Creative Research in Practice

Abstract: Creative writing research offers a unique opportunity to draw together threads of inquiry from the realm of the creative, the practical, and the critical (Kroll and Harper 2013). While the researching writer may feel that their work-in-progress resembles a crudely stitched together patchwork doll, in reality the component parts of creative, practical, and critical slowly merge over the duration of the research to become an increasingly seamless artefactual end product. As the research draws to a close, the artefact is like the patchwork doll newly clothed and ready to face the world. The various blocks or patches of research are hidden beneath the decorated surface of the artefact, each holding the other in place and making the final body of work cohere more strongly. This paper strips bare this process of creative research through a case study on the dilemmas of writing a narrative in which a mother kills her adult children