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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).

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: editorial
Introduction
Debra WainMelanie Saward
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.
Special Issues: scholarly article
All things degrade: an autoethnographic study of memory and postcards
Johanna Ellersdorfer
This piece is an auto-ethnographic essay that hinges around a series of blank art postcards collected by my mother in the early 1980s.
This essay presents both scholarly and personal insight into how, through the deployment of objects, poems come into the world, operate, and inhabit the life of a reader.
Special Issues: scholarly article
The key of knowledge
Claudia R. Barnett
‘The key of knowledge’ uses a socio-historical, Foucauldian framework and creative writing research methodology to examine Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ as a discourse of disciplinary punishment.
Special issues: creative works
the blue case
Sue Hall Pyke
This work is a case of a worlding with every wording: material textuality creates a poetic space for thick description that helps me see the world as textual material.