Introduction

Abstract

The scholars who present their work here in this Special Issue on Writing Through Things: Past and Broken Things were invited to contribute their research in the form of a traditional article or creative work that explores the fission between the arena of the mind and the concrete, tangible things of the world around us; to explore that ‘unexplored world’ of ‘memory, emotion, and untapped creativity’ (Pollack, 2011: 230). The events of 2020, lockdowns and self-isolating, meant that we were, perhaps more than ever, surrounded by our own things, offering an opportunity to see these things differently and maybe more clearly. Bill Brown explains that “the work being done… under thing theory is addressing how it is that the inanimate object world helps to form and transform human beings. Part of that is to say: how does our material environment shape us?” (Brown, 2012). We, as writers and researchers, are concerned with that which forms and transforms us and the world around us. These catalysts of formation and transformation can be people, experiences, landscapes, and sometimes they can be the seemingly everyday objects that surround us. As Brown points out, the things that impact on us do not have to be those of ‘economic value in Marxist terms’; they can be ‘small things’ of ‘symbolic value’ (Brown, 2012).