In choosing the theme of Nostalgia and Escapism for the 2021 edition of INK, the editorial team have offered a context for creative work that is far more than a simple prompt to retreat and indulge in gentle, sentimental fantasy. The theme places the craft of imagination and reverie at centre stage, in a collection that offers a space for narratives of pleasure and healing as much as longing, loss, reflection, and critique. 

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Nostalgia and escapism are key to the experience of writing as well as reading. They serve both as method and motivation for acts of creative invention, however, they are both tinged with paradoxical contrast. Often described as ‘bittersweet’, the pleasures of nostalgia are cut through with a sense of loss; a flavour of longing that mingles mourning and joy. The feeling is often invoked for an affective thrill, and hence nostalgia’s usefulness in marketing and politics has opened it up to criticism. In cultural theory of the last few decades, nostalgia has been connected with self-deception and false memory on a personal level, and on a cultural level to false histories, false consciousness, the repackaging of revolutionary culture by capitalism, rose-tinted nationalism, and reactionary politics. 

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We should not forget our own creative agency in all of this. Nostalgia should be seen neither as a plaything nor as a danger, but, as Janelle Wilson suggests, a sanctuary for the creation of new meaning. Both in a personal and collective sense, nostalgia is the act of constructing a sense of ‘home’, it is an act of generating and ordering meaning from what is, in reality, a chaotic past. Whether this construction is focused on material spaces or values and feelings, and whether from personal memories or collective ones, this remembering, constructing memory and emotion, is both a source of pleasure as well as a way to generate a sense of the self, and one’s past actions, to clarify and focus on the meanings of self and home. As Wilson puts it ‘nostalgia may give us the key to a gate between the lessons of the past and the needs of the present.’1 She wonders if nostalgia’s antonym might be ‘dystopia’. Their opposition mirrors, if in a slightly funny way, and skews past and future. In a dystopia, a longed-for ‘home’ is replaced by a world in which freedom is lost. In a nostalgic past, we are free to construct an idealised and imaginary meaning, and a sense of our own selves and actions. 

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Many of the writings collected in INK 2021 explore questions of reconstruction, narrativisation, and invention, where we retain our freedom to wonder and construct. In one piece, an unreliable narrator’s scanty childhood memories pose questions about the grey area between self-protection and self-deception, burying facts and contexts in footnotes. Another piece calls on poetic description to manifest a metaphysics of the deeply physical experience of longing. Another story offers an endearing parable for rethinking tropes of artistic genius. As we see in these examples, creative practice offers a space in which to explore meaning, experience, and identity, especially that of the artist and writer. But it also starts to offer ways to ask questions about the processes through which meaning is produced, the experiences and rhetorics of longing and the promises of escape, rather than the fact of them. As Buckaroo Banzai says, ‘wherever you go, there you are.’2

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The writers and artists whose work is collected here include students from across the University, and disciplines that extend beyond those you might expect to produce such an impressive cohort of creative writers. Within the context of more structured studies, the importance of spaces that invite the ongoing development of a personal craft, not only of writing but of reflection, is not to be underestimated. As an academic whose work has focused on conducting and supporting transdisciplinary research in the arts, I have often noticed and encouraged the exploration of ‘free’ spaces between disciplines, on the margins. It is often in the ‘extra-curricular’ where really rich insights are found; these are the spaces where we test our knowledge. I am glad to see that INK is here to provoke and capture these explorations. 

 

- Dr Hannah Drayson, 

Lecturer in Digital Art & Technology/Immersive Media Design at the University of Plymouth,

April 2021