Reading writing breathing

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article addresses how breath is intra-active with reading and writing. The two meditation methods I used for concentrating on and writing the breath-experience were ‘attention on the breath’ as taught within a Korean Seon (Zen) tradition, and writing this experience as ‘meditative enquiry’ [Stephens, T. 2021. ‘A Meditative Enquiry into Presence: Unmaking the Autoethnographic Self.’ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 14 (2): 161–178]. Two ‘texts’ gradually converge into an intertwined experience of reading both academic and literary writing, blurring distinctions between them. Various theories are drawn from that un-do dualistic frameworks of epistemology assumed in reading academic texts. This raises questions for the embodied cognitive humanities, post-qualitative methodologies, and in autoethnographic and phenomenological writing as well as for creative writers. The article draws from cultural, philosophical, and literary studies, recent breath studies, and from the field of embodiment, to contextualise the ‘creative academic writing’ excerpts; leading to an unavoidable conclusion: this type of ‘new writing’ is not new but, rather, contiguous with practices of embodiment. Yet, how can a written fabrication of breathing be read, and does stylistic innovation present insurmountable problems for the academic validation of creative academic writing?