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)