Introduction: writing creatively – process,practice,and product

For most academic geographers writing remains the primary means through which we communicate our work. Typically, of course, in monographs and journal articles, but with ongoing creative efforts to engage geographical audiences through practices beyond academic publishing – something cultural geographies in practice has long featured – that writing sees a myriad of expressions. ¹ Nevertheless, the process and practice of our writing remains masked by its product, as the polished published work obscures the means of its production, ² and even the production of our most frequent output (a scholarly publication) is, with few exceptions, ³ seldom spoken of, let alone written about. The aim of these papers is to open writing for discussion as an expression of cultural geographies in practice, as a way of revealing some of the engaged and embodied practices of cultural geography that lie behind the varied published expressions of our scholarship, and to explore some of the creative forms of expression such writing practices may lead to.

Of course, all writing is creative – a monograph no less so than a monologue, a paper no less so than a poem. ⁴ And even when we choose to reject, or work outside of, the conventions of scholarly prose, we open ourselves to the structures of other expressive forms. But just as each form has its restrictions, so can those restrictions be leveraged by a skilled writer to harness rather than hamper creativity – none, after all, has thought Shakespeare uncreative for his 154 sonnets, despite their fixed rhyme scheme and prescribed format of 14 lines. ⁵

Still, some academics turn to forms of expression other than those most often accepted in the scholarly repertoire as creative means to forward their scholarship, while still others engage these outlets for work other than their scholarship. So while literary writing has long formed an empirical entry point for geographers, offering, among other things, a powerful repost to positivistic science, creative-writing practices have themselves, as Cresswell observes here, long been enrolled as part of the geographer’s ‘craft.’ ⁶ Indeed, this relationship between geography and literary writing can, as Cresswell’s autobiographical account of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ a geographer-poet demonstrates, be ‘cut’ in a number of ways. Whether this be geographers – including Yi-Fu Tuan, Miles Richardson, Allan Pred, Sarah De Leeuw, Tim Cresswell – penning and publishing poems; others – Rob Kitchin among them – publishing fiction; or those exploring still other expressive forms, including radio essays, testimonial theater, and interactive websites. ⁷ As Cresswell’s and Kitchin’s papers in this collection make clear, albeit in very different ways, such literary modes of writing can sit productively alongside other genres of written communication, from blog posts, to poems, novels and policy documents, as well as the journal article. So, for example, in a biographical account of his research on Irish ‘Ghost Estates,’ Kitchin describes how, as a result of serendipity, a complimentary assemblage of written words/works emerges alongside his research, each register of writing interacting with and informing the others.

The four essays presented here arise from a session at the Seattle meetings of the Association of American Geographers in 2011 where we sought to peer inside the black box of academics’ writing, opening issues of writing process and product as part of a creative practice of sharing geographies. We asked: instead of thinking of writing as a posteriori representation, occurring after the ‘fact’ of thinking and investigating, what does it mean to think about the ‘doings’ of writing, to engage with writing as a geographical practice, a research method and a mode of making geographical knowledge?

Collectively, these essays animate the writing process, and in doing so call out the ideological effects of published writings that mask the practices and labors behind that writing. Writing is written into being in these papers as embodied doing and thinking. Resisting tendencies to foreground product over practice, the authors offer instead personal accounts of the doing of geographical writing.

The doings of writing and the sites of practice take many different forms across the papers. Cook et al.’s account, for example, details the labors of collective, collaborative writing as an interactive, iterative practice that takes place not solely at a writing desk or by way of a singular, linear relationship between writer, keyboard and screen. Rather, writing emerges as a process of to-ing and fro-ing, of exchange between people and technology, in a myriad of forms from emails to workshops and blogs. In taking to task the singularity of authorship Cook et al., detail the various forms of work involved in their particular collaborative production process; from coordinating paper development, to the ethical labors of balancing multiple commitments to the communities and individuals involved in the collaborations.

In Cresswell’s autobiographical account of becoming a poet, we see the challenges writing practices raise to the illusion of a stable academic self. Cresswell, reflecting on the risk-taking of merging previously distinct streams of practice – a life-long practice of poetry and a parallel ‘academic’ practice – directs us towards the transformative potentials (personal and institutional) of these practices. Whether risking ourselves and our established academic identities in new skills and crafts, or exploring the productive challenges creative-writing practices can pose to assumed histories of academic practice, we sculpt productive terrains of engagement.

JD Dewsbury, in seeking to combine ‘theoretical thinking and performative documentation,’ pushes words to animate the space of the page as a site across which the struggles and personal investments of writing – and thinking – are played out. Here, the act of writing emerges as a thoroughly constitutive one – constitutive of ideas and of self – spanning the conscious desire to communicate and the emotional labors of moving from ‘the desire to write’ to ‘willing the text into being.’ Dewsbury shows how, in the ‘work’ of writing, the page becomes a personally invested space, a site to be both revered and feared, one of daily practice and struggle.

To become mindful of the corporeal, affective, and emotional labors and politics of putting finger to key, and the serendipitous, collaborative, and contingent nature of the ‘work’ of writing is also, as these papers demonstrate, to assert the presence of two other figures that haunt the writing process. On the one hand the ‘audience,’ a group targeted in advance by the writer, and for whom a text might be crafted. So Kitchin’s paper, through sensitizing us to the writing of one topic in a range of ways, installs an awareness of multiple audiences into the writing process: writing for Kitchin is a flexible crafted form, whose formats, language and register are selected for the audience in advance. ⁸ But yet, within both Kitchin’s paper, and that by Cook et al., any sense of the uni-directionality of such a process – from research, to writer, to audience – is challenged by the interactivity that formats like blogs install into our writing processes. Here we find comment boxes, discussion fora and rights-to-reply, even in journals, drawing us into lively relations with our readers.

The second figure is the far more contingent subjectivity of the thoughtful, fleshy, responsive ‘reader.’ What emerges in the reading of this collection of papers is the reciprocal relation not only between research, writer, and text, but also between text, writer, and us as readers. For, if Dewsbury hails the writer-as-reader, drawn into the worlds formed by other writers, enrolled in their texts in the process of producing her/his own, then the affective nature of his prose, of Cresswell’s poetry, as well as in Cook et al.’s discussion of the organization – the spaces and gaps of the page – bring into play our own experiences as readers. In engaging with these papers we are reminded of how texts actively work on us as readers, and how we in turn work on them. Drawn into an ethical relationship with the text, the reader here is accorded capacities for thinking and feeling; a reader, constituted through her/his iterative engagement with the text, as s/he construes meaning, conjures visual pictures and is moved by the author’s sentiments.

With this collection we hope to urge onward discussion of writing as a creative geographical practice: to explore both the affirmation and disruption of disciplinary formats, to upset the stories we tell of neat and linear progressions from research to writing, and to entwine divided writers, audiences and readers, producers and consumers. We encourage geographers to be aware of themselves as writers, to explore their writing as practice, to examine what it means to ask questions of this practice, and to take writing seriously, as an ‘embodied mindful process that shapes . . . research itself.’ ⁹