At a time when people must work harder than ever to stand out from the crowd, the word creativity can seem vague and overused. But what exactly is creativity? Adrian McKerracher travels from Vancouver to Havana to Buenos Aires, leading readers on a journey to discover poignant new insights into a life of letters. Through encounters with artists of all kinds, famous or obscure, McKerracher traces a socio-cultural history of the meaning of writing, each vignette a meditation on the way that meta- phor limits and liberates understanding: creativity is a process, a possession, a relation, an algorithm, a game, and more. But What It Means to Write is far more than an archive of the figurative. Along the way, a labyrinth of chance reunites McKerracher with old friends, threatens him with violence, and invites him to remain forever in a place both real and imagined. His journey from cafés to libraries to late-night living rooms embod- ies the structure of a bold new methodology for interpreting creativity, demonstrating the tools for working productively with ambiguity and rebuild- ing meaning, one metaphor at a time. Told in character-driven narrative pulses that reflect on the nature of belonging, understanding, and loving, What It Means to Write is a celebration of the possibilities of both language and silence. “A genuine pleasure to read, What It Means to Write exquisitely employs memoir and nonfiction to ruminate upon the connections between creativ- ity and metaphor. Others have attempted such an intertextual weaving of writing, fieldwork, and narrative, but rarely is it done so well.” Cynthia Chambers, University of Lethbridge Adrian McKerracher is an independent scholar, writer, and illustrator from Quadra Island, bc. 9 M Q U P S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 M E M O I R • C R E AT I V E W R I T I N G What It Means to Write Creativity and Metaphor adrian mckerracher An intimate and worldly adventure into the heart of language, learning, and getting lost. S P E C I F I C AT I O N S March 2019 -5,7a755pl7lnpp7S 4s-i-lv bAU1 4shi-lv Dc1 kS,i-- $.9ru n B - ssh66 0g99T omot.oN.0