Creative Research Writing: Between Fact, Fiction, and Personal Truths

My arrival at creative research writing is informed by two observations:

1. There is an assumed distinction between academic research and writing practices and personal, creative ones.

2. Academic research and writing practices are considerably impaired when divorced from personal, creative ones.

To attempt to reconcile both ‘types’ of writing, of approaching our work and the page, is to be faced with the dual demands of critical thinking and our imaginations. This, to me, is an incredibly exciting beckoning and if taken seriously, can be immensely expansive and not least of all, fun.

How would our articulation of our research findings be impacted if we approached it as writers of creative non-fiction rather than academics? How might an eye to poetry, to figurative language, rhythm, and musicality inform the kind of observations we make and how we interpret them? How can our chosen transcription methods alter our perception of the same interview? What would happen if we inserted our own experiential history and emotions into our academic writing, considered them equally profound and worked with them seriously?

These are some of the questions that we will attempt to address collectively by experimenting with different creative writing tools and forms and seeing how they can be configured within our research process and writing.