Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing

Luminous, playful, intimate, poetic and surprising-this book will touch you, it will take you over, take you inside yourself and outside yourself. It invites you to lose yourself in the material, relational fleshiness of life. Wyatt catches moments of being and becoming in the way only great writers can do. He experiments with thinking otherwise, and asks the reader to encounter the words on the page so they (and you) come alive, escaping into the new, the unexpected, and the vital. He takes you inside a magic circle where anything can happen-and does. Bronwyn Davies, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University Jonathan Wyatt's Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing comes to me like a compelling poem. In general, the book is about the unfolding and enfolding of therapy, stand-up and writing, and indeed the book teaches me a great deal about those subjects, but it is equally about thinking and feeling in the ongoing process of becoming. It is a poetic gift. Its gentle rhythms find their own form. Its language surrounds, seduces. Its creative-relational inquiry, to use Wyatt's rich term, opens new ways of moving through the world. Ronald J. Pelias, Professor Emeritus, Southern Illinois University This is a wonderful book; a book full of elicitations of wonder. Jonathan writes in a style that is seductively conversational, a style that is imbued with affect in a book that never stumbles into proclivities of simply human concerns and emotional response. The book is powerfully energised by the everyday; Jonathan is a hugely adept storyteller and so these vignettes, accounts and exemplifications carry the reader with them into almost unwitting engagements with exciting, profound theorisings with practices of life and facilitations of worlding. Here there are encounters inhabited and animated by clients, family, audiences at stand-up gigs and, through enunciations of these, Jonathan offers diffractive pathways into practices of creative-relational inquiry. This is a book that picks you up, then needs to be carried and can't be put down. Ken Gale, Lecturer, University of Plymouth, UK I love this book. It is going to be a classic in our field. The writing is so inviting, so visceral, so open. The topics the book explores are familiar ones, but Wyatt looks at them in fresh ways that are inspiring both to senior researchers and to those new to qualitative inquiry. And I have never read a better introduction to Deleuze and Guattari: he makes their vocabulary understandable at an ethnographic, bodily and emotional level. I especially love Wyatt's metaphors, like the idea of the `white chalk circle' on the floor for the stand-up comedian being also understood as the chalk circle in a therapeutic session, and in the writer's relationships with real and imagined co-writers and readers. All these are sacred spaces where surprises might happen. One of the things about the book I loved is how Wyatt handles the issue of `trust'. We trust the therapist, the writer, the stand-up. That trust is necessary for qualitative researchers to do their work, and with trust comes other ethical questions: What do we reveal? What do we hide? How do we decide? I trust that Jonathan has led us towards creative-relational inquiry. That is what is most important. Laurel Richardson, Professor Emerita, Ohio State University This book is a wholly original gesture at a world of circuits breathing with the rhythms of something happening, refrains working thresholds of matter and meaning. An ordinary room is a milieu of compositions: the this-ness of the mic, the alcohol, the weather, that shirt. A beautiful, brilliant book, it catches up the reader in the worldly thinking of a shoulder shrugged, a joke, the resonance of a word in a room. Kathleen Stewart, Professor, University of Texas at Austin The form and content of Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers embodied insight into a creative-relational inquiry revealing new paths in the development of qualitative methodologies. With deft reflexivity Wyatt reveals connections and slippages among seemingly disparate experiences of therapy, humor, and writing as inquiry; such connections are a hallmark of groundbreaking qualitative research. This is a transdisciplinary must-read for writers and researchers. Tami Spry, Professor, St. Cloud State University