Writing the Multiple: from Chapalang to Confluence

Educare - vetenskapliga skrifter

This article shall argue that learning arts (creative writing) and becoming an artist is best understood as a process of immersion. Lave and Wenger’s Community of Practice will be used as a framework along with the concept of nyantrik, an apprenticeship in arts within Javanese culture, which gives a deeper meaning to the process of immersion. This article will also show how such learning processes may be re-shaped and occur across spatial and cultural boundaries, with the help of modern communication platforms. Using a/r/tography as an approach for arts-based inquiries, the article aims to describe the dialogic learning process of becoming a creative writer through immersion into an online multicultural community of practice, Project 366. The study is accomplished through an examination of the interactions, reflections and creative works (poetry) of the participants, as well as how such exchanges also affected the researcher’s own creative process.

2015

Language and Education, 2015

For Jacques Derrida, language is a habitat that contours one's " ipseity " (1). He addressed the complexity generated in one's sense of the self when one speaks a language that is not one's own, but a legacy of the colonial experience which has erased the language of the colonized. Yan Zhao's monograph entitled Second Language Creative Writers: Identities and Writing Processes explores the configuration of writer identities and writer voices of Second Language Creative Writers who have access to both their first and second languages. The linguistic habitat of these second language creative writers is a mélange of various linguistic paradigms that have played a pivotal role in the constitution of their subjectivities. As Zhao meticulously traces the connection between the identities and the cognitive writing processes of 15 advanced level L2 Creative Writers in the United Kingdom through discourse analysis, this important work does not only cover how social processes and human cognition are interconnected , it also operates as a work that could function as a base for devising new ways of analyzing the subjective coordinates of L2 writers vis-à-vis the target language and also the socio-political contexts within which the target language is spoken. In her work under review here, Yan Zhao interweaves Community of Practice (CoP) theories with Post-structuralist thought in order to analyze the imbrication of the socio-cultural paradigms, histories and interactions within the creative writing processes of L2 writers and their identity construction. Zhao sees their modes of writing as " idiosyncratic performances " (Zhao 7; italics in original) stemming from their agentive choice of engagement with specific discourses, ideological angles, writing mechanisms , etc. In doing so, they " perform " (Zhao 3) specific configurations of identity which remain functional in multiple spheres of existence. One of the important areas that this work opens up for further exploration is the engagement of prior social and linguistic experiences in the performative enactment

TEXT, 2017

In many Southeast Asian countries, English represents a colonial tradition, whose merits co-exist alongside other languages that are also seen as creative : Mandarin, Tagalog, Cantonese, Malay. In the everyday, the bilingualism that emerges in these spaces is playful, with languages like Chinglish and Taglish re-invigorating the old kingdoms of proper English. And yet, as English educators we often take the playfulness out of language learning: we treat English as hierarchical, class-driven, authoritative, dignified, a certificate through which students can maximize their prospects. This essay argues for a playful teaching of English writing that does not see failure in grammar mistakes, or incorrectness in accents. Taking inspiration from writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, as well as my own bilingual creative writing students, I explore the ways in which we can perceive of English as a creative medium to communicate self-expression and feeling. In Hong Kong where I work, the colonial routes of bilingualism have always been in the colonial power's favor, but this has hinged on the presumption that translation was done obediently, in respect to a sacred and immovable linguistic hierarchy, a tower of babel. Teaching in English need not be an authoritative nor a colonial practice. Instead, we can offer students an aporia of meaning engaged in play, delight, and failure.

Using critical theory, textual experimentation and tactile engagement with language.

TEXT, 2017

2017

Reflective Practice, 2018

In this article, I use the method of 'talking to myself' as a mode of critical reflection about the practices of art making and art writing. This 'reflective conversation' manifested the multiple voices of the dialogic self who either thwarted me or spurred me on, in the process of writing. The article presents reflection as a conflict between an authentic reflection which is true to one's sense of lived being with the requirements to fit within a particular writing genre suitable for a disciplinary tribe that may reject or support the particular method of reflection. I suggest that attending to, and critically reflecting upon, our internal dialogue and acknowledging its conflictual nature can be a sustained process of reflection where different points of view are explored, questioned, reinterpreted and reshaped. The conversation with my multiple selves is presented in the form of a play script as an authentic format to capture multiple selves interacting. In so doing, I reflect upon artistic practice and its relationship to thought, reflection and action.

A call for the widening of what we understand to be research in creative writing higher degrees. Using Csikszentmihalyi's theory of creativity as flow, I model an analysis of my own creative writing process.