Producing a Frankentext

Forming part of a larger action research project, this article explores how a work of Interactive Fiction (IF) that was written for use in the secondary school English classroom was produced. Drawing on Bakhtinian Dialogism, New Materialism and Barnard’s conceptualisation of multimodal creativity, the article examines how the text can be seen as a product of the writer’s creative assemblage via an analysis of two individual passages. Identifying himself as a teacher, writer and researcher, the writer of this paper identifies the significant role that the researcher persona can play in supporting teachers seeking to navigate what Cremin and Baker term as the “writer-teacher identity continuum” (Cremin & Baker 2014: 30). The article also highlights a key difference between writerly and teacherly intentions, namely the teacher’s interest in metalinguistic or metanarrative levels of textual engagement on the part of their students. The writer asserts that an acknowledgment of this difference could help teacher-writers attempting to produce works of IF for use in the classroom to formulate appropriate creative assemblages in the future.