AustLit

'Time is a rare commodity in the academy. Academics are often inundated with multiple teaching, administrative and coordinating tasks, which detracts from time for creative writing and research. This paper discusses the problem of time poverty in academia. It proposes that engaging in creative modes, such as expressive, embodied and poetic writing, can generate a sense of timelessness. Timelessness will be defined as the sensation of fixed or frozen time, where academics are so fully engrossed in an encounter that they are unaware of time passing. Creative writing can evoke such timeless moments by connecting academics to intrinsically meaningful work that gives them pleasure.'  (Publication abstract)

'As complex and geographically discrete life environments, city neighbourhoods are invested with a great deal of personal meaning as well as with general cultural significance. Pierre Moyal argues that ‘the city is poeticized by the subject’ and explores the refabrication and consumption of space by the city dweller, along with the outsider's creative and fractious presence. Boston, MA, has been touted as ‘the city of neighborhoods’ by Anthony Bak Buccitelli and our practice-led research project, Fragments of the Place Itself, investigates insider and outsider creativity, rupture and poetic form in Boston's North End, Beacon Hill and Cambridge neighbourhoods through prose poetry. Our project considers the notions of perambulation and drifting, and the idea of genius loci. Further, we argue that prose poetry is well suited to writing about neighbourhoods because prose poetry's fully justified text is able to set up a demarcation or ‘plot’ that readily accommodates both insider and outsider viewpoints.' (Publication abstract)

'To investigate the health benefits of participating in creative writing workshops, in 2015 and 2016 a group of academics from Western Sydney University ran an intervention in two retirement homes. Asked to participate in both ‘life writing’ and ‘experimental’ writing exercises rather than purely in life writing alone, participants showed an ability to write in ways they had not done previously, with the two modes of writing practice proving complementary. Two case studies, Skipper and Brydon, show how participants engaged in ‘new writing’ in different ways. A study of the data on the continuing independently run workshops between the two interventions and after the second one reveals that the participants continued to write in ‘new ways’ even after the academic facilitators had ceased being involved.' (Publication abstract)

'‘Tesserae’ enacts its own content, being a lyric essay about memory, brokenness and how lyric essays can both tell a partial story and open up questions about this story. The mosaic is metaphor and subject, as the narrator remembers moments from her childhood and intimates their effects on her later life, and on her writing. The work aims to demonstrate how the lyric essay form can support life writing that embraces narratorial subjectivity that is complex, fluid, contingent and relational whilst still adhering to Lejeune’s (1989) ‘autobiographical pact’.' (Publication abstract)