Beyond "How-To's" in Art and Research:

An Interview with Dr. Patricia Leavy

“Research is a messy process; art making is also a messy process,” Dr. Patricia Leavy says in this interview. The author of over 30 books, both fictional and research-based, Dr. Leavy is a leader in arts-based research and female empowerment who describes fiction as a way to illuminate scholarship—to make it accessible for the people it seeks to help. She also speaks to her varied routes towards inspiration, from bursts to collaborations, explaining how both writing and research are processes of inquiry: “That’s the beauty—possibility and discovery.” As she shares work that asks questions, imagines great love, and strengthens self-conceptions, Leavy is an example of how interdisciplinary creativity sheds light on our understandings of human experiences.

It’s hard to know where to begin when speaking about your work because it has had such a seminal impact in the cross-disciplinary, arts-based research community—we’ve quoted you in previous interviews discussing how arts and sciences share a goal “to explore, illuminate, and represent aspects of human life and the social and natural worlds of which we are a part.” Could you tell us how your interest in using the arts for concrete research began?

To give you the full picture, I have to go a little bit back to my childhood. I’ve always been involved in the arts—I took ballet for fourteen years and started college as a theatre arts major which, since I wasn’t a great student in high school, was the best way I could get into college. My mother's a painter among other artists in my family, so we were always going to art galleries and museums. My favorite things when I was little were creative writing, reading, and going to films and theater shows.

Then in college, after taking a couple of sociology classes I ended up changing my major and completely shifting career paths: I got my bachelor's, master's and PhD in sociology. At this point, the arts became something I did in my free time, something to do on the weekends, although I didn't think about it as a career anymore.

I was qualitatively inclined when I was in graduate school as a sociology student. I'm not against quantitative research in any way—I think it's incredibly useful for certain set of things. But qualitative research has its own strengths. I began doing things like qualitative content analysis of media, and in-depth interview research, mostly interviews with women about their lives, their gender identities, relationships, body images, that sort of thing. It was a very traditional path: I was publishing peer-reviewed journal articles, presenting my work at conferences, all the things you're taught to do when you're a graduate student in sociology.

Then at one point early in my career, I had an epiphany while sitting in my office. I thought to myself, does anyone even read this stuff? I was spending years collecting interviews about topics that would likely be of interest to other women, but when I did a little research I realized oh no, basically nobody reads this stuff. Peer-reviewed journal articles are completely inaccessible to the public in multiple ways. They only circulate in university libraries, they're very expensive to subscribe to, and they're loaded with jargon. So, unless you have a degree in a particular field, you're never going to understand or be exposed to them. And, generally speaking, they lack the qualities of good, engaging writing.

I think there is this myth that peer-reviewed articles are highly read within the academy, but even that isn't true either. In the social sciences and humanities, more than 90% of journal articles have an audience of literally a handful of readers. Some studies say three to eight readers, which I've always suspected is an overestimation. Truly. This meant that the women I was interviewing would never benefit from anything I was doing, nor would women like them.

After this awakening about the limitations of academic research, I was working with a mentor of mine from graduate school who’s a well-known qualitative researcher. We were working on a couple of different books about qualitative research and what she called “emergent research methods” which was basically her term for innovative research methods. I started doing some research, thinking, is there some more popular way to do research where people outside the academy can actually read it? That’s when I stumbled across arts-based research. I didn't even know what it was called at first—I still have my early folders and they have these tabs on them labeled “creative methods.”

But as soon as I discovered arts-based research an entirely new world opened up to me and it immediately made sense, I suspect it part because I've loved the arts my whole life. I've always seen them as a powerful way for jarring you into thinking differently, reflecting on society, reflecting on your own life, building compassion and empathy for others who might be similar or dissimilar to you. The arts are accessible to virtually anyone—people enjoy them, and though scholars can get a little anxious when I talk about enjoyment, the thought that our work shouldn't be enjoyed is also a myth I would really like to challenge. If your work can be enjoyed, people are more likely to remember it and they’ll want to experience more of it. So I take issue with this idea that our work has to somehow be dull to be scholarly.

For people who might not be familiar with arts-based research, it’s a set of methodological tools that adapt the tenets of the creative arts to ask research questions in engaged ways. The arts can be used as the entire method of inquiry or they can be used as one phase of the methodology. So the art form could be used for data generation, analysis, representation, or for all of it—there's a continuum. Some arts-based research mirrors qualitative research in that researchers go out and they collect ethnographic observations or in-depth interviews, generating data in a traditional way to analyze and/or represent it using an art form. Then all the way at the other end of the continuum, you have art as the inquiry—as the process of discovery itself. And I don't think any of these methods are better or worse, I just want to present a range of options.

When I discovered arts-based research, I started writing about it as a methodology. Mostly I was summarizing and synthesizing what was out there because at that time, there was no book that talked about an arts-based research methodology.

I began my own practice with poetry. While poetry is a skill I respect enormously, it’s not one I’m trained in. Still, I took some of my interview research and rearranged it into poetry and I found that when I did this, the research reached more people and reached them on a much deeper level. So in this case, even my mediocre attempt at creating art had a much bigger effect than my years of traditional research ever had. After that, I turned to writing fiction and my first novel was loosely based on years of research. From then on, that was it—I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life writing stories.

It’s great to hear your story about the power of poetry. We’ve been thinking about that a lot, especially today in relation to Amanda Gorman’s powerful poem from the inauguration.

It's amazing. After all the day’s events, I posted a quote from her poem on my Facebook page just yesterday [This interview occurred the day after the Biden/Harris inauguration]. She just stole the show and her poem so beautifully captured the moment: where we've come from, where we are now, and where we hope to go. It really shows the power of art. There is no lecture that she or anyone else could have given that would have tapped into these emotions the way her poem did, and I think people across the country and across the world felt that way, listening to her. It’s a beautiful thing to witness that because I think if you talk to some people who don't think of themselves as particularly into the arts, they’d write off poetry. But then you hear something like this and you realize that this can actually tap into something nothing else can.

We’d love to learn more about how your research interests have informed your creative writing and vice-versa. Your recently published novels Shooting Stars and Film are relatable and inspiring––how did you choose the stories you wanted to tell, and were those stories based on your experience as a researcher?

Thank you. Each novel has materialized in a different way, so I'll just give you a couple of examples. When I was on a sabbatical and bored with the work I was doing, I started doing a little creative writing just for myself, and from there came my debut novel Low-Fat Love. I had been collecting interview research with women about their lives for probably eight, nine, maybe ten years at that point. I was also teaching very intimate courses on gender and sexuality, on popular culture, and on feminism, and my students shared a lot about their lives inside and outside of class. I felt like I had a cumulative knowledge based on my interviews as well as my own life experience.

I ended up writing something like 20 pages that first day which, I can say now as a novelist who has written more than 10 novels, is a lot in a day. The only person I shared it with at the time was my boyfriend, who's now my husband. He said, You should write a novel. And I was like, I'm totally going to write a novel. So I did, and that novel became everything I had been frustrated about from my work life and my personal life.

One of my favorites of my novels, Film, follows three women who each went to LA at a different time to pursue a different creative dream. One wants to be a filmmaker, one had wanted to be an actress and model, one is a DJ. These three women, two in their twenties and one in her forties, all end up in each other's lives. Suddenly, a man in their close circle is catapulted into fame which is used to contrast to the women’s negative experiences as they pursue their dreams. The narrative has undertones of the #MeToo movement. I use different literary devices in every book depending on what I'm trying to communicate—here, I used a lot of flashbacks. I went back to these women throughout their lives; their childhood, their teen years, their early career years to show the different experiences: losing an internship because they got felt up by their boss, having to quit a job because they were sexually harassed—experiences to show the contexts in which women are pursuing their dreams and how different that context is than is for men and how that poses unique challenges for women. How does an experience from when you're 16 impact you when you're 42? That’s what I used fiction to explore.

This past year, partly because of the pandemic, I've written more creative work than I've written in my entire life prior. Between November 2019 and this past December, I wrote seven novels, writing seven days a week. I don't normally do this and I'm not necessarily advocating this routine for others, but for me creative writing has been a way to get through the pandemic.

When I was stuck on another project, I decided to go outside on my balcony to get some fresh night air. I looked up at the stars, and all of the sudden a complete idea for a novel came to me. I mean, every character, every word they would ever say, their backstories. I mean, the entire book came to me. I sat back down and started writing the entire thing out of order unlike relying on the outline I had written for previous books. I wrote the entire novel, Shooting Stars, in 10 days and it’s my personal favorite of the more than 40 books I’ve published at this point. It’s an epic love story about love in every form—romantic love, but also love between dear friends who see each other as soulmates, our love of what we do, love of community. It's a celebration of love through this couple’s journey. Both suffered from different kinds of trauma in their past and through their relationship, they help one another heal.

Though this idea came to me in a burst, seemingly out of nowhere, I don't think it was actually out of nowhere. When I was 10 years old, my English teacher Miss Mercer—the best teacher I had an elementary school—exempt me from class projects to do creative writing instead because, thinking I had an aptitude for it, she wanted to encourage me. I tried to write a novel during that time but, because I was ten, it totally didn’t pan out. But it was an epic love story between two people who helped each other. There’s a part of me that thinks this story has been in me my whole life, even though I didn't recognize it, and that's why it came so quickly when I finally had the skills to translate it.

On day eleven, I was incredibly depressed because I had loved writing about love, which I had never done before. Then the next day, I went back on my balcony, looked at the stars and, in another burst, I got the second book which is a novel called Twinkle. Twinkle was just released and explores love and doubt as well as the relationship of the small part to the greater whole. I realized when I was writing that one that I was going to write a whole series, a grand love letter to love. The next one, Constellations, will come out in May 2021. These characters are such a gift to me, not just because they have helped me through this pandemic, but because they have made me look at people in my own life differently. They've made me reflect on: How do I treat people? How do people treat me? Who do I really want in my life, who values me? What does intimacy look like and feel like? What does love look like in action? At the end of the day, it's all about, not settling—these are stories about what good relationships can look like. Why would we settle for less than that?

In your book Low-Fat Love Stories, which explores the psychology of women’s dissatisfying relationships with partners, family members, and their own identities through narratives and visual portraits, you write about your collaboration with Victoria Scotti. Can you tell us more about working together, and how combining your backgrounds “opened up new ways for [you] to see and think about interview research and representation”? (Low-Fat Love Stories 144).

It’s my favorite collaboration I've ever done. In part, this is because Victoria and I come from different disciplines and bring different skills to the table. For some background, I'm a sociologist and a novelist and Victoria is a creative arts therapist and a visual artist. We both studied women's lives so we had a shared interest, but we were looking at it through a different lens. This collaboration actually happened by accident: at the time, Victoria was getting her PhD and she reached out to me because her school required a practicum. She signed on to assist me with my own research projects and meanwhile, I had a contract for a book that was supposed to be called Low-Fat Love Stories. When my debut novel Low-Fat Love came out, everywhere I went readers were bombarding me with their personal experiences about unsatisfying love and it was a beautiful, amazing, generous experience that I’d never had in response to non-fiction. People would use the novel as a springboard to talk about their own stories. This inspired me to do a new set of interviews, which I did by email for the first time in my life because I wanted to be able to interview women all around the United States, of all ages, of different racial backgrounds and sexual orientations. They all had to choose one dissatisfying relationships for their interview.

But I could not write this book. Every time I would sit down, I would stare at a blank screen—and I am a person who is pretty prolific as an author. I don't get writer's block so this really freaked me out. Eventually, I even told my husband that I might have to tell my publisher to cancel this book contract. I felt so bad also for all these women I interviewed, but for some reason I couldn’t write this book.

Okay, so at the time I'm acting as a mentor to Victoria Scotti. One day we're talking over Skype and I said, you know, I'm just going to tell you about this project I'm working on that I can't do anything with. I've been sitting on it for years. If you have any ideas, let me know. After seeing the summaries I’d written about each woman, she emailed me back: When I read these, I see a portrait. Okay, she's a visual artist. I'm not, so I didn't see a portrait, but I was immediately intrigued.

We began an exchange in which, she created a “visual concept” based on each interview summary. The, using that as my inspiration or jumping off point, I wrote short stories using verbatim transcript, about 50% of every interview transcript was used word-for-word. Victoria would then create a final visual portrait reflecting how she imagined the women’s essences, themes of the interviews. This project really changed me. I see things more visually now after working with her, and it was also the first book I ever wrote in first person.

To linger on the idea of portraiture, our journal seeks to enhance the poems through photographic interpretations. Your work also integrates mediums through “textual-visual snapshots” that are short, reflective emotional packets––almost like poems. How do you understand the capacity of images, and portraits in particular, to convey truths that words might miss?

On the book, it says “By Patricia Leavy and Victoria Scotti.” I talked to my publisher about that: I did not want her to be listed as an illustrator. I wanted her to be listed as a co-author to show the weight of the images and how there is no distinction between images and words.

A lot of times we don't value all the different arts equally, and we can see that just based on how we fund different things. If you're successful in music or acting, for example, you're going to make a lot more money than if you're very successful in dancing. You make more money as a novelist than as a poet. These are all generalizations, but there is something about how we value these different art forms, and I still think that the world of publishing very much values the printed word above all else.

An image can foster a feeling immediately, whereas words take time. I can't help but think about the inauguration yesterday—we're doing this interview the day after Biden and Harris were inaugurated. A lot of the images I'm seeing on social media today are of little girls standing in front of a TV watching Kamala Harris being sworn in as Vice President of the United states. There’s no lecture that is more powerful than those photographs that people are sharing of their daughters and nieces and sisters.

Your book Method Meets Art is now on its third edition and, along with your The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research in its section edition, among other texts, has become a guideline for so many qualitative researchers. How do you relate experimental principles such as reliability and validity to your methodology? What are some steps you take when developing methods for narrative inquiry and fiction-based research?

In academia, we are trained to want these steps and models to follow. But in reality, research doesn't work that way: if we knew all the answers, we wouldn't be asking the question. If we don't know the answer, this means we don't necessarily know up front how the methodology will unfold. Research is a messy process; art making is also a messy process. That’s the beauty—possibility and discovery.

In my books, I provide criteria because people want it. But I also say over and over again this is not a gold standard. Don't turn this into a gold standard, because there is no gold standard. I think people need to be open to evaluating these things in different ways and ask if what they did makes sense relative to what their goal was. Did it impact them in some way? Did they develop some insight? In my experience, every project is different. I mean, earlier in the interview, you asked me about how my inspiration for novels comes about and I told you about many different routes. I'm still so in love with writing because it's a process of discovery, because it's not the same thing over and over again and research isn't either.

Have Social Fictions had a role in the reverse, influencing the research that inspired them?

I would definitely say that with Low-Fat Love Stories that was the case. The novel Low-Fat Love was chick-lit fiction, and the research for the later stories was a response to that fiction. I also found that when I was rereading Low-Fat Love which, you know, I wrote over 10 years ago, I thought, Wow, there are things in here about myself that I did not realize, things I'm discovering in that book. Things about myself. Things that I had gone through at the time but I didn't realize how they influenced me and it's literally a decade later when I can see something I was going through. Fiction can also take on new meaning because we are not static. We are not the same our whole lives—we grow, change, and evolve every day. Art isn’t static either. Like the Constitution, it's meant to breathe and evolve and grow.

How do you see the future of arts-based research? What are your hopes for this field as its influence on other disciplines grows?

I feel positive about the future of arts-based research. The first edition of Method Meets Art came out in 2008, nearly 15 years ago, and I just recently put out a third edition of the book into a completely different world for ABR. When I was re-reading the first edition, there are some chapters in which there are very few examples simply because I couldn't find anything. I don't think that people weren't necessarily doing the work, I just think they weren't documenting the methods, or calling them ABR.

Fast forward to writing the third edition of the book, and I have the opposite problem—there's so much work out there and there's only so much you can cite and reference in a book, and I feel terrible excluding the work of so many people. Today, there are journals devoted to arts-based research, one that I co-edit. There are conferences, major professional organizations, special interest groups devoted to arts-based research.

When the first edition of Method Meets Art came out, despite its success in the English-speaking market it was never translated into other languages. The second and third editions, on the other hand, have been translated all around the world—it's in Korean and Chinese and Taiwanese and Japanese, in different European languages. It's the same book by the same author, but what's changed is the world’s reception to ABR.

I also think the academy in general has gone less to a disciplinary model and more towards a trans-disciplinary model; cross-pollination is more valued. There's been a shift towards public scholarship as well in which people are realizing hey, research should be of some use in the world. There should be some impact. In some countries, like in the UK and Australia, you have to demonstrate that your work has had an impact in “the real world,” meaning the world outside of academia.

Anytime there are new ways of doing things, it can threaten people; it can make people feel like it will somehow degrade their work or make their work less valuable. This means it does take some amount of courage because you will be confronted with people who are uncomfortable with the new things that you're creating. I want to remind people that research is meant to shed light into dark places. Research is meant to illuminate. It’s so interesting that earlier you mentioned Amanda Gorman's incredible poem yesterday because I was thinking about it before this interview—I even wrote down some words for it. In regards to the future of ABR, I was reminded of the final words in Amanda's poem: “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

My hope is that scholars across the disciplines, whether they do arts-based research or not, are brave enough to embrace and legitimate ABR as a valid way of knowing and acknowledge its unique ability to shed new light, research’s ultimate goal.