GOLEM Speaks

Dr Kevan Manwaring is an alumnus of the University of Leicester, lecturer and  Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. During 2014-18 he under took a Creative  Writing PhD, involving practice-based research into the novel form. He won a  national science fiction prize with his no vel, Black Box, where he first star ted to  write about Artificial Intelligence. At Leicester he won several commissions from the  Centre for New Writing, including ‘GOLEM Speaks’

Heavy Weather: a creative intervention

Weaving history, literature, and environmental humanities with sections of life-writing (travel-writing based upon various long-distance walks), this hybrid form explores narratives of Climate Change from the very earliest (eg, Ruskin's observation in the 19th Century) to the very latest (eg news reports from the summer of 2019). It is the culmination of a wide range of research from the archival to the experiential. This was a creative keynote for the Gothic Nature symposium, University of Roehampton, September, 2019. It was edited and published in the peer-reviewed Gothic Nature journal in Spring, 2021. Manwaring, K. (2021) HEAVY WEATHER: A Creative Intervention. Gothic Nature. 2, pp. 285-294. Available from: https://gothicnaturejournal.com

The Knowing: A Fantasy an epistemological enquiry into creative process, form, and genre

This creative writing PhD thesis consists of a novel and a critical reflective essay. Both articulate a distinctive approach to the challenges of writing genre fiction in the 21st Century that I define as ‘Goldendark’ – one that actively engages with the ethical and political implications of the field via the specific aesthetic choices made about methodology, content, and form. The Knowing: A Fantasy is a novel written in the High Mimetic style that, through the story of Janey McEttrick, a Scottish-Cherokee musician descended from the Reverend Robert Kirk, a 17th Century Episcopalian minister from Aberfoyle (author of the 1691 monograph, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies), fictionalises the diasporic translocation of song- and tale-cultures between the Scottish Lowlands and the Southern Appalachians, and is a dramatisation of the creative process. In the accompanying critical reflective essay, ‘An Epistemological Enquiry into Creative Process, Form and Genre’, I chart the development of my novel: its initial inspiration, my practice-based research, its composition and completion, all informed both by my practice as a storyteller/poet and by my archival discoveries. In the section ‘Walking Between Worlds’ I articulate my methodology and seek to defend experiential research as a multi-modal approach – one that included long-distance walking, illustration, spoken word performance, ballad-singing and learning an instrument. In ‘Framing the Narrative’ I discuss matters of form – how I engaged with hyperfictionality and digital technology in destabilising traditional conventions of linear narrative and generic expectation. Finally, in ‘Defining Goldendark’ I articulate in detail my approach to a new ethical aesthetics of the fantasy genre

Marginalia: graffiti, urban coding and the semiotics of the street.

The Hidden Stories app delves deep into the untold history of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, bringing the area to life through poetry, plays and narrative non-fiction. The app operates via locative technology that triggers fragments of writing at specific locations; the texts are effectively connected with the location and history they are exploring, with content being unlocked as the user moves around the area. Each text is displayed differently within the app, taking advantage of the framework to emphasise the ideas being presented by the writers and reflecting the concept of hidden stories. Hidden Stories was commissioned by Phoenix and developed by Cuttlefish Multimedia as part of Affective Digital Histories, a research project investigating how communities change with urban decline and regeneration. The five pieces of creative writing used in the app were commissioned and edited by Corinne Fowler, director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing. To find out more visit affectivedigitalhistories.org.uk

Performing Kirk: a search for authenticity in the dramatisation of the life of the 'Fairy Minister', Reverend Robert Kirk.

Is it possible to achieve authenticity in the fictionalisation of a historic figure? To research my novel, The Knowing – a Fantasy, extensive experiential and archival research was undertaken. Having covered the experiential approach elsewhere (2020), here I focus primarily upon the archival. In this palaeographic enquiry I describe the discovery of a possible lost manuscript by the Reverend Robert Kirk – a version of his famous monograph, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, Fairies (1691). I analyse its provenance and content in a comparative study with extant MSS, contemporary accounts, and scholarship. I situate this enquiry within my own practice-based research undertaken for my PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester (2014-2018) and what this potential discovery means for Kirk scholarship. I draw upon the work of Scott (1815), Lang (1892), Rossi (1957), Sanderson (1976), Stewart (1990), Hunter (2001; 2012) and Warner (2006), as well as more recent scholarship by Maxwell-Stuart (2014), Baker (2014), DeGroot (2015), and Temple (2019). How the archival discoveries revealed secrets of Kirk’s life (through painstaking textual analysis and transcription), and how the context of these discoveries (research libraries; a Scottish castle; a winter’s writing retreat and long-distance summer walks) all fed into the portrayal of Kirk and his world, will be discussed

Walking Between Worlds: In defence of experiential research

This article explores the benefits and challenges of experiential research for a PhD novel in the contemporary fantasy genre and how this has significant qualitative impacts upon the “early drafting” stage of the creative process (Neale 2018). Drawing upon the extensive field research undertaken in the Scottish Borders, with its rich palimpsest of oral tradition, traumatic historicity, and touristic gilding, the article shows how this informed the emergent multimodal approach, resulting in a transmedia novel – one that ‘performs’ the liminality experienced according to a reader-response model. The Scottish Border ballad of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (Roud 219: Child 37) is used as a map – both in the field trips to associated locations, and in the creative-critical process itself. Within the ritualised landscape of the ballad three roads offer three ontological choices for not only the protagonist, but also the researcher-writer. Layered over this is Walter Benjamin’s three-step model of the musical, the architectonic, and the textile. How does one negotiate the various tensions of different disciplines? How does one avoid displacement activity in a protracted research project that embraces different modes of enquiry? When and how does one ‘return’ from this crossed threshold? And in what form can one’s findings withstand critical scrutiny, while retaining faith with the initial vision, the demands of the narrative, and the expectations of the reader

'The Rememberers' (We Are A Many-Bodied Singing Thing)

Focus: Researching and writing an ecological short story about endangered species. ‘We Are a Many-Bodied Singing Thing’ is an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry inspired by endangered species, commissioned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ‘Back from the Brink’ project and published in 2020. The brief was for positive speculative writing that raised awareness about 28 threatened species highlighted by the project, including the Violet Click Beetle, the Royal Splinter Cranefly, Eagle’s-claw Lichen, Coral-tooth Fungi, Knothole Moss and the Noctule Bat. Using the ‘Back from the Brink’ resources as a starting point, the author researched a cross-section of endangered species. He combined this with field research, visiting ancient oaks in situ, various botanical gardens, the insect house at Cotswold Wildlife Park, and the Eden Project in Cornwall. The challenge was to then turn this scientific information into a creative narrative. When contemplating current and imminent species extinction it is very easy to slide into despair. As with much contemporary fiction that contemplates the stark existential threat of the Climate Emergency the predictable pathway (in terms of the storyworld paradigm) is one of dystopia. Utopia is a lot harder to imagine. But perhaps a more nuanced and realistic conceptualisation is one Margaret Atwood called ‘ustopia’. And so, this is the approach the author takes. His near-future narrative imagines a world with many problems, but like Pandora’s Box, there is also, critically, hope. ‘The Rememberers’ in Kevan’s story are a group of ecological resistance fighters who use their memories as storage for the minutiae of endangered species. This co-opts Cicero’s ‘method of loci’ (from De Oratore) and turns it into a kind of ark. As a professional storyteller and performance poet, the author has made a study of mnemonic devices and has used them extensively in his performance to memorize text (see The Bardic Handbook, Gothic Image, 2006). This long-term experiential research (1998-) has informed the story in this anthology. The story has been ‘tested’ out on live audiences (via virtual open mics during the 2020 lockdown), including during ‘Writing the Earth’ (AUB, April 2021), the 2-day symposium exploring creative writing and the environment organised by the author, in which creative responses to the climate crisis were extensively discussed with students and a range of guest speakers. ‘The Rememberers’ encourages readers to commit to action, while demonstrating the power of words, especially when embodied. The effort required to learn something by heart is an act of honouring. As a regional organiser for the national annual recitation contest founded by former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, ‘Poetry by Heart’, the author has seen this first hand: how committing a text to memory can be very empowering – which is the dramatic arc of the story’s main protagonist. Thus, the story itself explores the mnemonic process and the valuation of ecological knowledge within ‘storied’ communities. The short story that resulted from this range of research was included in the published anthology from the RSPB

Speaking New Languages: Exploring the Landscape of Cross-Disciplinary Research

There are many dynamic communities of practice within the arts but not all of them can claim to have their own research culture. Consequently, many researchers become adept at co-opting theoretical frameworks, research methods, and language from other disciplines. But what happens when we use concepts and language developed elsewhere to address our own particular disciplinary concerns? Language matters, and as the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted, language is not a nomenclature—it is not simply a question of linking a set of words to a pre-existing set of things; different languages divide up the continuum of the world differently. It follows that the ways that we engage with other disciplines potentially has a bearing on how we see, think and talk about our home discipline. This conference explores the challenges and benefits of research that features significant interaction between two or more disciplines. It will explore [even contest] ‘trans-’, ‘cross-’ and ‘multi-’ disciplinary approaches to research

Finding the Line: A triangulation between walking, multimodality, and embodied poetics

Deploying a customised embodied poetics (after Lorde 1984; Cancienne & Snowber 2003; Peary 2018) and primarily drawing upon a two-week coast-to-coast walk across the north of England undertaken during the summer of 2019, this article is structured as a walk in 5 stages (i. Setting Out; ii. View from a Hill; iii. Drifting; iv. Back-bearing; v. Returning). It explores the effectiveness of this experiential approach for the composition of poetry. Walking can be in itself a form of creativity, an act of subversion, or deep reflection — a way of going inward as much as outward. The poem written in situ can be a form of qualia-capture for the little epiphanies of secularised pilgrimage. Sister methodologies such as the psychogeographical dérive (Debord 1954) are drawn upon, but a customised approach is forged: the way of the dériviant who transgresses borders and forms. Extending this approach, a multi-modal approach is discussed, included Twitter poetry, audio recordings, and artwork. Restricted from further long-distance walks during the Covid-19 Lockdown of Spring 2020, Nan Shepherd’s ‘deep mapping’ approach (2011) is adopted, continuing the practice-led exploration within the local universe of the Wiltshire Downs. Finally, the benefits of such an embodied praxis are suggested

Ways Through the Wood: The Rogue Cartographies of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle as a Cognitive Map for Creative Process in Fiction

In this article I would like to discuss Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle – Mythago Wood (1984); Lavondyss (1988); The Bone Forest (1991); The Hollowing (1993); Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory (1998); and Avilion (2009) – in the context of creative writing praxis. I will argue that Holdstock’s Mythago Wood Cycle offers a powerfully resonant metaphor for the creative process: how stories are created and written (informed by the oral tradition), and how we, as readers and listeners, interact with them. As a novelist, scholar of folklore and folk tales, and professional storyteller it is something I am familiar with and fascinated by, and it dove-tails with my current Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester: a dramatization of the creative process in novel form, and so this is a reflection on my ongoing investigation into creative writing research through practice