'Connective Tissuing Language' Stretches Creative Writing's Methodological Possibilities

As an acupuncturist and creative writer, I work with flesh and words. Put another way, my creative practices blend the ancient needling arts with contemporary literary arts, specifically, the lyric essay. As a creative practice researcher, I think transversally between the body and ideas as I write a series-or make a body-of lyric essays. In my PhD I aim to demonstrate that the lyric essay form is capable of re-presenting the body as a group of becoming bodies alive with possibilities, alive with knowledge. Like the astounding capacities of the human body, the lyric essay, I propose, is a form flexible and agile enough to slip out of dualistic traps and flow into the multiplicities of the fluxes. As a conceptual analogue for the structural elements of the lyric essay, I draw on biomedicine's recent re-discovery of connective tissue as dynamic and alive. To add critical and sinewy rigour, perspectives from New Materialism and process philosophy are ficto-critically embedded into the bodies of the lyric essays. By doing so, I aim to demonstrate how my idea of connective tissuing language is a new vital material that has the capacity to stretch Creative Writing's developing epistemological body.