Purpose -Deleuze and Guattari have argued that in art, including literature, the senses get hold of the world in a non-conceptual or "sensational" way, adding "new varieties" that can lead to new ways of knowing and seeing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of multi-disciplinary, practice-led research in creative writing as a form of knowledge making in qualitative research. Design/methodology/approach -The author uses her own writing, especially the novel Swimming (Vanark Press, 2009), which is situated in the broader context of feminist fiction writing, as a subversive feminist project that aims to intervene in and challenge the dominant narratives of what it means to be a woman, by creating "alternative figurations" of "woman" which highlight differences among women and enhance our understanding of "woman" as a complex and multiple subject always "in process". Findings -By using her own practice of fiction writing and research as a case study, the author explores the ways that constructing an imagined narrative -in this case a novel -can make a contribution to knowledge and raise questions about representation, truth and subjectivity. Originality/value -In this paper, through a few examples from her novel, the author's aim has been to write a narrative of the process, of "material thinking" that led to the final work. Keywords Narratives, Creative writing, Feminism, Practice-led research, Creative arts research Paper type Research paper "Miscarriage is a normal part of the process of having children," Dr Wright has already told her. Her mother and aunt try to convince her that she's on the right path now.But what about those other stories? The stories they censor: the stories of women who desperately want children, who pray to saints and angels, who endure miscarriage after miscarriage, those women who never get pregnant and remain childless forever.There are no stories, of course, of women happy to be childless. Childless women don't exist in the world her mother and aunt live in -but Kate knows childless women, women like Penny who are happy not to have children, who find other ways through their lives. The stories her mother and aunt tell her are the stories of the journey to motherhood; they involve struggle, grief and faith, and in the end there is always a baby -inside those stories no other journey is imaginable.Kate doesn't ask about the other women and the other stories. Lately she's been feeling like the killjoy in too many conversations. At home that night Kate wonders about the women who lived fifty or sixty or a hundred years ago -the Australian women of her grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' generation, English born women with long skirts and hair tied in neat buns. What did the barren among them do -no doctors to artificially inseminate them, to offer them the eggs of another woman, or fertility drugs that would pushstart their ovaries. What did they do? No career to get into, to give life to another shape. What did they do, the barren women of those generations? They had no ...
