Writing as curatus: archival practices, encounter and response

Armistead Maupin once said of the art of storytelling: 'I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life' (2006). So too, I propose, can curation. At its simplest, curation is the act of organising and maintaining a collection of works or artefacts. Etymologically the word curation comes from the Latin curatus fi·om cura 'spiritual charge of souls' or cura 'meaning to take care of' the act of healing. When it comes to writing and researching and being the curator of your own practice the challenge is to get a bird's-eye view, to think of your work as a whole, to find story threads embedded naturally in the work, even when individual projects seem distinct and unrelated at first glance, in order to allow the essential qualities of the work to come into focus, to resonate. The idea of curation is not necessarily newthat we are curating our own writing and research practice, telling stories about our work. But to name it as such clarifies the approach. This paper sets out some preliminary thoughts on how one might conceive of a body of practice in creative writing as both writing and research. In so doing, I propose three different approaches to archival practice (encounter and response) as a suggested form of curatus. I will draw on my own work to exemplify what I am proposing, namely: archive as 'first place' -those 'embodiments of mind and psyche that belong to the first experience and first mapping' (Malouf 1985, 10); archive as residue, as a way of 'working through' in order to compose new work that is creative and generative; and archive as experience, a way of exploring the possibilities and limitations of the imagination