Introduction
I’d been trying to write a story. It wasn’t a story about illness, not at this stage. It was about artificial intelligence, and anthropomorphism, and how we reveal ourselves through our use of technology; about how a non-human presence in a relationship can be used to voice the unacceptable, to express what we’re reluctant to speak or to hear. This story was going to be part of a collection of uncanny short fiction about contemporary science and technology, which I was writing as part of my doctoral research. But I couldn’t make it work, and after some months I set the thing aside and moved on.
(I’m beginning this article with a story about failing to write a story in part to reflect the way that creative writing can operate to produce praxical knowledge, from research initiated and carried out through practice [Gray 3]. In the reflexive, looping process whereby practice informs the direction of research—the thinking and reading and writing that then feed back into the ...