AustLit

'Anne Casey-Hardy’s Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls and Else Fitzgerald’s Everything Feels like the End of the World share feminist concerns. But while both use the short-story collection to explore latent social violence and collective anxieties, they are dramatically distinct.' (Introduction)

'The writing workshop is a core pedagogical practice in the creative writing discipline in higher education and has significant researched benefits to students. As higher education moves increasingly online – a trend that is arguably escalated in response to the impact of COVID-19 – important questions are raised about if, and how, the writing workshop can be delivered online. This paper uses a literature review combined with analysis of small sample of anonymous student feedback about their experiences in one creative non-fiction subject where workshopping was an assessed learning activity. The authors argue that the benefits of face-to-face workshopping can be translated online, and that students may experience higher quality feedback and increased flexibility in participation. However, these benefits are complicated by the increased workload for students and instructors, challenges with digital literacy and unbounded timelines. The paper offers several recommendations for writing instructors facilitating peer workshopping online.'(Publication abstract)

'Astley’s Selected Poems — many of which are previously unpublished and span her life from childhood to adulthood — does not so much offer a collection of outstanding aesthetic merit, but rather suggests the ways in which the poems resonate with the stylistic qualities and themes of Astley’s later, more widely read and acclaimed fiction. Indeed, the whole collection invites a reading of poetry as the form through which Astley learnt to be a fiction writer.' (Introduction)

'Historical fiction writers can be drawn to the true stories of women who have committed violent or criminal acts, as are readers. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Hannah Kent's Burial Rites are popular, acclaimed examples of this trend. In my own creative work, Treading Air, I fictionalise the life of Lizzie O’Dea, petty thief and sex worker. The women in these stories are vulnerable subjects unable to give their consent, and the often elliptical and unreliable historical records that are the textual traces of their lives, coupled with the discomfort of the voyeuristic gaze, make representations of criminal women in historical biofiction a fraught act.' (Publication abstract)

'In changing research climates in Australia, as elsewhere, non-traditional research outputs are increasingly incorporated into the scope of recognised intellectual activities beyond the PhD. While practice-led research has a relatively recent history in Australian universities, increasing numbers of academics hold doctoral level degrees with a creative practice component. In addition, a new focus in ERA on impact, and connections with communities outside academia, represents both challenges and potential for creative writing research. In these changing tertiary landscapes, early career artist-academics navigate complex institutional hierarchies and imperatives. Following Josie Arnold (2012, 2015), this paper takes an autoethnographic, ‘mystory’ approach to addressing these possible tensions and practical imperatives in a changing academic climate, proposing an initial framework for nurturing practice-led research in Australian universities.'  (Publication abstract)

'Murray heard the sharp, dry crack of the undergrowth, and he was down on his stomach with the rifle pressed into the hollow of his shoulder, thinking of wild pigs. His hands shook with the suddenness of it, and he couldn't adjust the sight. It swung out-wards: he saw the sky framed by the black half-circle of the top of the scope, and a tree looping wildly with the white daytime moon caught in its branches. He brought his other hand up to steady the barrel, trained the sight on the scree of lantana where he thought the sound came from and scanned the scrub. ' (Introduction)

'The jazz era of the 1920s in America was filled with exuberant music, fast cars and young men and women determined to have a good time. But at the same time in working-class Far North Queensland, life wasn’t lived at quite the same level of opulence. In a new novel, Treading Air, Queensland author Ariella Van Luyn uses fiction to investigate the life of a real young woman from Townsville named Lizzie O’Dea, who shot another woman in 1924.'

'In 1920s Brisbane, Lizzie O’Dea wants to get away from her dad and the memories of her mum that haunt her. At the races, she meets attractive, war-scarred Joe. When he says that he wants to marry her and take her away to far-flung Townsville, Lizzie sees her chance to escape.

'But Lizzie soon falls through what she’d thought was a safety net. On the fringes of society, she discovers a new sense of independence and sexuality, love and friendship. It’s a precarious life, though. Always on the edge of collapse, eventually it spins out of control.

'Two decades later, Lizzie is sick and worn out. Lying in a Brisbane lock hospital, she thinks about Joe, who’s been lost to her for twenty years. But she’s a survivor. There’s hope yet.' (Publication summary)

'Step into the dysfunctional life of Eunice…

Oblivious to her unhappy marriage, still living in her mother’s house and unable to stop biting her nails, Eunice feels as if she has no control over her own life. When her new husband needs to make a trip for work, Eunice tags along in the caravan without much thought for what it will be like. Left to her own devices, what will she uncover within the deepest recesses of the caravan park… and within herself?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.