Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing

Luminous, playful, intimate, poetic and surprising—this book will touch you, it will take you over, take you inside yourself and outside yourself. It invites you to lose yourself in the material, relational fleshiness of life. Wyatt catches moments of being and becoming in the way only great writers can do. He experiments with thinking otherwise, and asks the reader to encounter the words on the page so they (and you) come alive, escaping into the new, the unexpected, and the vital. He takes you inside a magic circle where anything can happen—and does.

Bronwyn Davies, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University

Jonathan Wyatt’s

Ronald J. Pelias, Professor Emeritus, Southern Illinois University

This is a wonderful book; a book full of elicitations of wonder. Jonathan writes in a style that is seductively conversational, a style that is imbued with affect in a book that never stumbles into proclivities of simply human concerns and emotional response. The book is powerfully energised by the everyday; Jonathan is a hugely adept storyteller and so these vignettes, accounts and exemplifications carry the reader with them into almost unwitting engagements with exciting, profound theorisings with practices of life and facilitations of worlding. Here there are encounters inhabited and animated by clients, family, audiences at stand-up gigs and, through enunciations of these, Jonathan offers diffractive pathways into practices of creative-relational inquiry. This is a book that picks you up, then needs to be carried and can’t be put down.

Ken Gale, Lecturer, University of Plymouth, UK

I love this book. It is going to be a classic in our field. The writing is so inviting, so visceral, so open. The topics the book explores are familiar ones, but Wyatt looks at them in fresh ways that are inspiring both to senior researchers and to those new to qualitative inquiry. And I have never read a better introduction to Deleuze and Guattari: he makes their vocabulary understandable at an ethnographic, bodily and emotional level. I especially love Wyatt’s metaphors, like the idea of the ‘white chalk circle’ on the floor for the stand-up comedian being also understood as the chalk circle in a therapeutic session, and in the writer's relationships with real and imagined co-writers and readers. All these are sacred spaces where surprises might happen. One of the things about the book I loved is how Wyatt handles the issue of ‘trust’. We trust the therapist, the writer, the stand-up. That trust is necessary for qualitative researchers to do their work, and with trust comes other ethical questions: What do we reveal? What do we hide? How do we decide? I trust that Jonathan has led us towards creative-relational inquiry. That is what is most important.

Laurel Richardson, Professor Emerita, Ohio State University

This book is a wholly original gesture at a world of circuits breathing with the rhythms of something happening, refrains working thresholds of matter and meaning. An ordinary room is a milieu of compositions: the this-ness of the mic, the alcohol, the weather, that shirt. A beautiful, brilliant book, it catches up the reader in the worldly thinking of a shoulder shrugged, a joke, the resonance of a word in a room.

Kathleen Stewart, Professor, University of Texas at Austin

The form and content of

Tami Spry, Professor, St. Cloud State University

This is a powerful and thought provoking book. It gives shape and form to innovative modes of inquiry to open up significant perspectives on comedy, therapy and writing. Like a good stand up routine, the risks pay off. The writing enlivens thinking, method and theory. A major contribution

Iain MacRury, Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University

"The book transports its reader into the richly-textured, aesthetically-conjured moments of materialities in which the author gropes feels, breathes, thinks, and perceives amongst relational others. It disorientates our inclination towards the familiar and the graspable, towards tapping into the awareness of how affective subtlety is the current of life, of relational sensitivity, of creative forces with which we, as qualitative researchers, cannot do without."

Nini Fang- Qualitative Social Research Forum

"With a pleasing serendipity, I found myself opening Jonathan Wyatt's book as I was closing Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse [...] A considerable amount of the book is given over to Deleuzoguattarian concepts that seek to connect our subjec-tivity with the external, that aim to form our position in a chaotic world, that bring together a multiplicity of partial objects in a momentary self, that provide us with the illusion of a capacity to make sense of everything. It would take a better man than I to, in the space available, explain Deleuze and Guattari, let alone how Wyatt draws their theories to wrap around his three putative central themes, so I hope he'll forgive me if I end as I began, with Woolf: “In the midst of the chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing . . . was struck into stability” (Woolf, 1992, p. 176)."

Nick Campion, Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute, Nottingham, UK

"Jonathan is careful to spell out the political "mutual indebtedness" in this co-creation. It is the Cailleach that does this work with him in his writing. Jonathan thinks with her, not with theory in this case, but with her stories, with her person, with her more than human powers which evoke a speculative inquiry, a magical realist inquiry. He puts this to work in his writing and it leads me to wonder about other stories from these shores, other ontologies, that might be thought with, that might be resonated with."

David A.G. Clarke and Nova Southeastern University