Object biography and its potential in creative writing

ABSTRACT

While biographies are generally understood to narrate the lives of people, the biographical form can also be used to write the life histories of objects of material culture. This article investigates the object biography (sometimes referred to as the ‘artefact biography’) and proposes that this is a form with rich potential for creative writing practitioners and researchers. As well as defining the object biography and its use in various disciplinary contexts, the article also profiles how this form of life writing has been utilised by creative writers, in order to consider its capacity to contribute to practice and research in the discipline of creative writing. Contemporary writers discussed include Edmund de Waal, Bambi Ward and Marele Day, with reference also made to the work of Hans Christian Andersen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliza Cook, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anna Sewell.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative writing
• object biography
• biography
• publishing
• academic writing
• writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Donna Lee Brien, PhD, is Professor, Creative Industries at Central Queensland University, Australia, where she leads the Creative Arts Research Training Academy. Her latest books are Empowerment Strategies for Nurses (with Margaret McAllister, Springer, 2019), Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice in Australasia (with Quinn Eades, UWA Publishing, 2018), Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (with Lorna Piatti-Farnell, 2018) and Forgotten Lives: Recovering Lost Histories through Fact and Fiction (with Dallas Baker and Nike Sulway, 2017).

Notes

1 For a recent example of this, published in a creative writing journal, TEXT, see Nelson and de Matos 2015.

2 Interestingly, despite possessing a fascinating biographical story, little else seems to have been produced on Elizabeth Cook neé Batts’ life since Day’s book, except a small number of online articles and blog posts (see ANMM [2013]; Robson [2007]).

3 Group biographies of pairs, or larger groups, of people connected in some way have been written since at least the 1970s (Peters 1981; Langmore 1984), and this collectively-focused form is currently not only growing in popularity with biographers and historians, but also emerging as a topic in biographically-focused scholarship (Caine 2010, 59–64).