Essaying bodies, bodying essays: write in the middle is a creative-critical research practice

This PhD blends three practices that are not ordinarily put together: creative writing, acupuncture, and process-oriented philosophy (e.g. Spinoza, William James, Whitehead). An important aim of this practice-led research is to re-present notions of body through the writing of a series of essays that demonstrate how creative and critical components can move together within one body, and also within a collection of text-bodies. The PhD explores the relation between `lyric' and `essay' and how this relationship can generate a more-than quality that has the potential to affectively move the [dissertation's] body beyond the sum of its parts. The practice of experimenting with the essay's capacity to carry the force of thought forming can, by extension, make creative practice research a site for the production of knowledge. The project demonstrates how a method of making becomes the methodology. That is, the process of thinking and making, rhizomatically, from the Deleuzian middle, not only activates the practice(s), but also becomes the outcome. Or, as Whitehead says, "Knowledge is drawn up with the immediacy of its own importance, as fresh as fish.&quot