Introduction

hosted by Newcastle University's Writing Cultures research group in May 2008. The conference had two related strands, critical and creative, and essays by creative practitioners of non-fiction have been published separately as a special issue of TEXT. This is not to say, however, that the essays collected here are distinct from those works by creative practitioners, particularly in their use of form and in their meta-textual concerns with writing the real. While their dominant interest in the art of the real lies in the works of others, these critical essays also include subjective, experiential and practicebased engagements. All are concerned with ways in which 'the real' can be approached, interpreted and read, and the attendant problems that these textual representations of an order outside the symbolic create

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