Research in the Guts: Review of: Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing by Jonathan Wyatt. (Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives). Routledge 2019

If I should tell my colleagues what your book is about, or write a review about it (which I am not trying to do, clearly), I would say that this is a book about writing as inquiry and inquiry as transformational-dialogical event. It is about writing beyond text, through the inclusion of struggling bodies that can be poetic and funny as well. Cixous’ gesture is enacted, performed, laughed at, in the awareness that it is no laughing matter. It is a book about making research that is in the guts and hits us in the guts. Gently. Mercilessly. We call it soft skill as opposed to the hard science, the one made of facts and number. We should call them the warm skills instead, because this is the way they feel on the body. On our hyphenated bodies.