Creative practice – finding the right mentor

ABSTRACT

I am currently the third PhD student of creative writing in the history of my university. I do not think we have a graduate yet … It's a bit of a lonely journey. (2014, pers. comm. December 10)

This paper argues the importance to the creative practitioner in finding the right mentor as an axis for growth. The discussion interchanges the terms ‘artist’ and ‘practitioner’, not to denote broad scopes of diverse disciplines but to mean the creative writer in a research setting. It applies the term ‘creative practice’ to mean the duality of artist and scholar in action research. The personal communication from the Australasian PhD student is witness to the solitary milieu in which artists in doctoral settings find themselves. The right mentor can trigger or catalyse insight to the solitary artist to whom isolation is not an optimal setting; collaboration and participation are vital elements providing important tensions that add value to a work. Wings from the artist’s isolation, runways to the ‘leap’, may emerge in the form of another author, a supervisor, a peer reviewer, an editor—all seemingly non-collaborative participants—whose association is crucial to locating and asserting the best form of the artist’s work.

KEYWORDS:

• creative practice
• mentoring
• supervision
• peer review
• editing
• constructive criticism

Notes on contributor

Eugen Bacon studied at Maritime Campus – Greenwich University, UK, less than two minutes’ walk from The Royal Observatory of the Greenwich Meridian. Her arty muse fostered itself within the baroque setting of the Old Royal Naval College, and Eugen found herself a computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She is now a PhD candidate in Writing by artefact and exegesis at Swinburne University of Technology. Her short story ‘A puzzle piece’ was shortlisted (top 10) in the Lightship Publishing (UK) international short story prize 2013 and is published in Lightship Anthology 3.