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Creative non-fiction is a fictocritical, genre-defying form that shifts‘ between fragmentary modes of experimentation, from essayistic to poetic to theoretical, employing autobiographical elements of story-telling techniques’ 12, with many proponents using it in opposition to standardised forms of academic writing. Creative non-fiction is not formless or unstructured, but at the same time it challenges neoliberal assumptions of what academic writing is and should do. In my own writing, I use it as a method of introducing a voice that is both creative and investigative, which reflects on events and history to critically engage with the environment in ways that are unexpected to both researcher and reader. Detailed below is an example of my engagement with this form. My intention in this piece was not to create a point-evidence-explain structure, but to contextualise two situations that resonate together for me, and leave the reader haunted by them. The piece documents the first leg of a psychogeographic journey in Stoke-on-Trent in early 2018. It re-covers the steps of an EDL march that took place there 8 years previously.
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Fig. 1 Hanley Bus Station( Photograph by Stephen Seabridge, 2018). 13
12
Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities( London: Routledge, 2005), 167.
13
Stephen Seabridge, Hanley Bus Station, 2018, figure 1.