Introduction to the Special Focus Section "Creative Critical": To Be or Not to Be

Abstract

What and how does one write for a “journal of creative and critical writing”? A creative piece or a critical article? A poem as distinguished from an essay? How does that mark a contributor as a creative writer, as compared with a critic or noncreative contributor? So, what implications, resonances, and consequences can a “Forum on Creative Critical” have for readers of a journal on creative and critical writing? Will all the essays for the forum be considered critical, or creative, or critical and creative (/, &, –), making them relevant to the working ambit of the journal? How about dropping the and to refigure our experiences of writing and thinking? What happens if we indulge in a complete deletion of the subtitle? It is like a city bred man walking into the forest and trying to find a place to sit; there will exist patches and stretches that will be inviting for him to sit and relax, but a few concerns niggle him in the form of thorns, insects, stones, and upturned and disheveled earth. And, the decision to sit will receive several rounds of reconsideration before he can sight a site to settle in that, albeit is a part of the forest, is still less “foresty” (not forest enough), to accommodate an urbanite consciousness. He will find a “place” that will be a part of the forest without becoming or being a forest, an intersection of consciousness in that this moment refuses to be considered as separate but is experienced as “together-apart.” The interlocking and enfolding consciousness lives through an unaware moment of togetherness, a mutually invested habitation where the city and the forest blur their boundaries of separation and become, inconspicuously, on most occasions, a pathway into each other, into the domains of identity, character, and patterns. Such shadows and seductions of the and and overlapping consciousness where roads are, most often, marks under ceaseless state of erasure ghost all the contributions in this forum: Sumana Roy insightfully connects walking and the movement of feet (paayechari) with