Writing and the flowering of imagination

How do we imagine feeling? There are two questions there: first, how do we imagine? And then, how do we imagine concepts that are not in themselves tangible objects in the world out there—a flower, a horse, another person–but in here, inside the space behind our foreheads? And a third question: if we imagine feelings, [...]

Do negative emotions make for better creative decisions?

Do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?
That’s one suggestion that comes from the recent article by Jonah Lehrer on the ‘upside’ of sadness. Lehrer examines research, published in Psychological Review by Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist, which offers the idea that sadness and depression [...]

Tense affects between creative & critical

I’ve just put in my abstract for the PhD conference here in Newcastle in April: ‘Creative Friction – How do the different modes of creative practice intersect with the world of traditional academia?’
The theme looks at how the two parts of a creative practice PhD – the critical and creative – interact, and what are [...]

“But we are flux” – Muriel Spark

How are we to articulate emotion? Here’s one way, from novelist Muriel Spark via quantum physics.
For the theorist David Bohm, an understanding of life as “the law of the whole movement” is central to all emotion, to the act of creativity and to the renewal of a fragmented person or fragmented culture.
He [...]

A less justified walking

The walk from Bay Ness Farm, where I was camping for the weekend, and into Robin Hood’s Bay follows an old railway line that has been mapped out as a ‘permissive path’ – not a public right of way, but one that is signposted nonetheless.
The line was part of the Scarborough & [...]