The Writer Walking the Dog: Creative Writing Practice and Everyday Life

• Authors: Tony Williams
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Creative writing happens in and alongside the writer’s everyday life, but little attention has been paid to the relationship between the two and the contribution made by everyday activities in enabling and shaping creative practice. The work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold supports the argument that creative writing research must consider the bodily lived experience of the writer in order fully to understand and develop creative practice. Dog-walking is one activity which shapes my own creative practice, both by its influence on my social and cultural identity and by providing a time and space for specific acts instrumental to the writing process to occur. The complex socio-cultural context of rural dog-walking may be examined both through critical reflection and creative work. The use of dog-walking for reflection and unconscious creative thought is considered in relation to Romantic models of writing and walking through landscape. While dog-walking is a specific activity with its own peculiarities, the study provides a case study for creative writers to use in developing their own practice in relation to other everyday activities from running and swimming to shopping, gardening and washing up.

Keywords

EN

walking; dog-walking; creative writing; everyday life; practice; Wordsworth; Romantic; Ingold

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: American, British and Canadian Studies Journal
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 224-238

Dates

published

2013-06-01

online

2013-08-07

Contributors

author

Tony Williams

References

• Attridge, Derek. “The Body Writing: Joyce’s Pen.” European Joyce Studies 17 (2006): 47-64.
• Baer, John. “Domain specificity of creativity: Theory, research, and practice.” TEXT Special Issue: Creativity: Cognitive, Social and CulturalPerspectives. Eds Nigel McLoughlin & Donna Lee Brien (2012). Web. 12 December 12.
• Brace, Catherine & Adeline Johns-Putra. “Recovering Inspiration in the Spaces of Creative Writing.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 (2010): 399-413.[WoS]
• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. London: University of California Press, 1984.
• Dietrich, Arne. “The cognitive neuroscience of creativity.” Psychonomic Bulletin& Review. 11(6) (2004): 1011-1026.
• Edensor, Tim. “Walking in the British Countryside: Reflexivity, Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape.” Body & Society 6(3-4) (2000): 81-106.
• Harper, Graeme. On Creative Writing. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2010.
• Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwellingand Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Ingold, Tim. “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting.” VisualStudies 25(1) (2010): 15-23.
• Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.
• Krauth, Nigel. “Four Writers and their Settings.” TEXT 7(2) (2003). Unpaginated. Web. 07 June 12.
• Krauth, Nigel. “The Domains of the Writing Process.” Creative Writing: TheoryBeyond Practice. Eds Nigel Krauth & Tess Brady. Teneriffe: Post Pressed, 2006. 187-196.
• Kroll, Jeri. “Redrafting the Self: The Author as a Work in Progress.” CreativeWriting: Theory Beyond Practice. Eds Nigel Krauth & Tess Brady. Teneriffe: Post Pressed, 2006. 197-209.
• Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mindand its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
• Middleton, Jennie. “‘Stepping in Time’: Walking, Time, and Space in the City.” Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 1943-1961.
• Modell, Arnold H. Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. London: MIT Press, 2003.
• Nash, Catherine. “Performativity in Practice: Some Recent Work in Cultural Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 24(4) (2000): 653-664.
• Saunders, Angharad. “Literary geography: reforging the connections.” Progressin Human Geography 34(4) (2010): 436-452.[WoS]
• Schooler, Jonathan W., Jonathan Smallwood, Kalina Christoff, Todd C. Handy, Erik D. Reichle and Michael A. Sayette. “Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(7) (2011): 319-326[WoS]
• Sharples, Mike. How We Write: Writing as Creative Design. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2001.
• Williams, Tony. Three poems. Their Colours and Their Forms: Artists’Responses to Wordsworth. Eds Carol Mackay and John Strachan. Grasmere: Wordsworth Trust, 2013.
• Wylie, John. Landscape. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/abcsj-2013-0016