Dreaming of Creativity: Imaging and Imagining the Creative Self in Memoir

• Published in: M/C journal 2020-03, Vol.23 (1)
• Main Author: Brien, Donna Lee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1441-2616; 1441-2616
• DOI: 10.5204/mcj.1641

Where can creative people find models of creativity and possible creative selves? How do they find examples of how others have imaged and imagined the creative identity that they dream of inhabiting? This discussion focuses on book-length memoirs written by creative writers, surveying these texts as a sub-genre of popular memoir and seeking to contribute to understanding of both the creative self and practices of writing about creative process and creative identity. A number of published book-length memoirs include discussion of the creative process and creativity. Despite memoir being a popular and enduring category of popular literature, such works have not been investigated as a group. Nor, with rare exceptions, have individual memoirs in this group received significant critical or scholarly attention.MethodConsidering qualitative research, Giorgi states, “nothing can be accomplished without subjectivity, so its elimination is not the solution. Rather how the subject is presented is what matters, and objectivity itself is an achievement of subjectivity” (205). This entanglement of objectivity and subjectivity when conducting qualitative research – and attendant notions of bias, influence and, therefore, the validity of results – is especially apparent in what has been described as “insider research”. As its name suggests, in “insider research” the researcher is directly personally involved in, connected to, or otherwise privileged in relation to, the subject under consideration (Robson). While such research has long been charged with a lack of validity (LeCompte and Goetz), others have asserted the importance of the “insider view”, asserting how, in some research, including in interpretivist methodology, the researcher’s perceptions from this position are valued above the “outsider view” (see, Blaikie 115). Insider research is often used as a descriptor of work-based inquiries, where the researcher acts professionally within the profession under investigation (Costley, Elliott, and ‎Gibbs) – often called “practitioner research” (Robson 382) – and is common in professionally-focused research such as in social work (Kanuha), education (Sikes and Potts) and nursing (Asselin). This work-based context may be widened to incorporate situations where researchers are members of the specific community under consideration (Rooney 6). This discussion mobilises this awareness of the insider perspective in considering the “creative memoir”, which I am here defining a