For Creative Writing students in Higher Education, feeling at home with the process of writing and the identity of being a writer can be difficult. Many find themselves trying to separate their writing life from home life which can lead to a sense of not being at home with the writing process. As life necessarily involves care and a generative process of maintenance and repetition within the principles of living so too, being a writer calls for a process of making that is embedded in acts of care and maintenance. By reflecting on a student writing workshop that transformed stories of cleaning domestic homes into a shared representation of a ‘creative’ house, and recounting a personal story of a home held together by my grandfather’s daily acts of care, I consider homeliness as a ‘writing method that is less like writing and more like living’ (Samatar 2024, 3). Rather than treating the complexities of everyday life as interruptions to creative practice, I argue that they form an imaginative home for a writer through which creative work can emerge and is initiated. Framing homeliness as integral to creative practice acts can illuminate artistic process and make writing more like living.

Keywords: writing, writer, homeliness, creative practice, home, housework, maintenance, creativity