Sonia Overall, “Walking Into a Creative Writing Practice”

Sonia Overall’s book walk write (repeat) is on my list of books to read this summer—a list which is soon to become the books I want to read this autumn—but I thought this short article might be a preview, so I decided to take a look on this hot, smoky afternoon. Overall begins by telling us that her writing practice uses walking as a method, drawing on psychogeography, particularly the practice of the dérive or drift, which she defines as “a loose walk that follows curiosity and interest rather than a fixed path or set destination” (1). The drift “suggests a certain freedom of access to and inhabiting of public space, and as a result, the dérive has been criticised by feminist writers as hetero-patriarchal, perpetuating the privileged gaze,” she continues, citing an essay by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman that I haven’t read (but should). Overall’s practice sets out “to recast the drift as immersive, sensitising and attending to place and ambience, or applying provocations, agitations and playful aspects to the practice,” with a view to pushing “against ambivalence and entitlement” (1).

Overall goes on to describe her walking practice. She lists several different forms of walking. The first, “attentive walking,” is a method that “embraces the heightened awareness that walking brings, combining the psychogeographical drift with an openness to the sensory, physiological, psychological and aesthetic experiences of place” (1). Attentive walking, she continues, “lends itself to speculative and site-specific responsive writing, which I generate through ambulatory note-taking, word mapping, freewriting and stream-of-consciousness text” (1). She works against privileging her visual senses, recording “textures, smells, sounds and associated emotions” which she captures “through ambulatory, sensory writing” and transmits to her readers (1).

Attitudinal walking, in contrast, uses one or more conscious intentions or attitudes, and for Overall, it lends itself “directly to conscious topographical or material research,” including walking with a chosen concept or research question, or walking in character (1). Attitudinal walking can also include “the use of constraints, such as instructions to disrupt walking and promote a particular intention or attitude” (1). 

On the other hand, ludic, haptic, and totemic walking draws on Dadaist experimental writing methods, embracing “playfulness and chance, encouraging forms of experimentation” (2). She uses a deck of cards she calls her Drift Deck, which draws on “ludic and divinatory practices” to “disrupt walks and encourage attentive walking by seeking out sensory detail” (2). “Each playing card suit in the deck relates to environmental interaction through movement, as well as touching, smelling, listening and looking,” Overall explains. “While a card may instruct a reader to seek out textures and surfaces, both the individual card and the deck as a whole are objects to be carried in the hand while walking, connecting the attentive seeker-walker with an attitudinal attention through touch” (2). In this way, the Drift Deck has a haptic function, she argues: “The carried deck or individual card is also totemic, representative of the ‘sought’” (2). “I have employed haptic and totemic elements in public performance and research walks, including walking with objects and carrying totemic seed-words to connect walkers with specific intentions,” she continues (2). This process helps her writing practice, which seems to be fictional or poetic rather than nonfiction, because she speaks of characters and the objects they own (2).

Overall also engages in labyrinth walking. “Labyrinths can provide useful constraints in both attentive and attitudinal walking,” she states, although the constraint, because it is walked, is embodied, unlike the writing constraints practiced by Oulipo experiments (3). “The shape of the labyrinth removes all decision-making from the walking, facilitating freedom of ambulant thought,” she explains. “The labyrinth’s form can be read as a visual metaphor for life journeys in which the walker must move forward without a clear sense of how the path will unfold” (2). In that way, it’s useful for writing memoir, she suggests (3).

In walking “in” and “as,” the walker adopts a character and walks like that person, consciously experiencing place through that lens (3). This is an attitudinal method “that consciously removes the veil separating writer and character: the writer becomes them, embodying the character fully, moving and seeing as they do” (3-4). This form of walking can be practiced anywhere, she states (4).

Finally, Overall contends that writing is a conceptual practice, and that freewriting and ambulant writing are as free as other art forms (mark-making, modelling, movement, and musical improvisation) (4). Freewriting and ambulant writing “bring the making and thinking together, directly on the page,” she states (4).

In her conclusion, Overall hopes that these methods are useful for other writers. “Walk to fuel your writing and write as you walk,” she suggests. “Whichever approach you use, playfulness is key” (4). I certainly see the resemblance between the kind of walking I was doing last summer and what Overall describes as attentive walking, and since I take notes as I walk, I’m doing what she describes as ambulant walking as well. I will likely find her book useful when I start writing my description of theory and methodology, because she’s giving me some terms I can use to describe what I’ve been doing.

Work Cited

Overall, Sonia. “Walking Into a Creative Writing Practice.” Livingmaps Review, Autumn 2019, http://livingmaps.review/journal/index.php/LMR/article/view/178.