Finding communitas: Encounter, unfolding, and creative writing

Abstract

Anthropologist and poet Edith Turner (2012) sets out a narration of communitas to demonstrate its endless variations through fieldwork, how it appears often unexpectedly, and how it is a felt sense; “a collective satori” or sudden enlightenment. She calls communitas “togetherness itself”. This paper outlines the discovery and experience of communitas as it applies to creative writing in several different creative writing and research settings: 1) the genesis and makings of an interdisciplinary creative practice research group within a university setting 2) a durational creative exploration of writing and walking (not-walking), and 3) a performative “un-panel” exploring nonfiction as queer encounter. It borrows the concept of communitas as a loanword from the field of anthropology and ritual studies (Victor Turner, 1969; Edith Turner, 2012) and identifies generative characteristics of communitas for creative writing purposes. It investigates the development of the idea of togetherness itself through a feminist and queer sensibility in relation to Hélène Cixous’s non-acquisitional space and jouissance, and the communitastica of joy. This paper offers a way of thinking about the gift of communitas, including the elements needed to allow it to happen within creative writing, hand in hand with a sense of joy, jouissance and possibility.