AustLit

'When the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) was established in 1969, poet Judith Wright was elected as a founding fellow. Scholar and fellow poet A. D. Hope saw her inclusion as boding well for the Academy’s purpose to foster and promote the humanities. Six years later, Wright complained about a lack of opportunities for creative practitioners and claimed that she was being excluded from Academy life. While some fellows supported Wright, the majority disagreed that creative practitioners belonged in the fellowship. This incident is representative of a broader “unclear connection” between the “living humanities” – as H. C. Coombs described the creative arts – and what Simon During terms the “academic humanities”. Focusing on the AAH’s first three decades, this article traces different ideas held by leading humanities scholars towards the creative arts and shows how the AAH maintained boundaries and created exclusions. A major shift occurred with the John Dawkins reforms to higher education. Key figures at the AAH played leading roles in seeking solutions to alarmingly low levels of Australian Research Council (ARC) funding for “creative arts research”. Despite such efforts, the AAH continued to elect very few creative arts practitioners into its core fellowship throughout the 1990s and ARC data shows that funding inequities for creative arts research remain an intractable problem.'(Publication abstract)

'This essay argues that fiction writing is a distinct form of research and way of thinking in which the methodology is generated in the writing. Unlike other forms of research, the research problems arise for the writer during the act of writing. However, within an academic setting, writers are often required to set out their methodology in advance of their project and provide a retrospective account in the form of an exegesis. Fiona McGregor’s A Novel Idea demonstrates the practical difficulty in both writing and paying attention to methodology at the same time, thus problematising the exegetical component of fiction writing in retrospect. A way forward might be to require fiction writers within the academy to state their aims for a piece of fiction, recognising that the methodology and knowledge will be generated within the writing. The “original contribution to knowledge” component of these aims can be assessed by the writer’s intention to create something new, whether through formal innovations or approach to subject. In terms of accountability, the writer’s capacity to deliver on their intention can be measured by their previous output and, retrospectively, by an examination of the novel itself and its drafts.' (Publication abstract)
 

'This paper outlines the creative experiment that led to the composition of Self Portrait / In Cross-Sections / With Bird, writing designed for theatrical performance. The paper sets this experiment within a critical framework that theorises a textual system. The textual system utilises the organismic dynamics of systems biology to delineate the dwelling within and shaping of imaginative spaces that results from the act of writing. Using practice-based research, the experiment seeks to investigate how biological processes might be used to generate innovations in dramatic form by analysing the implementation of one distinct biological process – the generation and proliferation of cancer. Specifically, by applying a model of composition derived from cancer biology to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is theorised that a dramaturgy essentially cancerous in nature might emerge. A cancerous mode of composition is realised through the transcription or copying of a foundational Hamlet text, a process which models DNA replication and which allows for a proliferation of mutation errors. The rapid and unchecked accumulation of transcription errors simulates the destructive energy of cancer, embodying the tension between chaos and order by which cancer is characterised. What emerges from the experiment are insights into the relationship between (creative) life and death within a cancerous mode of creative composition. By extrapolating from cancer to biological processes more broadly, the paper argues that a biological mode of composition – one which is alert to the inherent energy of the textual system – can enhance our understanding of the mutual emergence of character, author and text.'(Publication abstract)

'The raw facts of memory, of longing for place, and the corresponding need to shape a narrative and to account for experience, create fundamental tensions in this piece of creative non-fiction. Childhood memories of the “Garden of Eden” underpin adult experiences as a researcher in what is now the UNESCO listed Kafa Biosphere Reserve in southwest Ethiopia. Research and writing about “saving” birthing women as an international development goal identified friction between visiting women in their homes, and remembering childhood encounters with women whose lives (and souls) needed to be “saved”. Struggling to find meaning, and writing about these experiences, offered a way to move on from other unhappy childhood memories. Drawing on descriptions of Tizita (Ethiopia’s anthem to nostalgia and longing) by Maaza Mengiste and Dagmawi Woubshet, and fernweh (longing for a place “far away from here”) by Teju Cole and Christiane Alsop, longing for home, ሃገሬ ናፈቀኝ (the Amharic term pronounced hagere nafekegn), guided more recent journeys accompanying women as they walked from home to the field, to collect water or firewood, to visit neighbours, to the market or to a health facility. Walking defines an approach to living whereby daily activities are framed by time and distance'(Publication abstract)

'What can formalist comics studies contribute to creative writing practice? This consideration of an experience in unconsciously applying comics thinking to creative writing shows how notions familiar to comics studies can enrich creative writing. The essay articulates the challenges of writing contemporary gay male “post-crisis” fiction, which troubles the foundations of many representational strategies familiar to creative writers, raising questions about the relationship between what can be shown and what can be known. In comics, where spatialised relationships are foregrounded and help guide representational strategies such as focalisation and description, these foundations become decentred and malleable. Yet, rather than using comics thinking to resolve problems in creative writing – the temptation of applied practice – this paper shows how looking at representational strategies across media can allow challenges to constitute a piece of creative writing and therefore stop being problems to be “solved” but rather to be negotiated within a particular work. The discussion contributes to comics studies and creative writing through highlighting echoes and distortions between the two linked disciplines; theory and method from one creative discipline may be formally applied to another, but the benefits of using cognate disciplines to “think through” problems can also be indirect and discursive.' (Publication abstract)

'How can authors fictionalise trauma without cognitively suffering intense vicarious trauma in that writing process? This paper explores this question through the lens of fictionalised Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) representations in domestic noir narratives. Domestic noir operates within the constraints of a domestic space that is subverted from a sanctuary to a potential psychological space of tyranny or violence. This may include reiterative chronic traumas such as IPV or other forms of relationship violence. Viewed as a trauma fiction, domestic noir is peculiarly suited to interrogating the survivor narrative. The domestic noir models focused on IPV develop a complex combination of the victim, survivor and hero in their representations of traumatised protagonists. The effects of writing about IPV trauma may be transformed by this fictionalising into an emerging hero-as-survivor narrative. The Emerging Hero Process developed and elaborated within this paper indicates, through reiterative cycles of the protagonist’s emotional and behavioural response, their capacity to summon the heroic act that may enable a reframed and reconciled survivor outlook. The Emerging Hero Process has evolved into an IPV writing model of a survivor narrative that may also filter or reposition the vicarious trauma of the writing process.'(Publication abstract)

'I spent much of 2018 crafting a story; the premise, setting, characters and scenes were clearly defined before I started. I was careful to choose my words, tossing around synonyms to try and find the perfect fit, paying particular attention to sentence structure and mulling over the form of the conversations that would be included. I tried to get a sense of my imaginary reader and whether my descriptions would enable them to visualise the scenarios depicted. Yet, the story was not mine, it was somebody else’s; I rewrote it, in English. There is an adage which says “translation is no substitute for the original”. That is not correct. Translations have always been substitutes for originals (Bellos, 2011, p. 37), and in the case of literary translation, the best ones are performed by writers. In this paper I discuss my evolution from translator to writer.'(Publication abstract)

'Contemporary farming often involves more machines, access to information, and public pressure to protect or regenerate non-human nature than in the past. However, this is scarcely reflected in the farm novel, which is largely bound to an historical era. Australian farm novels include Benjamin Cozens’ Princess of the Mallee (1903), John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962), Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), and Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2005). Each feature realism and pre-1960s settings. In this article, I propose a major revision of the farm novel by employing magic realism to challenge Australia’s realist representations of farming as a rational, money-making enterprise. Magic realism allows me to position Australia’s dominant profit-driven approach to agriculture as fantasy and hopefully to stimulate new notions of farming and the farmer. By casting sugarcane and machines as a colonial farming alliance and humans as their marginalized subjects, I draw attention to a gradual depopulation of rural lands, subvert a persistent anthropocentric element of the settler-colonial ideology, and challenge notions of humans controlling the farm. This article is also a case study in a performance of John Kinsella’s international regionalism (He, 2021; Kinsella, 2001), in which Australia’s Wet Tropics connects with creative writing discourse.' (Publication abstract)

Author's note: This Shakespeareanisation of the tragedy of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (occurring after the mythical sacking of Troy by the Greek forces following their ten-year siege to rescue Helen) arose from my interest in developing new “Shakespearean” blank verse dramas by reapplying some of the rhetorical precepts for composition used by Shakespeare to create forceful blank verse that has an archaic aesthetic akin to the language observed in Shakespeare’s plays. I was initially inspired by teaching the Agamemnon play by Aeschylus and discovering this play might be called a “proto- tragedy” because it was written before Aristotle’s Poetics and seemed to lack those formal elements of peripeteia (tragic reversal) and anagnorisis (tragic recognition) – that is, these things happen offstage in the Aeschylus play so the prospects of an audience experiencing a strong catharsis by sharing these moments with the protagonist seemed diminished. I therefore attempt to reinstate these elements in my script with a view to strengthening the prospects of catharsis. I was also impressed by the presentation of scenes from this play by a group of female students who viewed Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon (through the lens of the #MeToo movement) as a justified reaction against the patriarchal violence subjugating women of her time. I have tried to be faithful to this observation in my development of Clytemnestra’s character as a justified usurper of her husband’s throne and a politically savvy manager of her “queendom” in her husband’s absence.

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Extract from a “Shakespearean” blank verse drama a companion play to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

'Nigel Krauth’s book is so rich in what creative writers are seldom granted but yearn for, from inspiring quotations to insightful explanations to occasional – perhaps too occasional – revelations of his own practise, that anyone embarking on a life of what Krauth calls “the writer’s mind-work” would be foolhardy not to pack it. Experienced writers too, for Krauth’s thinking is that rare joy, it clarifies and distils what we are doing. I would’ve packed it when I first embarked on creative writing, about the same time as Krauth himself. I will still keep it near. Krauth and I met over the years on stages at festivals, and whispered snatches of encouragement and advice, mainly about my terror of accounting for myself to audiences, or critics’ reactions to our work.' (Introduction)

'This review of Linda Weste’s The Verse Novel: Australia & New Zealand forms a sequel to my review of her first selection of interviews with verse novel writers, Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing (2020). Much like the earlier book, this iteration comprises an edited collection of interviews with 35 writers who have authored verse novels. Some have only written one verse novel, some are prolific poets as well as verse novelists and some are celebrated masters of the genre. Weste has conducted essentially the same interviews, with the same set of questions, providing strong continuity with the earlier volume. The questions address such aspects as the genesis of particular works, the writing process(es), any difficulties encountered along the way, and the privileging of narrative over poetic techniques and vice versa and why this was required or desired. The questions had sufficient breadth to elicit a reasonably comprehensive picture of writers’ perspectives on the form generally and on their own approach to writing.' (Introduction)