AustLit

'It is always interesting to look at the cPanel stats provided by our excellent webhost, Netregistry. They show, for example, that ten years ago, in October 2008, TEXT had 2397 unique visitors who accessed on average 3.2 pages (i.e. 3 articles) in the month.' (Introduction)

‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

1. Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
2. We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
3. There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
4. Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
5. History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
6. Story transmits narrative responsibility. Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.

'This two-part paper discusses each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra. Part 1 discussed the first three groundings and was published in TEXT Vol 21, No 2, October 2017. Part 2 discusses the remaining three groundings.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article attempts to address some of the limitations currently felt by creative practitioners in the UK (with wider implications) when presenting their practise-led work as research. Taking as a starting point the self-reflective critical component generally accepted as a key criterion in the recognition of practice as research, I ask if a case may be made for metafictional devices being recognised as legitimate forms of practice research methodology. Using a current creative work in progress that focusses on the question of how one may represent the past without simply appropriating it to one’s own position, I investigate whether it is possible for a self-reflexive component internal to the creative work to fulfil the requirements for the formal recognition of practice as research within the UK’s research structures and processes whilst also serving as an inter-generative, vital part of the creative process.'  (Publication abstract)

'At the heart of the enterprise of writing in relation to research, there exists a tension between the imaginary and the informed; between the literary and the academic narrative, or, taken from a distant view: a tension between the creation of art and knowledge production. This tension does not necessarily imply and opposition, in that different writing registers (style, language, formalism, tradition, etcetera) and their corresponding research strategies have one thing in common: the author’s need to express herself and the desire to explore the ‘known unknown’. This essay discusses and shows simultaneously the attempt of me as author, both as a researcher and as a novelist, to get a grip on the notion of ‘beginning’ as mediating space between origin and destination. Embraced by the beginning (and closure) of Michel Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, this text explores the concepts underpinning Edward Said’s definition of the beginning as a ‘first step in the intentional production of meaning’. To connect an intention to write to the actual performance of writing, Roland Barthes proposes that the beginning, or ‘origin’, must be sought in the tendency of the author: a clear, yet elusive determination, at the beginning, in order to begin. Authorisation then comes twofold: from the desire to explore the ‘known unknown’, and from the willingness to internalise and apply multiple voices. A beginning, any beginning, has consequences for all that comes afterwards; within the text (what I am going to say next), as well as outside it (what you will gather from it), thus defining what will be in the end the significance of my attempt.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper investigates approaches to authorship in The Long Weekend in Alice Springs (2013), a graphic adaptation by the Australian artist Joshua Santospirito of a psychoanalytic essay by Craig San Roque (2004). Because the subject of both essay and adapted text is the ability of stories to have lasting effects over time in a space of crisis, this unusual adaptation establishes itself as an unusual site of authorship, whereby multiple authorships create a complicated authority, and stories themselves are shown to be significant. Through its variable positioning of the different roles undertaken by the author, the adaptation struggles with the ongoing challenge of appropriating Indigenous storytelling and suggests a possible way to discuss these stories from the outside. Through analysing paratextual materials and the work itself, this paper shows how nonfiction comics can both convey stories and separate themselves from stories through destabilising notions of creation and authorship.' (Publication abstract)

'Fairy tales rely on conventions that perpetuate heteropatriarchal ideals, which makes this an apt genre for deliberate modification to better represent queer perspectives. This article surveys queer reimaginings of the fairy tale published between 1997 and 2010, identifying several problems with representations of queerness and sexuality in existing literature. This canon often works to distance and marginalise those who do not fit the dominant stereotype of a monosexual identity. Further, the frequent depiction of explicit sexual acts, violent and unhealthy relationships, and inappropriate language has worked to exclude young adult audiences. In this article, I identify a growing but still relatively small field of new queer fairy tale literature directed at young adults since 2015: texts that tend to posit the importance of self-identification. Nuanced representations of queer characters in recent young adult fiction make space for the lived experiences of queer youth and have the potential to influence future queer reimaginings of fairy tales, as well as to challenge heteropatriarchal conventions in other genres.' (Publication abstract)

'The Dungeons & Dragons-inspired podcast, The Adventure Zone (TAZ) (2014-present), which is run by the McElroy family, is an ongoing narrative about three adventurers who work to find and destroy seven powerful Grand Relics. The narrative incorporates several different genres, themes, and both player and non-player characters. During the podcast, the youngest brother, Griffin, explains settings and story elements so that his two brothers, Justin and Travis, and his father, Clint, can react to them while playing characters that they have created. This paper argues that TAZ models a storytelling approach that incorporates and streamlines radio drama storytelling, chance, and roleplay into an organic, collaborative narrative. I examine TAZ’s audio gameplay, the discussions amongst the players between scenes (metagaming), and the metatextual discussions in the Lunar Interludes and other metaepisodes, in order to track the progression of the story and explore how the storytelling methods contribute to an engaging narrative.' (Publication abstract) 
 

'With the question of appropriation in fiction in debate – given prominence through the furore caused by Lionel Shriver’s keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival in October 2016 – the importance of discussing issues of voice and authority with emergent writers has become ever more apparent. Yet how should these ideas be discussed with student writers who are still coming to terms with craft notions such as point-of-view and narrative voice? What alternatives are available other than focusing on privilege and power, where students tend to retreat into their subjugated identities to justify their speaking positions? And when discussing ‘the right’ to tell other people’s stories how can a recognition of fiction writing as a political act in itself move emergent writers away from the idea of ‘making things up’ towards a more engaged view of their practice? This paper will attempt to answer some of these questions via a mixture of voices itself, utilising the ‘voice of experience’ of the tertiary teacher as well as that of the practicing creative writer whose own work – a draft novel entitled ‘The Master Class’ – is concerned with fiction as, inevitably, an act of appropriation and utilities a narrative where fictional characters directly engage with the question of who owns a story.' (Publication abstract)

'‘Books talk among themselves’, Umberto Eco (1984: 61) once quipped convincingly. Readers overhear those conversations, I assert. Some books sing to you (as Francesca Rendle-Short, in her performative essay on memoir in Offshoot, says of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race [232]). Offshoot crackles at me. Staying ululates.'  (Introduction)

'Published less than a year apart, Meera Atkinson’s two new books make a profound and original contribution to the study of trauma in the humanities and creative writing practice, as well as the wider public conversation about its rippling effects upon lives and across generations. Traumata (UQP 2018) and The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (Bloomsbury 2017) are very different works, one a creative non-fiction account of growing up and living with trauma and the other an academic inquiry into the literary poetics of trauma transmitted from one generation to another. Yet the two books traverse similar terrain in search of answers to similar questions: how does trauma move from one body to another and across time? How is it shaped and changed by the actions of living, the structures of oppression within which it operates and the slow, arduous efforts of survivors to recover? How might language bring forth that most resistant of experiences, the traumatic?'  (Introduction)

'Enza Gandolfo’s second novel has been many years in the making, but it has been well worth the wait. This is an ambitious, multi-generational story from a skilled writer. Diving into the almost four-hundred-page novel, I was promptly absorbed by its carefully layered plot, its significant cast of troubled characters, and Gandolfo’s strong loyalty to a representation of recent local history that takes in the union movement, post-war European migration to the city of Melbourne, and the very real struggles of raising a family, both with and without the support of extended family.' (Introduction)