conducted in a traditional participatory style, evolved into an experimental script for an essay film questioning the ontological status of memorialisation. Constructed around unseen documents, held in multiple languages (Italian, Slovenian, German and English), the narrative aimed to illustrate the harrowing topic without entering the camp. With the story locked in the relationship between the silenced history of the victims and those who struggled for the persecution of the perpetrators, when late into production some access to the camp was granted, the team was brought back to the drawing board and editing became screenwriting.

The chapter considers elements at play in the establishment of our current historical knowledge. Looking at past events as complex adaptive systems, it demonstrates why the current mediation of history is oversimplified. By formulating the possibility of a complex narrative matrix (environment), it explores its potential in offering both an archive of evidence drawn from multiple agents, and presenting the evolving relationship between them in time. This matrix aligns itself with a simulation of a CAS, the primary interest being the VR matrix' ability to be both an interactive interface enabling exploration of the evidential material from different points of access, and a construction able to reveal its procedural work; a dynamic that elicits the creation of meaning by including the reasoning behind the chosen archival material, the product of the process, and the process itself.

Young men, especially from working-class backgrounds, often lack the space, capacity, or opportunity to reflect upon masculinities and their role in shaping future trajectories. By devising mechanisms to engage young men differently in creative activities, participants in our project were supported to think beyond assumed futures and explore new possibilities. Mobilizing the theory of possible selves, this article draws on data across three creative university outreach workshops in England with 18 participants who were given the opportunity to explore masculinities using creative writing, photography, and dance/movement. Combining artifact analysis and semi-structured interviews, the article argues that these workshops created safe spaces for young men to articulate their concerns and fears about harm and risk in everyday life while facilitating an exploration of alternative possible selves.

The 250th anniversary of the birth of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was celebrated in 2022. In recent times, one of his most famous poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (initially published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798), has gained increasing resonance as a proto-environmental text. It warns the reader, or listener (personified by the listener-within-the-poem, the Wedding Guest), that when humankind mistreats nature there are devastating consequences. In the age of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency, it is a poem that speaks to our time. This article considers this ecological interpretation of the text and its connection to other literary ‘texts’ across a range of media. It surveys how the poem’s semantic field, imagery and themes contribute to its meaning, and how contemporary readings show the impact of this context on its reception.

Deploying a customised embodied poetics (after Lorde 1984; Cancienne & Snowber 2003; Peary 2018) and primarily drawing upon a two-week coast-to-coast walk across the north of England undertaken during the summer of 2019, this article is structured as a walk in 5 stages (i. Setting Out; ii. View from a Hill; iii. Drifting; iv. Back-bearing; v. Returning). It explores the effectiveness of this experiential approach for the composition of poetry. Walking can be in itself a form of creativity, an act of subversion, or deep reflection — a way of going inward as much as outward. The poem written in situ can be a form of qualia-capture for the little epiphanies of secularised pilgrimage. Sister methodologies such as the psychogeographical dérive (Debord 1954) are drawn upon, but a customised approach is forged: the way of the dériviant who transgresses borders and forms. Extending this approach, a multi-modal approach is discussed, included Twitter poetry, audio recordings, and artwork. Restricted from further long-distance walks during the Covid-19 Lockdown of Spring 2020, Nan Shepherd’s ‘deep mapping’ approach (2011) is adopted, continuing the practice-led exploration within the local universe of the Wiltshire Downs. Finally, the benefits of such an embodied praxis are suggested.

Weaving history, literature, and environmental humanities with sections of life-writing (travel-writing based upon various long-distance walks), this hybrid form explores narratives of Climate Change from the very earliest (eg, Ruskin's observation in the 19th Century) to the very latest (eg news reports from the summer of 2019). It is the culmination of a wide range of research from the archival to the experiential.

This was a creative keynote for the Gothic Nature symposium, University of Roehampton, September, 2019. It was edited and published in the peer-reviewed Gothic Nature journal in Spring, 2021.

Manwaring, K. (2021) HEAVY WEATHER: A Creative Intervention.
Gothic Nature. 2, pp. 285-294. Available from: https://gothicnaturejournal.com/

Moving to the Marlborough Downs on the edge of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Avebury in late 2019 (an area I have been exploring since the late `80s), I decided to map my new locality through poetry and art – connecting nodes of significance to create a personal Wiltshire ‘songline’: The Herepath Project. As the 2020 lockdown kicked in, the concept of ‘deep mapping’ (Nan Shepherd) my local universe gained increasing poignancy. In the form of a literary dérive – charting zones of ambience and influence as I range metaphorically across the Downs – this article will consider different forms of creative mapping, including the ‘Counter-Mapping’ of the Zuni Map Art Project; and the ‘song-walking’ of Dr Elizabeth Bennett (Essex University); as well initiatives which ‘hack’ the hegemonic discourses of the countryside, such a Black Girls Hike, the Colonial Countryside project, and Slow Ways, and other acts of creative resistance (Rebecca Solnit; Nick Hayes). Examples from the poetry pamphlet produced will be shared, along with the odd field sketch. A technique of ‘writing the land’ will be fashioned, combining repurposed elements of Debord’s psychogeographical ‘dérive’, Richard Long’s ‘Land Art’, and Buddhist ‘jongrom’. Drawing inspiration from the biodiversity of the Downs a non-anthropocentric perspectival shift will be advocated for deconstructing the conventional human-centred cartographies of property demarcation, ontological discreteness, and hierarchical layering.

Taking a phenomenological approach, this article explores the benefits and challenges of writing long-hand, and how this has significant qualitative impacts upon the early stages of the creative process. I will consider exemplar from famous practitioners; the benefits of archival research; and the implications on my own praxis. I will argue the efficacy of this aspect of practice-based research, one that aligns with Frayling's research through and into practice. As an experiential and kinaesthetic approach, long-hand writing can act as both a form of critical cultural resistance to the digitisation of daily life and also complementary to other technologies (e.g. ‘smart’ devices with styluses). The pedagogical effectiveness of this approach (e.g. timed writing activities within a workshop; use of notebooks for qualia-capture in the field) is explored and evidenced with particular focus on a series of ‘Wild Writing’ workshops led between 2015 and 2017 in England and North America.

In this article I reflect upon the process of designing and constructing a digital interactive narrative using elements of biomimicry as an intrinsic part of the ecological themes it wishes to dramatise. The ‘branchiness’ of this modern iteration of the chooseyour-own-adventure style of game is supported by a complex substructure of coding and wider ecosystem of coders, mirroring a forest and its exoteric and esoteric networks and labyrinths. Published by West Coast start-up, Tales: choose your own story, Hyperion: tower of the winds (2020) is a 24-part, 96,000-word digital novel set in the storyworld of my fantasy series, The Windsmith Elegy (2004-2012). I argue that Fantasy has a role to play in cultivating ecoliteracy and in modelling alternative modalities in response to the multiple challenges we face in the Climate Emergency. I posit that the design, playing, and prosumer discourse such ergodic texts generate have a mycelial quality to them—rhizomatic structures, which, as Deleuze and Guattari advocate, are
non-hierarchical, resilient, and reciprocal. Acknowledging the compromised entanglement of the digital, I critique the affect and ethics of gaming platforms, which can both raise awareness and be part of the problem: the dirty ecology of every electronic device and virtual noosphere.

Is it possible to achieve authenticity in the fictionalisation of a historic figure? To research my novel, The Knowing – a Fantasy, extensive experiential and archival research was undertaken. Having covered the experiential approach elsewhere (2020), here I focus primarily upon the archival. In this palaeographic enquiry I describe the discovery of a possible lost manuscript by the Reverend Robert Kirk – a version of his famous monograph, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, Fairies (1691). I analyse its provenance and content in a comparative study with extant MSS, contemporary accounts, and scholarship. I situate this enquiry within my own practice-based research undertaken for my PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester (2014-2018) and what this potential discovery means for Kirk scholarship. I draw upon the work of Scott (1815), Lang (1892), Rossi (1957), Sanderson (1976), Stewart (1990), Hunter (2001; 2012) and Warner (2006), as well as more recent scholarship by Maxwell-Stuart (2014), Baker (2014), DeGroot (2015), and Temple (2019). How the archival discoveries revealed secrets of Kirk’s life (through painstaking textual analysis and transcription), and how the context of these discoveries (research libraries; a Scottish castle; a winter’s writing retreat and long-distance summer walks) all fed into the portrayal of Kirk and his world, will be discussed.

In this article I explore the embodied epistemic of the act of reading, arguing that it is an inherently ecological phenomenon. I draw upon Phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau Ponty, Abram) and Ecolinguistics (Naess, Stibbe).

This article explores the benefits and challenges of experiential research for a PhD novel in the contemporary fantasy genre and how this has significant qualitative impacts upon the “early drafting” stage of the creative process (Neale 2018). Drawing upon the extensive field research undertaken in the Scottish Borders, with its rich palimpsest of oral tradition, traumatic historicity, and touristic gilding, the article shows how this informed the emergent multimodal approach, resulting in a transmedia novel – one that ‘performs’ the liminality experienced according to a reader-response model. The Scottish Border ballad of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (Roud 219: Child 37) is used as a map – both in the field trips to associated locations, and in the creative-critical process itself. Within the ritualised landscape of the ballad three roads offer three ontological choices for not only the protagonist, but also the researcher-writer. Layered over this is Walter Benjamin’s three-step model of the musical, the architectonic, and the textile. How does one negotiate the various tensions of different disciplines? How does one avoid displacement activity in a protracted research project that embraces different modes of enquiry? When and how does one ‘return’ from this crossed threshold? And in what form can one’s findings withstand critical scrutiny, while retaining faith with the initial vision, the demands of the narrative, and the expectations of the reader?

In this article I would like to discuss Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle – Mythago Wood (1984); Lavondyss (1988); The Bone Forest (1991); The Hollowing (1993); Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory (1998); and Avilion (2009) – in the context of creative writing praxis. I will argue that Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle offers a powerfully resonant metaphor for the creative process: how stories are created and written (informed by the oral tradition), and how we, as readers and listeners, interact with them. As a novelist, scholar of folklore and folk tales, and professional storyteller it is something I am familiar with and fascinated by, and it dove-tails with my current Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester: a dramatization of the creative process in novel form, and so this is a reflection on my ongoing investigation into creative writing research through practice.

Practice as Research (PaR), and Practice-led Research, as studied by Hazel Smith, Roger T. Dean, and Graeme Sullivan, are increasingly being implemented in a wide range of disciplines. In this article, I will report on the methodological trajectory of my creative practice, an autoethnographic work that used film forms as research. The process progressed on three levels of investigation: the narrative, the epistemological, and the ontological. It developed from my personal experience and research in the archive, as a network of references supporting and responding to the needs of producing films through the exploration of prior film methodologies, and elaborating novel forms of mediation of history, memory, and postmemory

Independent filmmaking is often faced with difficulties. For the team behind San Sabba, the issue resided in the invisibilities embedded in the film’s location: a concentration camp within the city of Trieste. This article will explore how and why the writer and director of San Sabba considered Trieste as an archive of multiple histories, memories, and postmemory due to the historical findings the film is based on, and how silenced history informed a phenomenological examination of what a landscape can add to the collective memory. Linking other locations in the city, which contribute to the elucidation of stories and histories deprived of public attention, this article analyses the historical data and considers the ontological qualities of the landscape as an archive where dominant narratives impact the understandings of present and past identities.

This article explores the use of animation in the essay film and analyses how screenwriting animation becomes a complex process of translation of the message the film wishes to address. With a focus on issues encountered in the development of two short essay films, Lunch with Family (2016) and San Sabba (2016), the article maps the process that in both cases guided the scripting of animated sequences, and analyses why in the editing room the director chose to use stills from the animations, instead. An example of the narrative techniques applied to mediate silenced history and postmemory in film, this contribution intends to add to the larger discussion on the current state of the art in screenwriting non-fiction.

Zine, self and micro-publishing has seen a spectacular resurgence in the
last decade, with individuals within tight communities pushing the boundaries of the practice in terms of form, content and process.

This paper will examine ways in which this reinvestment of illustrative authorship
has been stimulated by the iterative and performative aspects of zines, self and
micro-publishing, through the discussion of varied publications’ genesis with their
illustrators – including my own self-published book The House.

This paper will consider how performance underpins both the motivation and
creative process of such publications so as to highlight potential contributions of
the scene to wider illustrative authoring practices.

There are many dynamic communities of practice within the arts but not all of them can claim to have their own research culture. Consequently, many researchers become adept at co-opting theoretical frameworks, research methods, and language from other disciplines. But what happens when we use concepts and language developed elsewhere to address our own particular disciplinary concerns? Language matters, and as the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted, language is not a nomenclature—it is not simply a question of linking a set of words to a pre-existing set of things; different languages
divide up the continuum of the world differently.
It follows that the ways that we engage with other disciplines potentially has a bearing on how we see, think and talk about our home discipline. This conference explores the
challenges and benefits of research that features significant interaction between two or more disciplines. It will explore [even contest] ‘trans-’, ‘cross-’ and ‘multi-’ disciplinary approaches to research.

qualitative research inquiry sets out to investigate the active interplay of design
poetry with users, designers and the objects of design. The outcome of this thesis has
contributed to the field of design by expanding the concept of design poetics and
developing design poetry as another dimension of design writing. It examines the
relationship between poetry and design against the backdrop of a growing interest in
the ways in which we write about the designed world. It proposes design poetry as a
compelling and immersive form of design engagement, one which is as yet underresearched.
This research has also shown that, with its capacity to encompass social, political and
cultural factors, design poetry can be a significant vehicle in shaping our view of the
objects of design. The plastic chair became a focus for this research gaze, as an
object of design importance, with both social and cultural relevance; as an object that
is mundane and quotidian but one that can achieve iconic status as a design classic.
The research adopts methods that support the critical-creative approach which
underpins an arts-based inquiry. A significant outcome of the research is in the
development and synthesis of new creative research methods: the creative
conversations facilitating a dynamic collaborative dialogue with the key protagonists
i.e. designers, poets and users who remain at the heart of this inquiry; the synthesis of
individual and group critique on design poetry practice, employed as a method to both
share, evaluate and contribute to the development of the researcher’s creative work;
the creative output itself, a book of original poetry that reflects the research endeavour
and captures the dynamic interplay of making, consuming and narrating.

This creative writing PhD thesis consists of a novel and a critical reflective essay. Both articulate a distinctive approach to the challenges of writing genre fiction in the 21st Century that I define as ‘Goldendark’ – one that actively engages with the ethical and political implications of the field via the specific aesthetic choices made about methodology, content, and form. The Knowing: A Fantasy is a novel written in the High Mimetic style that, through the story of Janey McEttrick, a Scottish-Cherokee musician descended from the Reverend Robert Kirk, a 17th Century Episcopalian minister from Aberfoyle (author of the 1691 monograph, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies), fictionalises the diasporic translocation of song- and tale-cultures between the Scottish Lowlands and the Southern Appalachians, and is a dramatisation of the creative process. In the accompanying critical reflective essay, ‘An Epistemological Enquiry into Creative Process, Form and Genre’, I chart the development of my novel: its initial inspiration, my practice-based research, its composition and completion, all informed both by my practice as a storyteller/poet and by my archival discoveries. In the section ‘Walking Between Worlds’ I articulate my methodology and seek to defend experiential research as a multi-modal approach – one that included long-distance walking, illustration, spoken word performance, ballad-singing and learning an instrument. In ‘Framing the Narrative’ I discuss matters of form – how I engaged with hyperfictionality and digital technology in destabilising traditional conventions of linear narrative and generic expectation. Finally, in ‘Defining Goldendark’ I articulate in detail my approach to a new ethical aesthetics of the fantasy genre.

A work on silenced history, life writing and auto ethnography focused on divisions created by barriers and borders. The three sisters confront their childhood after spending decades apart in culturally and politically diverging countries. For all of them, one moment in life determined everything that followed.
Narrated with the use of archival material and photos saved from the work of time, the film enters into the private memories of three girls now in their lated 80s, and unveil the dramatic impact of societal rules and history in itself of these unusual women.

Lunch with Family is a short film (30’) on postmemory that was shortlisted in the Inspiration category at the AHRC Research in Film Awards held at BAFTA in London in 2016. Judges thought the film to be "visually and thematically engaging and called it strong".

The film reveals the tension between Slav-silenced history in Trieste and its impact on personal life and identity in a city-symbol on the former Iron Curtain, in Italy. The film intertwines the author's own story with the history of forced Italianisation of half a million Slavs, their persecution, their organisation in anti-Fascist groups, and the final attempt to delete this ethnic group, which, in Trieste in 1918, was more substantial than in Ljubljana – the capital of Slovenia.

As part of the wider discourse of postmemory, the films aligns with the work of other scholars: Anne Karpf's The War After: Living with the Holocaust (1997) and Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (2004), but also Eva Hoffman's After Such Knowledge. However, Lunch with Family goes further. It uncovers the long history of resistance and the fight for the existence of a community that does not see its history acknowledged in Italy.

Based on interdisciplinary research, archival material and interviews, the film establishes the use of research-by-practice on film as an adequate epistemological methodology to uncover long-buried events and to explore the loop of existential questions the situation provoked and continues to stir in Trieste's Slav inhabitants. A paper published in Screenworks (Vol.8, No.1) in January 2018 explored the context, methods and outcomes of the research enquiry, and Turina presented conference papers and screenings at events in Sheffield, York and Cambridge during 2016-17.

San Sabba is a short film (29‘ 50”) that debates the way we conceive of sites of memorialisation, the way they represent people and who they were in the past. The Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards gave the film the Recognition Award in June 2017 and screened the film at the Awards event in Los Angeles, US, in March 2018.

Building on the method tested with Lunch with Family, this film displays the archival research and personal engagement in the discovery of the Axis Concentration Camp of the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, Italy, which was active from 1943 to 1945. The film debates the alignment of the Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba to the narrative of the Holocaust, as the site was predominantly used for the detention, interrogation and killing of freedom fighters and their families.

San Sabba aligns with known works within the Holocaust film tradition, as it explores events that took place within the same logic of genocide. Especially relevant are filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955), and Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985), because they tackle the unseen issues related to the depiction of genocide. Equally important is the work of Jeremy Hicks, The Unseen Holocaust of WWII (2014), which casts questions on the predominantly camps based narrative of the Holocaust. However, San Sabba opens the discussion to the concept of memorialisation in Italy, as the camp in Trieste fails to reveal the documented purpose of the site.

Full screenings of the film took place in York and Athens in 2017, and at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards, in March 2018. Turina presented conference papers and particle screenings at peer-reviewed events in Sheffield, York and Cambridge during 2016-17.

The Hidden Stories app delves deep into the untold history of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, bringing the area to life through poetry, plays and narrative non-fiction.

The app operates via locative technology that triggers fragments of writing at specific locations; the texts are effectively connected with the location and history they are exploring, with content being unlocked as the user moves around the area.

Each text is displayed differently within the app, taking advantage of the framework to emphasise the ideas being presented by the writers and reflecting the concept of hidden stories.

Hidden Stories was commissioned by Phoenix and developed by Cuttlefish Multimedia as part of Affective Digital Histories, a research project investigating how communities change with urban decline and regeneration. The five pieces of creative writing used in the app were commissioned and edited by Corinne Fowler, director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing. To find out more visit affectivedigitalhistories.org.uk.