Adventures in academic storytelling: using the tools of creative writing to produce peer-reviewed academic research
This context statement, and the public works submitted with it, demonstrate how the tools of Creative Writing can be successfully used to produce ten articles published in peer-reviewed journals. None of these publications is in the field of Creative Writing; they are in journals that span the academic specialisms of forensics, linguistics, history, policing, law, sculpture, weapons, and literary studies. Not only are the articles published in ten different academic fields, but each one also draws research from a number of distinct academic disciplines. This makes my writing practice more closely aligned with that of a poet, novelist or writer of creative non-fiction, than that of a traditional single-subject academic. While employed in nonacademic fields, I nurtured a second life as a highly successful freelance or ‘academically stateless’ researcher publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals. I eschewed building a singular focus on one field in favor of building a toolbox of skills from different fields to help me investigate aspects of the world around me. My work follows the tradition of the deep generalist-polymath and the philosophy of transdisciplinary research as it uses and integrates fields. However, my work has a more practical synergy with the Bricoleur-Bowerbird approach to research and production from the field of Creative Writing, and I argue that a Creative Writer’s approach to academic research can produce articles that challenge boundaries and dogma to advance our understanding of an ever-complicating world.
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