Creativity and/as writing

This paper arises from supervising PhD candidates in creative writing. It refers to the PhD Training Hub constructed by myself and my colleague at Swinburne University of Technology. It aims to encourage creative PhDs, particularly by the artefact and exegesis model. It focuses on the research question of how to encourage and understand the creativity that underpins all forms of writing. It utilises postmodernist theories about textuality to advance thinking about how creative discourse adds to knowledge in the academy. It encourages the practise of linear analytico-referential knowledge being overtaken by lateral postmodernist discourse. The conceptual framework involves Gregory Ulmer's 'mystory' and the pastiche of the dispersal of certainties in considering the practice of writing. Even as we see the fragility of language, we also see its robustness as a tool for experiments, for communication, for disruption as it works towards a new definition that is always under erasure. Experimentation means pushing against the limits, extending the boundaries, seeing beyond what is and was to what might be. The paper encourages the questioning of metanarratives, showing how they both arise from and result in arid cultural conformity. It looks at some of the many elements to creative capacities being developed, nurtured and coming into their full potential. It opens up discourse about where a text comes from in the creative act of overcoming the blank page. In this postmodernist moment, we no longer interrogate those attributes of a text that were once dominant. We no longer have the expectations that history and cultural metanarratives laid so heavily upon us. Today, we have more open questions aimed at discovering how every text is a constructed terrain. This paper displays these areas of discussion that have strong implications for future research arising from applying critical theories to the relationship of practice and theory.