The European Master in Creative Writing I am studying on at ArtEZ, in the Netherlands, is getting me used to a question: what can I discover through writing? In conversations with teachers and fellow students, I encounter a culture where artistic research is taken as seriously as scientific research. A scene, an experiment with language, a narrative form can produce knowledge. Even when the result complicates the question we started with.
I am interested in working with a question without knowing the answer in advance, allowing the material to contradict me. Writing, rereading and changing perspective, observing what happens to experience when it takes a form, and what that form allows me to understand.
This work also involves collaborative research practices: sharing materials, readings and experiments with other writers, allowing a question to encounter a different experience and emerge changed. Alongside writing, I produce podcasts as a research method. Working with voice, listening, silence and editing allows me to approach the material from another position, to hear where it hesitates and where it changes direction. The workshops I lead on these themes also become places of inquiry: I propose exercises, listen to what emerges and return to my questions through other people’s words.
My research begins with desertion: leaving a place, a role, a life that seems already decided. Then I found myself returning. I spent a year caring for my father in the house where I grew up and where I had not lived for twenty years. The rooms were familiar, but they asked me to inhabit them differently. They became places of work, waiting, exhaustion and tenderness. Within those gestures, I also began to recognise political questions: who cares for whom, what time can they call their own, what responsibilities do they inherit?
Since then, I have been exploring the unstable boundary between leaving and staying, between belonging and betrayal. Writing about a house means transforming it; writing a memory means opening oneself to the possibility of discovering something in it that was previously unseen. I look for forms in which the personal can reveal the forces that run through it. And I wonder how much of the places we have left continues to inhabit what we write.