AustLit

'This essay moves between the performative, the discursive and the ethnographic to compose an argument about how essaying as method, and then collective essaying as method, might contribute to new approaches to world-making. It begins with an essay-within-an-essay that takes as its object of pressure the contemporary context of biophysical crisis that has been called the Anthropocene, which soon becomes entangled with another pair of objects: the image on the front of a vintage jigsaw set and the essayist’s affective response to that image. Thereafter it brings in Latour’s concept of the ‘risky account’ to argue for essaying as a reflexively constructed mode of making accounts of the world. The experimental nature of essaying is extrapolated into a collective context, with a report on a transcultural creative writing workshop conducted as part of a residency program in the Philippines. The essay proposes and teases out the concept of ‘collective essaying’. It circles back to look at world making with Haraway’s invocation of sympoesis as a method for ‘worlding-with, in company’ (Haraway 2015), and asks how collective essaying might be considered in this light. '  (Publication abstract)
 

'In the context of academic financialisation where writing is ‘repurposed’ as an outcome designed to maximise financial profit, and to resist the pressure to be ‘careless’ (Lynch 2010) ‘ideal functionaries’ (Pereira 2012), we – a group of five women academics – come together to share stories of our accrued wisdom about living in the afternoon of our lives. We also share our creative writing and theorising about collaborative writing processes in papers, chapters, and conference presentations. As we do so, we encounter a conflict between our practice of inter-personal collaboration and the traditions and pressures of academic authorship where we are expected to publish in a vertical hierarchy of

(first author, 
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We therefore reflect on the paradoxes and tensions involved in collaborative writing within the academy. In particular, we explore how co-operative practice congruent with the philosophical framework of new materialism sits jaggedly against an academic culture of individualism, surveillance, audit, and the pressure for academics to (be seen to) publish. We offer no conclusion or easy resolution, but like Socratic ‘gadflies’ we seek to trouble the structural impediments to collaborative writing in the academy.'  (Publication abstract)

'The idea that the exegesis and the creative work are kept separate in a research degree submission dates back to early non-traditional doctorates in the Australian context. But, while an increasing number of research publications worldwide use fragmented structures and strategies which blend scholarly and non-scholarly approaches, what are the chances of honours, masters and doctoral students succeeding under examination with submissions that weave together exegetical and creative components? This paper examines the expectations universities have for their creative writing research submissions, and the strategies examiners may use in examining exegeses woven into the subject artefact they talk about. Exploring how examiners might read woven works, this paper surveys, especially, reader-response theory as developed by Wolfgang Iser and others. '  (Publication abstract)

'In this paper, I am reflecting on Entwinement, an improvisational live performance by myself, a writer, and my collaborator, musician Andrew Darling, appearing as a performance art act called Illuminous (Darling & Perry 2015). Performances by Illuminous involve live improvised trumpet playing and poetic text created live and projected digitally in the performance space. Entwinement was included in Spectral Harmonies, an umbrella event of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) Annual Conference in 2015. In documenting and reflecting on the performance in terms of practice-led research, I make observations about improvisational writing and the genre of performance writing, and I suggest that this performance became an experience of performative dissonance and embodied vulnerability for myself and my collaborator. This had cascading effects on the event, inadvertently adding elements of artistic and social dissonance to those that were intentional in the work.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper is a response to activism in the summer of 2016/17 when bulldozers pushed a 5km highway footprint, known as the Roe 8 extension, through urban wetlands and woodlands in Perth’s southern suburbs. We argue that the impact of the community campaign to halt Roe 8, and the clearing of this land evoked a form of cultural mourning and loss that can be thought of as solastalgia (Albrecht 2008).  As an increasingly common experience in the Anthropocene, we are interested in how solastalgia can be expressed. In our need to comprehend and articulate solastalgia, we propose that a poetic response to the Roe 8 bulldozing offers a complex and intense a form of mourning which is not restricted to that summer of activism but connects with broader experiences of environmental loss.  Poetry has long been a form of writing that unsettles, that gives voice to the un-namable, to the currents and sinews that run beneath the surface of an often alienating and incomprehensible society. As part of a tradition of activist poetics, this article includes poetry written in response to the physical affect of witnessing radical ecological destruction.'  (Publication abstract)

'One third of the 60,000 Australians killed in the 1914-1918 war were unable to be identified. Known collectively as the ‘Unknown Soldier’ they were reburied in the postwar years with the inscription ‘Known unto God’. In 1993, the remains of one Australian killed on the Western Front were exhumed, repatriated and interred in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial. In 2007, Archie Weller published a poem titled the ‘Unknown Soldier’ (Weller 2007) which gives a name, voice, history and character to the soldier-larrikin and anti-hero whose bones lie there, effectively challenging former prime-minister Paul Keating’s eulogy which insists ‘We will never know who this Australian was’ (Keating 1993). Weller deploys prosopopoeia, which has been described as the ‘fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave’ and a ‘master trope’ of poetic discourse. His verse undercuts notions of the sacred associated with the Unknown Soldier and creates presence from absence, making explicit a key motive of imaginative writing. This paper speculates on the potency of the ‘unknown’ and the way that texts like tombs assist concealment and revelation, remembering and forgetting, resurrection and erasure.' (Publication abstract)

'This article, in the form of a conversation between novelist Justine Ettler and literary and cultural studies scholar Rebecca Johinke, looks back at the reception of the Australian novel The River Ophelia in 1995. It also looks forward to speculate how audiences may read the novel in 2018 and beyond, given that in October 2017 it was re-released in e-book format with a new Author’s Note and Introduction (Ettler 2017a). The River Ophelia was a publishing sensation in Australia in the mid-90s as it describes sadistic and masochistic sex and domestic violence. Due to early reviews and the way it was marketed, it was labelled as ‘dirty realism’ or ‘grunge’. In this article, the authors argue for a re-appraisal of the text as a feminist parody and as a highly intertextual postmodern work. In and through their conversation, Johinke and Ettler reveal the extent to which genre confusion, and the question of what is and isn’t ‘real’ dominated the reception of the text at the time of its initial release, and how the intentional fallacy in cases where an author is conflated with a character can be adopted unselfconsciously, and indeed manipulated by, publishers and critics in the marketplace. In light of recent feminist activism around domestic violence and sexual abuse, such as the #MeToo campaign, the authors also discuss the depiction of domestic violence in The River Ophelia, and how certain representations of sex and female desire might play out in representations of abusive relationships. The question of what is and is not erotic, pornographic, or romantic literature is also discussed, both in relation to The River Ophelia, and in relation to several other controversial texts that have been published since its first release.' (Publication abstract)

'I will say at the outset that I was principal supervisor for Glenda Guest’s PhD novel Siddon Rock (2006) which subsequently won the world-wide Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book (2010) and was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Prize Best First Book (the Glenda Adams Award) and for other prizes. So why am I writing this review? Surely there is a conflict of interest. Actually, I am concerned about how many PhD candidates make it as writers, how many publish beyond their doctoral work without supervisory attention, and how many make careers beyond academia. The pages of TEXT seem the ideal place for a review taking this perspective.'  (Introduction)

'This novel provides a powerful view of alienation and its consequent positioning of Aboriginal blackness as always other. Whatever the terms of surrender, whiteness dominates and fairness remains an impossible goal. This novel opens with a strong narrative voice, including black jail-style dialogue. The ongoing observations are insightful and humorous, complementing the characterisation. The action and plot emphasise that the novel is the story of outsiders.' (Introduction)

'Jen met Roanna Gonsalves in 2007 when she came to the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference, hosted at the University of Canberra. Her paper used Bourdieu’s constructs in a genuinely fresh way: examining the relationship between the literary field, and how creative writers produce their works, from the original story idea all the way through to editing and publication. So Jen knew back then that Gonsalves, too, was a huge Bourdieu fan; but didn’t know she was also a writer of sharp, smart, moving short stories.'  (Introduction)

'One imagines that thumbtacked to the pinboard above H C Gildfind’s writing desk (or perhaps tattooed on the top of her dominant typing hand) are the words, ‘Happiness is repetition.’ If they hadn’t been quoted midway through the penultimate story of her debut collection The Worry Front (or perhaps misquoted: is this a reduction of Milan Kundera’s well-known ‘happiness is the longing for repetition’? then I’d have been forced to pencil them into the text myself.'  (Introduction)

'If the prose poem keeps its time across the sentence rather than the line, it also distinguishes itself from narrative as the lyric does, by sequestering narrative, with its relentless cause-and-effect motion, to a space outside the poem itself. Cannily situating the poems of Íkaros within the overarching context of a story so familiar most children know it, Paul Hetherington relieves himself of any obligation to provide narrative, and so allows himself to cast each poetic gesture adrift on lyric time, where the poems can operate in the realm of pure voice.' (Publication summary)

'The two thousandth anniversary of the poet Publius Ovidius Naso – one of the canonical poets of Latin literature and known to us more directly as Ovid – provides inspiration for this anthology of poems edited by Nessa O’Mahony and Paul Munden and published by Recent Work Press. In Metamorphic: 21st century poets respond to Ovid, one hundred participating poets – from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, South Africa, India, Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada – rewrite or re-envision Metamorphoses in a mix of poetic styles and forms.' (Publication summary)

'There is always going to be something missing in a translation of a poem, but the reader who doesn’t know the original language is unlikely to know precisely what’s not there. Translation can also, without denying the losses, be understood as a positive process.' (Introduction)