Book Cultures, Book Events

Excited to find my proposal for a paper/ presentation at this conference to be held at Stirling University has been accepted! Now to think about when I'm going to write it, given the conference is in March and I start lecturing again in two weeks time...

 Facilitating Creative Practice within the Academy

My paper explores the role of creative writing as research, performance and production within the remit of a multi-disciplinary centre for creative research and creative practice, The Facility, at London Metropolitan University. I will present the recent history of The Facility and take as case studies two events held this year with literature and/or the book as key component: the Facility Re-Launch (September 2011) and the Human Folly event (February 2012). 

Initially launched as a centre for practice-based research in the performing arts, The Facility hosted a number of events and seminars in which the role of practice-based research within the academy was discussed. Focus was given to the embodied arts such as dance and drama. However, shifts in thinking and in the University’s structuring in 2010-11 encouraged the Facility to widen its core remit to include visual and text based creative practice. As a published poet and  Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature, I was co-opted onto the steering committee in Septembet 2011, together with film-making academic Anne Robinson and original coordinator, dramatist Lucy Richardson. Our new mission is stated thus:

‘The Facility hopes to inspire, develop, investigate, support, fund, challenge, facilitate and archive the practice based/practice as research work developed at London Met, in its locale, nationally and internationally… It will support the practice as research work which is already happening within the university and attract and facilitate new work.’

And our principle aim, as well as establishing London Met as a centre for creative excellence, to ‘develop opportunities in which creative practitioners working in performance, image, text, sound, object and space may engage in productive dialogue, exchange ideas and work collaboratively on practice-led research projects’.

I will explore how, in the current academic year, these stated aims have allowed poetry, prose, and the promotion of new books (as in our guest speaker poet Andy Brown, presenting his new collection The Fool and The Physician this February) to become an integral part of creative research within the academy, and how location- and time-specific moments of sharing within the academic community (and interested others) are important not only to launch a new book as product, but to stimulate cross-disciplinary discussion over how creativity itself is research-worthy in terms of Higher Education’s remit (and funding). I hope to show how the production of new and valuable cultural capital is best facilitated by moments that combine both the ‘present’ of live utterance and the future stability of the published word.