I research the practises and processes of creative writing. Basically, I’m interested in examining the problems and pitfalls that effect writers and writing.
The articles and chapters I work on focus on both the theory and analysis of contemporary creative writing processes, and the pedagogy of creative writing in a digital age. I am also interested in the social functions of memoir and autofiction, particularly in the relationship between narrative and the so-called ‘real world’.
I recently co-edited an academic book called The Place and The Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy. It was published by Bloomsbury in April 2021.
My most recent journal article was “Writing through Loss: The Rise of Grief Narratives through the Lens of Linville’s Self-complexity Theory”, published in the Spring 2019 issue of the Life Writing journal. The article is about how loss leads to us losing a piece of our identity along with the loved one who is gone, and explores several memoirs about grief to show how authors navigate this process and construct a new identity.
In 2019 and 2018, I published several chapters in scholarly books about the creative writing process. In “Writing Backwards: Adventures with Time and Structure in Life Writing”, from the 2019 book How Stories Teach Us: Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship, I discussed how experimenting with formal and structural rules in life writing can help both writers and readers understand life experiences in new ways.
In “Writing Ghostly Spaces: Place as Palimpsest”, published in Writing as Spaces: Writing as Transformative, Scholarly and Creative Practice in 2019, I examined the role of psychogeography in life writing and discussed how the history of places in which we write can overlap with the subjects that we end up writing about, and therefore argues for a new way of thinking about the role of time in life writing.
Meanwhile, in my chapter on “Instagram Narratives” in Digital English: An Open Access Online Handbook for Tertiary English Educators, I offer tips and advice for higher education instructors for using Instagram as a learning tool in the university classroom.
In “Circling a Subject: Chasing Happiness in Creative Practice”, an article I wrote for the Autumn 2017 volume of New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, I discussed different strategies for how creative writers might depict happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction in their work, and also examined the many problems and pitfalls that come with trying to write about joy.
Finally, in “Writing the Real: the Use of Primary and Secondary Sources in Creative Writing Research” from Writing in Practice: The Journal of Creative Writing Research in Spring 2017, I wrote about good rules, tips and practices for using external sources and research in novels.
In 2015, I was awarded the Authors’ Foundation Award for creative writing research by the Society of Authors. I was also given the Liz Ketterer Trust Award, 2nd place, for best conference abstract at the British Graduate Shakespeare Conference.
If you’d like to discuss any of the ideas in these articles or chapters, or have suggestions or thoughts, please do get in touch.