Introduction

This blog will be a reflection on my creative process whilst doing a Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) at Wollongong University under the supervision of Dr Joshua Lobb. It will be notes, thoughts and sometimes unedited, rushed whimsy but I will try to move towards a more structured, solid thesis along the way.

The DCA has a creative component as well as a research component that asks for an academic paper of approx. 30,000 words that takes into account your process within the creation of the partner work. For the creative work I am writing a 'novel' with a working title "Cloudberries" (CB) that includes both poetry and prose. The novel's protagonist Isabella finds herself part of a ghostly matrix of women who have been held in confinement in psychiatric hospitals after experiencing a breakdown. She remains connected to the outside world through her love for a young girl held in a detention centre in Australia. CB aims to be part ghost story, part psychological, political thriller, part love story and part fictive memoir.

The above picture of Austinmer sea pool is indicative to me of the witchy brew I need to analyse and dive into in order to make sense of a process that for want of a better word is witchcraft. A place of magic, fire, blood, sweat, tears, insecurity, failure, tangent, death, colour, duende and of course water. 

In the research component or Exegesis (E) will of course be an analysis of CB and the process of its creation BUT it will also seek to be an analysis of the creative process itself for writers. In particular in reference to the work of Dorothy Porter and the links to my own process.

In particular I am interested in the spark of interest, meditation, the obsession for a topic that leads to its exploration for an artist such as Porter and in turn myself. It's links to the direct experience of the writer, the struggle to find the correct form and voice for this subject. The darkness that seeks the light of the page. The need for a physical and rythmic connection with words that drives Porter's staccato, blues and soul-kicking themes and her obsessive reading. To my need to come at an experience through words, images and communicate it through words. 

The works of Porter seem volatile and free to me, the white space and jumping narrators allow for hard hitting punches. It is the physical connection with words and images that I am interested in exploring . In my first blog post I wish to merely summarise my project, my connections with Porter and then to look at todays reading which focused on my supervisor's PhD thesis. Part of the E requires I define a theoretical stance, which is the part that I keep shaking off. I feel it almost goes against the very essence of creation to confine it through a lens however I have enjoyed very much Joshua Lobb's narratological approach in his thesis and it has started me thinking about the unconcious way I have created unstable narration in CB to date. 

In his work "Laminations: The 'Self-Conscious" Realist Techniques of A.S. Byatt" (2004) he examines the way Byatt destabalises the conventional realist time frame and "replaces them with the democracy of laminated time." He also talks about shattering the "now" point through using characters as narrators and recounting moments from various temporal locations, in particular in reference to Byatt's The Babel Tower.  (pg 231)

A further destabalisation of the realist novel comes from Byatt's use of present tense, not just a "fictive present" but a "real present", or one Lobb outlines that "does not depend on the illusion of "presentness", but asserts an instantaneous unfolding of the narrative." He talks about the worry of random moments without a reliable heirachy of time or narrator meaning a text can become unreadable.

To be reading theory about laminated texts and the danger of them being unreadable whilst you are writing one is in itself a lamination. I have often rejected the linear impulse of drama and action, I find it compelling in its directness but have always allowed that it is what is in the tangents that we see outside the arrow of time that give us the ghosts, the whispers and the deeper subconcious connections with the experience of an artwork. Lobb's defense of this chaotic, layered narration is that it allows for events to connect with other's throughout time, like other universes or past lives connecting on different planes. 

It is this structure and thematic concept that I have chosen, subconciously to depict the unstable mind of my protagonist in my work CB. Also to allow for the possibility of a physical space, such as that of a psychiatric hospital, or a detention centre, or a book's plot to be a portal for time travel, the walls to be keepers of stories, the horror of confinement to leave ghosts.  Regardless of my background in poetry or my gender I have long been attracted to novels that reject the one coherent narrative and narrative arc. In the same way as the psychiatrist in CB rejects Bella's self-diagnosis of "nervous breakdown" as something that is a literary creation that defies, like most psychological illness a neat, singular reading. As much as we crave the lure of cohesion, sanity, structure and communion our modern world is not providing a model of that and therefore our art cannot reflect it if it is to engage us outside of a fleeting moment of beauty. 

I believe that any creative process that is addictive, and by that I mean essential to the creator for their ability to make sense of the world, rather than a hobby or past time they enjoy as relaxation, there needs to be an element of themselves within the work. The obsessions, loves, losses, or indeed the very things we are missing and longing for in our own life. 

I believe that in most work that I relate to, or that I wish to create or expand on from one form to another there is an essential key, often within the protagonist that links me to it from the soul; or the ecstatic unknowable.

"In a good novel, a great novel, descriptions of the landscape, various objects, embedded tales, slight digressions - everything makes us feel the moods, habits and the character of the protagonists. Let us imagine a novel as a sea made up of these irreducible nerve endings-these moments - the units that inspire the writer - and let us never forget that every point contains a bit of the protagonist's soul."  

(Pamuk, O. the naive and the sentimental novelist)