VISION
A writing consultancy — formerly Burnish — with a new-ish shtick of para-academic writing against the grain. Para-academic, as in beside the academy where knowledge is produced cumulatively by way of intense research; simultaneously alongside, as on its own path: of thinking differently, writing knowledge differently, being open to experiment and to taking the risks involved.
What forms are adequate to the complexity of lived worlds?
How do we write when knowledge exceeds the dominant academic categories?
How do we hold power, oppression and privilege while also embracing plurality?
How does plurality differ — profoundly — from the toxin of fake news?
THE CREDENTIALS WALL.
University of Cape Town. Founder & Director of BURNISH/OTHERWISE (formerly Burnish).
WRITING OTHERWISE
It is a mosaic of fine art, stories, literature and memoir. The book bulges with foxes, wolves, Apartheid, Riding Hoods, migration, Cape Town and the brown fields of post-industrial Salford in Greater Manchester. Pictures sit beside stories and sit beside fragments of theory. The “antibubble” is the space where the container refuses containment.
The form is the argument – scholarship that lets the seams show.
The writer forms fluid protocols with writing companions, who are hospitable to multiple knowledge worlds, inhabited by humans, animals, insects, trees, plants and sacred objects. Passing Through entails working out in the language gymnasium of puns, poetry and paradoxes, rather than orthodoxies and certainties.
Animals tell stories and trouble our species classifications; witches expose academic intolerance to the refrain of the stench of the fires in which they still burn; there is the interspace world of the bardo - between living and dying. And everywhere there are more worlds of knowing and unknowing than we can imagine.
The Process
BIts & BOBS
A new book. An old book. An occasional retreat or event. A note from the desk. Things appear here.
