Awe and broken things: Articulating the agony and the ecstasy of creativecritical ‘wrighting’

Abstract

Scholarly conventions allow us to say certain things within certain forms and shapes. Yet, how can something be “research” if you know where you are going on the page before the writing begins? In this braided case study, scholars Peta Murray (AUS) and Ames Hawkins (USA) consider how the paradox of surrender and the awe of not-knowing may hold space for the inchoate and the formlessness that precedes form. Through reflections upon respective projects they consider the place of the epiphanic, the erotic and the ecstatic as preconditions for radical transformations within new exegetical casings. Murray revisits her first foray into wrighting towards the creativecritical via Things That Fall Over: an anti-musical of a novel inside a reading of a play, with footnotes, and oratorio-as-coda. Hawkins considers their creativecritical composing processes as they emerge/d while drafting “Feeling through Numbness, Healing with Awe”, a chapter for a forthcoming volume on sensory rhetorics. In three parts, each bounded by broken things – interstices, gaps, fissures between images and words – this paper asks: how might alchemical and material transformations occurring within liminal spaces – before, during and as a result of the writing process – be shared as an ethics of aesthetics, now and then?