Textual Healing and the Art of Placing Ideas (thesising)

Image from my thesis (2025)

Dear Void and all who sail in her,

It’s been two years since I last wrote to you (in this form), and as of this year I am now a Doctor of Arts. I teach Creative Writing and Theory and help tertiary students to think about real-world writing practices.

This blog began as a reflective research journal back in 2022 when I was half way through my doctorate. I introduced myself and my project with a tentative first post. This became a space to test the slow unfolding of my research practice. I was testing out my thinking in a social space.

The next day, I wrote a little about engaging with the materiality and affect of the eighteenth-century commonplace book (RB.Ms.Add 35, Fisher Library) and reflected on my research process and practice. I hoped my intellectual curiosity was sincere!

I’m sure I’m not the first to use the sexy, soulful pun 'textual healing' to describe the pleasures of reading and writing. Or the intellectual and emotional restoration found in turning thought into text. And then turning that text over again in thought, in an iterative process. There’s something profoundly reparative about it. I make no apologies for being fierce about this process. I wrote a little about what I mean by textual healing here. This act of repair through reading and writing depends on the spatial conditions in which one reads and writes, conditions that allow thought to settle and return.

It’s the reason I find the system of ‘hot-desking’ used by universities (particularly mine, the University of Sydney) to be anti-intellectual and anti-arts-reasearcher. Hot-desking is a spatial ‘constraint’, where people have no permanent workspace, which appears to offer flexibility but denies us the capacity for meaningful practice. For the foundation of scholarly work is reading research which is deep, slow, associative and textual. One needs a space to gather ideas, somewhere to place thinking. After all, the Latin meaning of ‘thesis’ is literally ‘a placing, a proposition, a setting down’.

Jx

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