Creativity: The fire in the fennel stalk

How can a change be brought about, one that would allow creative writing to be identified as research in Australian universities? Writing’s whole content and context revolves around mastering language, something that everyone uses every day, and this means it is linked to speaking - to the voice, the basis of our communication. From this an assumption arises that writing is something we can all do. As one writer said to me: ‘there’s a status thing about it, which belittles the creative effort. Anyone can write poetry. Uncle Jim did when there was a wedding last week, and it had everyone’s name in it’ (North 2004: 139). If ‘we can all’ do it, then it follows that someone who is doing what everyone else can do should not be bestowed with more ‘capital’ than the rest of us. Because of this attitude, creativity attached to creative writers in the academy lacks status and cannot easily win research funding.