This special issue includes traditional articles and creative works that explore the fission between the arena of the mind and the concrete, tangible things of the world around us. The scholars who present their work in this Special Issue were invited to contribute their research in the form of a traditional article or creative work that explores the fission between the arena of the mind and the concrete, tangible things of the world around us; to explore that “unexplored world” of “memory, emotion, and untapped creativity” (Pollack, 2011: 230).
The events of 2020, lockdowns and self-isolating, meant that we were, perhaps more than ever, surrounded by our own things, offering an opportunity to see these things differently and maybe more clearly. Bill Brown explains that: “the work being done… under thing theory is addressing how it is that the inanimate object world helps to form and transform human beings. Part of that is to say: how does our material environment shape us?” (Brown, 2012).
We, as writers and researchers, are concerned with that which forms and transforms us and the world around us. These catalysts of formation and transformation can be people, experiences, landscapes, and sometimes they can be the seemingly everyday objects that surround us. As Brown points out, the things that impact on us do not have to be those of “economic value in Marxist terms”; they can be "small things’ of “symbolic value” (Brown, 2012).
- Special Issues: scholarly articleIn this article, Rogers and Fulton introduce their cherished objects and explore the complex layers of attachment that their items generate and express.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThis article seeks to conceptualise the active quality of a souvenir collection in relation to processes of autobiographical memory.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleIn this fictocritical essay I enact methods and processes by which object encounters can be written and consider how the relationship between writer and objects can be co-constitutive.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleTaking an unassuming object as a prompt, the author conducts a creative interrogation into the impact of objects on writing practice.