Creative Writing Methods for Collective and Regenerative Thinking

This article asks how creative practice researchers — ordinarily working in disparate fields — might find common ground to speak across disciplines in addressing important issues and shared problems. It makes a case for the value of creative writing methods as tools to enable this shared space, and through which diverse scholars can explore the embodied and networked aspects of their “thinking” and “doing” as (creative practice) researchers. Specifically, we discuss a writing workshop that we ran in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, as well as the Listening chapbook that developed as a result (and which accompanies this article), as a case study for how these methods might be deployed. The chapbook, we believe, highlights the poetic and material aspects of language and writing, and explores how these can enable the expression of more than the “informational” aspects of reflective writing. We reflect on how the chapbook emerged as an extension of previous work by co-authors Jessica Wilkinson, David Carlin and Michelle Aung Thin in creative writing methods, specifically around essaying, collective writing and poetic inquiry. We hope that one of the contributions of this article is in the detail of its description of the process of this experiment which gave rise to the Listening chapbook.