Mapping the construction of a gothic adoption fiction and its creative use with secondary students

This thesis takes readers on a tour through the imaginative, theoretical, and practical landscape of writing and publishing a Young Adult novel – Bea’s Witch: a ghostly coming-of-age story. It maps the book’s use as a prompt for students’ creative writing during two residencies in UK secondary schools, resulting in the publication of two anthologies. This arts practice research emerges from a distinct intersection of my identities as an adoptive father, author, educator and academic. Using a storying methodology, this thesis constructs a reader-directed narrative, commented on by a fictional editor and playful footnotes, bringing the creative and critical into dialogue, exploring how each shapes the other. Readers may choose from three pathways on their tour, each exploring a different theoretical lens onto the process: the role of creativity; the representation of adoption; and responses from readers and other writers. As such, this thesis provides a map of the experience of writing, and of teaching writing, surveying a complex Deleuzian rhizome of personal experience, practical writing skill, reader responses and theoretical perspectives. It explores the relationship between an author, a text and its readers, asking how such awareness can enliven the teaching of creative writing, informing the structure of workshops, and shaping the practice of writer-educators. This thesis outlines how the novel, with its depiction of adoption, was used as a model for the residencies, framing themes such as identity, home, displacement, loss and family. This thesis shows that the identity of the writer is a core component in creative writing and its teaching. It argues that educators engaged in their own writing practice can use that experience to inform brave creative writing spaces that value agency, grow confidence and encourage empathy, facilitating a process through which both writer-educators and writer-students can transform their personal experience into expressions of consciousness, into voices that make a difference.