Forward, Wayward: The Writer in the World’s Text, at Large

All writing lives in intertextuality. That being the case, one of the most significant aspects of anyone’s creative writing is its relationship with reading. What we read, how we read, for what purposes we read. The kinds of texts we find in the world bridge time and space, offer exchanges between one writer and another, between writers and readers. Researching for content brings about new knowledge just as it does in any other field — in the case of creative writing, of course, that content research might find its way into a poem or story, and that creative work may be a combination of personal voices as well as facts. This kind of research has knowledge value and this knowledge is such that it is certainly worthy of funding by organisations that fund research in and around academe, even if frequently it remains difficult to convince such funders of its value. Knowledge in creative writing is also not necessarily the knowledge found in other fields. It is the knowledge of two minds, that of the writer and that of the reader, actively engaging in exchange and in the kind of understanding that cannot be reduced to the abstract. All this can inform the teaching of creative writing, encourage and support individuality, and contribute to originality in the work that emerges from creative writing workshops and programmes.