Creative Writing as Embodied Inquiry

I have argued in a number of publications (Stephens 2021, 2023, 2024) that creative academic writing can achieve epistemological status, particularly when framed as a mode of ‘inquiry’. Specifically this can be of value in the disciplines of art education and performative autoethnography, I also borrowed Lauruelle’s term of philo-fiction to test this as a form of (non) philosophical literature (Stephens 2018). I take the strongest examples I can find in these fields to demonstrate, and illustrate, this argument, namely, my own meditation practice, and, the empty art objects -the so-called dematerialisation of art- occurring from the mid-20th Century onwards, as well as literary philosophy or, as a critical theory of literature in writers such as Blanchot, as enacting a creative academic writing for which such practices are central. Recent research surveying the field of Practice Research, now allows us to consider this broad category that includes forms of embodied inquiry, and my own ‘meditative enquiry’ where I write from my Koan practice, initiated by the question: ‘What is this? That is, practice research in the modalities of intuition, imagination, tacit, embodied, affective and sensory ‘ways of knowing’ (Bulley and Sahin, 2021). This short paper will contribute a summary of these arguments with examples quoted from my various articles in their process to becoming equally, both a monograph and a PhD-by publication. Which is the thesis, and which is the practice? Hence, the layering of these knowledge practices as ‘palimpsest’ and ‘paratext’ drawing on Genette’s formulations of these terms, best describe these simultaneous creative practices, of enactment and description, which non-dualistically collapse ‘epistemic distance’ and form new modes of practice research, at one and the same time. Much like the mid-20th Century examples of art’s disappearance, or Blanchot’s poetics of absence, or the rhythm of breath in literature, each, like Zen koans, act on, and as, the nature of (meditative) experience.