Writing the Everyday

Jonathan Wyatt is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry and a co-director of the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh. Originally an English teacher and youth worker, he worked for ten years as a counsellor in a doctors’ surgery alongside being Head of Professional Development at the University of Oxford, before heading north to Scotland in 2013.

• Acknowledgements Chapter 1 – An Everyday Beginning Chapter 2 – Everyday Writing, January 2023: Small Talk Chapter 3 – Writing, Therapy, and Everyday Inquiry Chapter 4 – Everyday Writing, February 2023: Reckoning Chapter 5 – Breaking: An Everyday Body Chapter 6 – Everyday Writing, March 2023: Place Chapter 7 – How: Lockdown Everyday (1) Chapter 8 – Everyday Writing, April 2023, in the Second Person Chapter 9 – Recognition: Lockdown Everyday (2) Chapter 10 – Everyday Writing, May 2023: Time Chapter 11 – Losing Things, or Things that Leave Chapter 12 – Everyday Writing, June 2023: Writing-with Chapter 13 – Loss: The Poetics of the Everyday Chapter 14 – Everyday Writing, November 2023: Playlisting Father and Son Chapter 15 – An Everyday Ending References Index

“Here, the everyday is a plane of composition unfolding and passing at a creaturely pace. It holds inclusionary imaginations in the intimacy of a round table, a tone of home, trauma’s cadence, an insidious secret. Writing with it is a prompt, a push, a detour on a scrap weighted with atmospheric fill; a hand grips a mic too tight, a front door is left open, voices accrete. Theory is in the body; everything is thought’s muscles in the worlding of the moment.”Professor Kathleen Stewart, University of Texas, Austin, USA“I love this book: the clarity of it, the careful weaving together of the everyday and creative-relationality, with autoethnography, new materialism, and the act of writing itself. Jonathan explores what words do and can do and might do, as they capture palpable moments of everyday life. There are words in this book that give the hint of pain like a glint of silver, and there are words that deeply satisfy, including not only moments of love and joy but also the detailed clash between innocence and the malignant twist in the practices of one he should have been able to trust. Jonathan's words find the way out of, and beyond, platitudes and clichés, they avoid the seduction of causal reasoning, and they are responsive to and wary of the press of everyday normativities. This book grows in energy and power as it goes, and it swept me as reader along with it. It is such a beautiful text, bringing all of us, as readers, with him, into the work/writing/living/breathing of writing the everyday.”Bronwyn Davies, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University, Honorary Professor, Melbourne University“From its playful beginning to its perceptive ending, Jonathan Wyatt’s Writing the Everyday: Body, Place, Time instructs readers how being with the world, pen in hand, encourages a breathing in and breathing out, invites the poetic to claim daily space, and summons the relational, a 'with-ness', as the ordinary and extraordinary make their way into life. I could mention how the book demonstrates how time and place write upon us, how the body records its bruises and celebrates its joys, how loss claims its space, how possibilities are carried and used. I would rather, however, simply say have a cup of coffee with Jonathan, read about his everyday as an entry into your own. You will find Jonathan is lovely company.”Ronald J. Pelias, Professor Emeritus, Southern Illinois University“This is a beautiful and bountiful book about writing: its ordinariness and extraordinariness, its simplicity and complexity. In it, Jonathan Wyatt, the author, interrogates and liberates the everyday for writing, and writing for the everyday. The subtitle – body, place, time – is represented in the writing about the author’s body (in health, ease and dis-ease); in different places (cafés feature prominently, reflecting the author’s love of coffee, which inspired me to write this endorsement also in a café, here in the Waitakere, West Auckland); and in and at different times (mainly in the course of a year – 2023). While writing is the principal subject – and the object of desire, competition, and achievement – the book also addresses other significant subjects such as creativity, collegiality, university life, conferences, and abuse. It is also full of characters: colleagues and students, family, friends, and at least one foe. The author also represents the art and craft of writing in different forms (prose and poetry), modes (fast and slow), and persons (first and second). The book is serious and funny, stimulating and reflective, soothing and stretching, quirky and courageous: in all a must read for aspiring and experienced writers alike.”Keith Tudor, Professor of Psychotherapy, Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand; Co-editor of Heuristic Enquiries (Routledge, 2025); and Editor of Heuristic Research in Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2026)“Wyatt’s is an alluring entanglement of the lyricism and mess of a prolific writing life. Through the poetic, dialogic, personal, and political, Wyatt invites us to walk with him through the arduous and enchanting everydayness of loving, aging, and intentional being in the world. Wrap yourself up in this book and enjoy this writing life.”Tami Spry, author of Autoethnography and the Other