Introduction: The Art of the Real

This edited special issue of TEXT is derived from papers originally presented at The Art of the Real: National Creative Non-fiction Conference, organised by Kim Cheng Boey, Keri Glastonbury and Ros Smith of Newcastle University's Writing Cultures research group in May, 2008. The particular focus we've chosen for this collection is papers by practitioners, writers of the real. The papers from the conference selected for this issue break down perceived institutional divisions between critical and creative practice and problematise simple separations of truth and fiction, art and the real. These contested binaries are often interrelated in the context of tertiary creative writing practice, where writers are also required to critically reflect on genre. Such discussions about the relationship between fact and fiction have set up something of a template for critical writing by writers of creative non-fiction, especially those studying for higher degrees. The engagement of these papers with critical and creative practice within the academy is supplemented by other papers dealing with the productive tensions between fact and fiction, creativity and critical analysis more broadly. The resources of genre are repeatedly invoked as a way of negotiating these divides, and the diversity of generic forms represented in this collection presses at the boundaries by which creative non-fiction might be defined.