'We generally recognise that creative writing involves a number of intelligences. Linguistic intelligence is the ability to learn and use language. Throughout history, creative writers have sought to have and to improve upon their linguistic intelligence. Interpersonal intelligence is related to effective communication, and while creative writing is an art it has always also been a form of communication. Creative intelligence is of course fundamental to creative writing – creative intelligence being the ability to imagine the new, the distinctive, the unusual, the different, the previously unimaginable. Creative writers often do what they do to in order to apply their creative intelligence. Audiences seek out works of creative writing because of wanting to engage with that application. This exchange creates an individual bond in what is often a communal exchange. For example, an individual writer writes a novel and we buy that novel in the expectation of it appealing to us individually, even though dozens or thousands or even millions of people will buy that same novel.' (Graeme Harper, Editorial introduction)
'This paper is a collaborative reflection by four academic women using our creative writings about oceans and shorelines to think and reflect. We write from discrete locations along the Southern and Eastern coastlines of the invaded continent contemporarily known as Australia. Our methodology incorporates walking and creative writing. This walking-writing methodology has connected us to entangled feelings and lived experiences, including our embodied relationships with the ocean, our work in academia, and our rising levels of anxiety as climate change and related environmental crises coincide with our re-membering of oceans, bodies, rhythms and breath. To illustrate our re-membering, we intersperse fragments from our creative writing with reflective discussion. The social, environmental and political chaos surrounding us seeps into our processes, highlighting how neoliberal ideologies influence our inability to dis/connect, harming both human and beyond-human life. Through walking-writing, we seek to remember what we are losing and to imagine alternative futures.' (Publication abstract)
