Where does it begin? It lay buried here. Writing about oneself is a mysterious business.

At work, on long car journeys, over lunch, at the pub, on Zoom, on the phone, we have spent years talking about writing. We’ve probably spent more time talking about writing than writing.

This creative-critical essay frames my contribution to the colloquium: a poem entitled ‘Against Misdirection’ which forms part of my feminist adaptation project of the Old English epic Beowulf.

A central movement in creative criticism has been the struggle to position it both within and against the academy. The essay and lecture have been particularly fruitful forms for thinking about intersections between creativity and critical work.

This paper explores how a particular idea that preoccupies me in criticism finds expression also in creative writing, and vice versa; it shows how, although the forms and modes of address of, say, a poem might differ from those of a piece of criticism, they share a great deal.

Inspired by adaptations of Beowulf by John Gardner, Meghan Purvis, Maria Dahvana Headley, Roger Reeves, and Laura Varnam, this paper examines the possibilities of a creative critical approach to the objects of Beowulf.

We are going to talk about creative criticism as feminist practice. We’ll introduce how our own scholarship on underexamined women writers/artists has necessitated genre inventiveness on our own part.

Ten years ago, Stephen Benson and I published an anthology of contemporary criticism entitled Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide (EUP 2014), which included work by John Cage and Sarah Wood, Kevin Kopelson and Eve Sedgwick, amongst quite a few others.