This creativecritical essay investigates the author’s object-oriented mania and her anticipatory relationship to “happy objects” (Ahmed, 2010) through the lens of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, shadowed by memories around inheritance, a family propensity toward hoarding and the empty promise of capitalism under a “regime of crisis ordinariness” (Berlant, 2011). The chaos of the hoard, in which objects congeal rather than circulate, suspends the hoard in a time outside of time, similar to Kristeva’s (1982) chora (Lepselter, 2011). While the hoarder as artist manifests a “poetics of accumulation” (Falkoff, 2021), a writer as hoarder amasses a citational hoard via reference manager. This essay applies Zinman and Reese’s “critical-mess theory” (qtd. in Singer, 2001) to creative writing, arguing that critical mess literature demands a collaged form where one might draw conclusions from patterns made evident by the accumulated, intertextual, polyvocal hoard. It poses citations managers as a modern tool of Lévi-Strauss’s (2021) bricoleur. In “stringing up a narrative” of things (Juckes, 2017), the author puts word-things into place through object recollection, curation and citation, forming an interweb of narrative objects to demonstrate the application of critical mess theory with and through life writing.

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?

“Hôtel La Fêlure” is a work of fictocriticism in the form of a short story. In the piece’s auto-critical introduction, the author explains that, after a visit to Marrakech, Morocco, in early 2023, he conducted preliminary research on Moroccan male sexuality in advance of a return visit. Along the way, he viewed The Blue Caftan, a Morocco-set film directed by Maryam Touzani, and read L’amour Fait Loi (Love Lays Down the Law), a Morocco-based essay collection edited by Pierre Pascual. Rather than write a scholarly essay on the film, his first inclination, he created “Hôtel La Fêlure”. In the short story, Benjamin and a cast of Moroccan characters, who lodge in the eponymous hotel, watch and analyse The Blue Caftan through the lens of a fictional lecture on Moroccan male sexuality. Over the course of their conversation, the characters occasionally ventriloquize lines from L’amour Fait Loi.

This contribution will focus on creativecritical citational devices. We will position creativecritical writing in relation to scholarly research and the academic writing it typically results in, as well as performative writing and autotheory (a performative form in itself). Following Katherine McKittrick’s provocation “What if the practice of referencing, sourcing, and crediting … takes us outside ourselves?” (2021, p. 16), we understand creativecritical citational works as ecstatic: they stand outside themselves. At the same time, performative writing’s citationality creates an “affective alliance with writing itself” (Pollock, 1998, p. 94) – “affective alliance” being key in autotheory too. Ecstatic citations, then, allow text and voice to transcend themselves while opening up to these alliances, becoming other-like in the process. McKittrick names this as an unknowing and unhinging of the self (2021, p. 16). Similarly, Amy Hollywood describes “the self-shattering that occurs through identification with the lacerated textual other” (2002, p. 59). These creativecritical citational gestures imply an ecstatic merging with textualities and subjectivities that are radically different: historically (the anachronistic), existentially (the non-human) and even ontologically (the fictional). Putting all of this together, in this creativecritical contribution we will examine writing that becomes ecstatic, both in form and content, more self-expanding than self-reflective – luminous, slippery, weird.

The traditional view of theory as necessarily distinct from creativity has become increasingly unsatisfactory. In response to such dissatisfaction writers and scholars such as Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Michael Taussig, Saidiya Hartman, McKenzie Wark, Stephen Muecke, Joan Rettalack and others have introduced into the theoretical field qualities associated with creative writing – including, anecdote, memory, poetics and play. In doing so they have expanded the boundaries of what counts as theory and why. In Depression: a public feeling, literary and affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich argues for her use of memoir as a research methodology. She writes: “While I could have written a critical essay that analysed the genre [of depression memoirs], the results seemed rather predictable” (2012, p. 78). This article takes up Cvetkovitch’s desire for a mode “beyond” the predictable to argue that creativecritical writing might be better understood as a methodology than as a genre of writing. It claims the most radical aspect of the creativecritical mode is not so much the refusal of the critical/creative, nonfiction/fiction, objective/personal binaries, as what the doing of the refusal surfaces and therefore demands of the writer.

To grapple with the meaning of creative-critical writing today, it is necessary to begin from within literature. Too often, literary critics take up a disinterested position outside the text, which foregoes the ways in which the critic is always entangled with the text’s meanings. Through a reading of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows (2014), I propose a model for how a critic might read from within a literary text. I demonstrate how Murnane’s fiction – through the use of estrangement – entangles the reader-critic into performing acts of extension, rather than explication. With Murnane’s fiction, a critic must embrace – extend themselves into – a fictional landscape where “it [is] impossible to accept that the last page of a book of fiction was any sort of boundary or limit” (Murnane, 2014, p. 20). Such extended reading opens new possibilities for criticism’s form.

Creativecritical writings and methods in the humanities are examples of what Anna Tsing et al. call arts of living on a damaged planet (Tsing, Bubandt, Gan, & Swanson, 2017). Exploring creativecritical writing as “arts of living”, this essay addresses life writings that reflect a vibrant more-than-human relationship: the topic of gardens and gardening. Combining elements of creative practice and critical analysis to generate and explore new ways of relating to knowledge, creativecritical writings make room for the uncertainties of embodied self-experience and self-reflection, shifting the focus from the largely disembodied knowledge practices which traditional university teaching relies on. The present exploration of what nouns, actions and methodologies to attach to the adjective “creativecritical” takes place in a global climate of threat: “The urgencies of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene demand [a] kind of thinking beyond inherited categories and capacities, in homely and concrete ways” (Haraway, 2016, p. 7).

A “verso” is the side of a leaf that is to be read second. British conceptual artist Cornelia Parker uses the term in her practice to show the deconstruction of everyday objects, and how “even the most insignificant things can trigger a deeper meaning” (2016). This paper uses a Calvino-inspired creativecritical approach toward archival research to explore potential “versos” in archived text. It explores this from four viewpoints: the unwritten, unread, unreadable and unwritable. This exploration is founded on a claim by Italo Calvino: “We write to give the unwritten world a chance to express itself through us” (1983). From the unwritten, this paper moves to the unread as embodied by “unreadable” programming language as verso in digital writing. The final aspects – “unreadable” and “unwritable” – focus on my attempts to read Georges Perec’s materials at the UQ Fryer Library. In August 1981, Perec was writer-in-residence in the French Department, during which he intended to write a novel in fifty-three days, titled 53 Days. My first attempt to read the materials found them “missing”. When located, the notes on offer were not sufficient to comprehend Perec’s proposed unfinished project. I therefore use “unreadable” programming language to program poetry from Perec’s archival remains to explore digital methodological approaches to contemporary creative writing.

“We are making a boat, love” is a bookish multimodal experiment-in-the-making that works with/into/because Ania Walwicz’s Boat (1989) and as an exemplar of Eades’s écriture matière (2015). In this work we boat build a corpus of experimental reflective and material writing that makes visible an extended and always present but often forgotten archive of creativecritical writing in this place named Australia. Following on from methods developed during their longitudinal blackout poetry project Sending Love, Eades and Rendle-Short tore out and sent (by post) a page of Boat to each writer. Writers worked with this page in any way they chose over the course of two weeks, then sent them back to return to the book, to be stitched and glued together, to make a love object, a vessel, a boat. Each writer was invited to write from/with/against these pages and these texts were cut up and rearranged into a series of paste poems that appear throughout the artists’ book. ‘We are making a boat, love’ offers a we-world (Jean Luc-Nancy), a collective, a communitas (Rendle-Short), a many voiced and irreverent conflagration.

“Unleashed” is a creativecritical piece which focuses on my relationship with Artaud, a rescue Kelpie I taught to bark, and in particular on transference love which, for Jacques Lacan, is predicated upon knowledge. “Unleashed” questions The Law, and therefore language as communication, entering as it does into perpetual forms of dialogue and questioning through queer(y)ing the notion of interspecies kinship: Who is training whom in this story? Who is rescuing whom? What is knowledge? What is love? It crosses boundaries between autobiography, poetry and theory, with forays into psychoanalysis, philosophy and behavioural psychology because Antonin Artaud, after whom I named my dog, was a writer of and at the limit. Limit of aesthetic form. Limit of language. Limit of subjectivity. His philosophy is best described as an anti-philosophy. “Unleashed” displays epistemological solidarity with Antonin Artaud at the level of stylistics and performance across divergent discourses, testifying to a poetics of openness and excursiveness in the making. It highlights the shifting, indeed interrupted and illusory, temporal nature of subjectivity, dispelling any sense of certainty utterance such as I Am.