This Girl is on Fire: Seeking a Home for the Narrative

2019

Qualitative Inquiry

Exploring writing as breath provides an escape academia’s dry scientific prose and an entry into writing’s life inspiring potential. Both breathing and writing can be regarded as life-giving and engaging acts. Breathing flows as ceaseless and continuous acts of inhaling and exhaling, stirring up life in the way a writer’s personal voice animates words. Breath, like air, is light and spacious, evasive, and carries multitudinous possibilities. By dwelling deeply within words, through breath, we can subsequently disrupt the familiar and engage in poetic and “breath-like” forms of writing, which brings us closer to its weightless and enduring dimension.

Section: Elusive Breathmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Evasive Breath Space and Timelessnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sweet Breath Pleasure and The Rhythmicmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Learning to Write Through an Awareness of Breath

2019

Qualitative Inquiry

“…Some of them provide us with an insight into the deeper dynamics surrounding us; during other times, these flickers can reveal our true calling, drawing us closer to who we are and who we are capable of becoming. Gorman (2018) illustrates this as she reflects on an encounter experienced early in her career:…”

Section: Authority Authorship and Witnessingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A remnant of betrayal lingers still, the unsettling suggestion that I violated the best of what nursing should be-a natural and reciprocal relationship of care (p.3). Gorman (2018) ponders the life lessons experienced in her early years as a hospice nurse, when she had cared for a beautifully regal former ballerina. This dignified former ballerina offers her golden anklets, which are her final prized possessions.…”

Section: Authority Authorship and Witnessingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing creatively to catch flickers of ‘truth’ and beauty

2020

New Writing

This paper examines creative writing in academia through writing as a form of inquiry. Writing about lived experiences is a creative and empathetic form of ontology that unravels the flickers of 'truth' and beauty that elude the rational mind. Writing creatively requires letting go of the rigid structures of dominant academic discourse to write the unknown into being. To experience writing's potential, academics need to pay attention the resonance felt through their bodies and memories to uncover these flickers to writing and living well. Catching the flickersThere is subtle truth, magical truth, lyrical truth, visceral truth, truth that implies verisimilitude (Rinehart 1998, 200). Creative writing's open-ended, metaphorical and expressive form enables writers to draw out and capture what has yet to materialise. It allows writers to convey the fluid, mysterious and constantly evolving nature of lived experience, and can evoke a resonance that animates. This paper illustrates how academic writers can write creatively to capture flickers of hidden meaning and generate powerful stories to live by. To uncover the steps in this process, I have read examples of creatively written academic texts like a curious child who pulls apart her favourite toy to understand how it works. As I deconstruct examples of such writing, I notice how ideas can emerge from fleeting flickers of intuitive understanding that are intuited through a half light, and can easily be overlooked, as "they never come at you all at once, more like in fits and starts over extended periods of time, small isolated events that seem to be unrelated to each other or to anything else," and yet during other moments, their frequency makes them difficult to ignore, as "these so-called isolated happenings cluster together and their import can no longer be ignored, denied or repressed" (Frentz 2011, 798). Catching these flickers requires a certain level of skill and craftsmanship, which can be acquired and refined through practice.The first steps of writing are the most difficult as there is only a faint trace of a trail to follow. It begins when I feel a weight bearing down on my consciousness, which I tentatively trace out with my words. The pathway is unknown, but the general destination is clear. I write to uncover writing's life-evoking potential to guide us towards a better life, as Bochner (2012) relates, "Those of us who have been seduced by the call of stories realise there may be no better way to come to terms with how we want to live and what we can understand and say about how others live than to listen to and converse with their stories" (162). Bochner proposes that academics should write to understand life rather than to simply dispense knowledge. This act of putting the isolated flickers together occurs in the dim spaces of the subconscious, but the more it is practiced, the more fluently we can decipher and construct a richer narrative for our lives. Unpacking this process of writing creatively to pursue the flickers can accordingly help us to navi...

Revisiting This Girl Is on Fire: Seeking a Home for the Narrative During Lockdown to Uncover the Burning Embers

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

2021

This article relates the author’s insights about writing as inquiry that emerged while reading This Girl is on Fire: Seeking a Home for the Narrative during lockdown. It describes how the contemplative and expansive space of this narrative resonates with the in-between feeling of being locked down during a pandemic. Writing to inquire within in-between spaces is vital for exploring the rich and vibrant possibilities of the unknown.