Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry

This book invites the reader into how therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing might meet. It puts therapy and stand-up comedy in circuit with each other, through and with writing, to see what happens, to see what work they do, to see what they produce.

The author writes about this work as a therapist with ‘Karl’, as they talk together on Tuesday evenings; he tells stories of attending comedy shows (and performing his own) at Edinburgh’s comedy events; and he brings alive the everyday profound of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book’s heart – heart as rhythm, movement and flux, not heart as static core or centre – is in how, one through and with the other, therapy and stand-up connect with writing as a method of inquiry, mobilising theory – Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms and affect theory – throughout, and activating the concept of creative-relational inquiry.