FINDING HOME: a field journal of creative writing experimentation for exploring the adoptive identity
Creators: name: FULTON, Laura
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 360201
subject: Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting)

description: This creative practice PhD considers ways in which the adopted person can explore her adoptive identity through creative writing experimentation. By revisiting the pre- adoption home through both literal and metaphorical means, the adopted person can connect with the people and place of her past. In doing so, she can develop an understanding of aspects of her identity she may have previously ignored and a greater sense of belonging.

This project is informed by Elspeth Probyn's theory that childhood is a repeatable point of beginning, one we can reimagine through creative writing (Probyn 1996), and by research around the adopted person's fractured sense of identity (Harris, Yngvesson, Mahoney, Lifton, Homans, Howell, Novy). It references studies on self-transformation through creative writing (Bellour, Brien &amp; Eades, Baker) and Anne Marie Fortier, who suggests home may be a destination rather than a place (2001). It also references Marianne Hirsh's theory of postmemory (2012), which highlights the use of photographs, objects and imaginative creation to connect with lost family, and the practice of autoethnography, which argues that the sharing and the hearing of the story is just as important as the telling.

Five different styles of creative writing experiments were produced for this project: A) the novel, B) the epistolary form, C) the memoir, D) autobiografiction and other blended fact/fiction forms and E) the field journal. Writing fiction reconnects the adopted person with family and other figures long gone from his or her life. Writing in the epistolary form reacquaints her with her pre-adoption home by re-creating the voices of people associated with that place, while writing memoir examines the adoptive self through early memories. Writing autobiografiction and other blended forms confesses autobiographical truths in a guarded way, by embedding them within fictional stories, while writing a field journal reconnects the adopted person to the region where she was born in a literal way.

The findings of this research are presented as a creative field journal, one that blends creative, personal and academic writing into one hybrid document. This written work appears alongside secondary representations of images, material forms and sound designed to articulate other ways of knowing, including experiences, emotions and memories, that bring the reader into the world of the researcher and the researched. The creative writing samples included within the framework of this field journal demonstrate how experimentation with different literary techniques can be used to consider voice, form and perspective. The field journal format allows for greater exploration of the past and representations of the self - past, present and emerging - and greater opportunities for revising the self through creative means. It also provides a framework for considering how the past may impact on the adopted person, her sense of belonging and identity and where she fits within the context of family and community.

This PhD contributes to the study of the adoptive identity, addressing the gaps created by (and the stigma surrounding) the institution of closed adoption practiced in many places around the world in the mid twentieth century. It enhances wider debates surrounding identity and belonging, ways of accessing memory and the past and how the adopted person may define (or redefine) home. It considers ways in which the voices of the marginalised can be heard through creative writing and the potential for blending the creative, the personal and the critical.