Anything You Can Get Away With: Creative Practices

Contributors

Eddie Tay, Sarah and Schooling

Description

This book takes stock of the practices of writing poetry, taking street photographs, and creative writing scholarship. It adopts both imaginative and critical ways of writing and exploring both texts and practices. I think of myself as a MacGyver-type character, indulging in the art of bricolage, pulling together poetry, street photography, and autoethnography. Marshall McLuhan once wrote that “[a]rt is anything you can get away with” (Medium is the Massage 132-136). I am going to borrow from him and say that “scholarship is anything you can get away with”. Hence, this project is a self-conscious assemblage of sorts, drawing from various genres. It is a scholarly work that draws from the methodology of autoethnography, it is a creative work to do with poetry writing, and it is a critical reflection on the possibilities of street photography. It also features my own poetry and street photography. Although I am working to articulate a socio-philosophy of creative work, teaching, and scholarship situated specifically within Hong Kong and Singapore, I write with an awareness that the issues I examine here are nonetheless relevant to fellow writers and artists in other locales who are likewise searching for ways to talk about what it is that drives them.