Susanna Laaksonen

Small dance – the somatic emergence of the writer’s artistic process The writer’s creative process is a little researched topic. For a time, literary theory paid little attention to the writer. Professional writing education emphasized product, not process. Creativity research focused on maximizing productivity. Artistic research has become an avenue for artists themselves to elucidate how art creates meaning. Literary artistic research emerges in this context. Today, cognition is increasingly recognized as an embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, and affective process. In the realm of continental philosophy, corporal hermeneutics and body poetics address how the body creates meaning and becomes present in text. Somatic methods from therapeutic contexts are making their way into writing pedagogy. My research project is aimed at understanding the embodied experience of the writer’s process. I will recruit 6-9 creative writers from diverse backgrounds and lead workshops featuring freewriting exercises and somatics. We will trace the felt sense of emerging work. I will interview the group members using a micro-phenomenological research approach to elicit precise descriptions of somatic experiences and to analyze the differences and similarities My thesis will intersperse participants’ writing, interviews, descriptions and analysis. I will produce a piece of experimental writing that puts aside analysis, metabolizing instead my own experience as writer/researcher. Writers are uniquely equipped to describe the sensory qualities of their process. My project leads to a fuller, fleshed-out understanding of writing as an art form and creativity as an embodied practice.