Editorial

Bukker Tillibul

The Online Journal of Writing and Practice-led Research

Bukker Tillibul is a refereed journal that provides the discipline of Professional Creative Writing (accredited by the ARC as code 400103) with a much needed forum for discussion and debate. It also fosters better Research Quality Framework outcomes for students and staff engaged in research in this discipline.

Professional Creative Writing research is a relatively new discipline, which requires a certain degree of explanation of just how practice operates in the production of knowledge. Conceptual and theoretical frameworks provide a means through which to discuss practice as research and to locate the enquiry within the context of historical, socio-political and contemporary ideas relating to practice. As was noted at the last Australian Association for Writing Programs held in Brisbane in November 2006, there is to date no forum that specifically invites intellectual exchanges between researchers on practice-led research. Though journals such as TEXT, New Writing and In/Stead partly fill this gap, Bukker Tillibul focuses more explicitly on this issue.

Higher Research Degrees in Writing are increasingly led by practice. An articulation of their process and its significant moments through the exegesis or research paper is essential to locating creative work within the field of practice and theory. It is also part of the replication process that establishes Professional Creative Writing as a stable research discipline able to withstand peer and wider assessment and hence be validated alongside other fields. With the implementation of the Research Quality Framework, it is of critical importance that HRD candidates as well as academics be offered the possibility to publish their findings in specialised journals. Bukker Tillibul fulfils this aim.

Bukker Tillibul is also refereed in its Creative Writing pages (poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction). This is because ‘for the purposes of the RQF, the definition of research is consistent with a broad notion of research and experimental development (R&D) as comprising “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge”'. Indeed, increasingly creative work is granted the status of DEST publication if published in a refereed journal. This is by no means an established trend, but it needs to be developed and (re)established.