Creative writing is often thought of as an individual and solitary pursuit. This is partly owing to Romantic (and still popular) notions of creativity as residing in highly gifted individuals, but also to the widely held belief that writing is a lonely rather than a social activity. The research presented in this paper provides a unique insight into the creative process by tracing the way one poem is produced by a member of a creative writing class based on a major urban art gallery. Based on a 5‐year ethnographic study of this class, it employs interview material, field notes, photographs and creative writing as data. Using theories from both the “anthropology of writing” (Barton and Papen, ; Latour and Woolgar, 1986) and the “anthropology of creativity” (Ingold, ; Hallam and Ingold, ), I argue that creative writing is a relational and temporal process involving complex and multiple claims for agency. I also go on to show that when the text moves from a private to a public context, these multiple agencies are encompassed and erased under the umbrella of individual authorship.

This article explores the painting of two murals as part of a community arts education project aimed at understanding Marshallese children's experiences of displacement and belonging. It describes the process and outcome of mural making workshops conducted in two schools: one in Honolulu attended by migrant Marshallese children; the other with a community of Marshall Islanders, internally displaced as a result of the effects of nuclear testing on their home atoll. Engaging with anthropological approaches to art (Gell 1998; Schacter 2014), the article seeks to address important questions around the agency of these murals in the context of community arts education. What do these murals do, both in the process of coming into being, and as finished products? How did the images depicted on them take shape? In what ways were the artist's intentions, and the children's input, enabled and limited in this process? Paying detailed attention to these questions, the article argues for a nuanced understanding of what a successful community mural-making process might look like.

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