AustLit

'Life writing such as autobiography, biography and memoir continues to be popular with readers while new genres, for instance, on-line or in other public, performative iterations, also shift and grow. Both historically and in the current moment, life writing emerges to address issues of individual experience in relation to public record. Very often, such works also seek to engage with issues of justice or redress, particularly in relation to expressions of trauma or conflict. What role do life narrative texts play in troubled times? This special issue presents scholarly and creative work that seek sot respond to this question in particular. The writing and research here explores troubling subjects such as political injustice, moral panics, and family and interpersonal relationships. These works ‘trouble’ prevalent ideas, for instance about minority or marginal cultures to offer new ways of seeing the cultural work that diverse life narrative texts can perform.'  (Publication abstract)

'In this article, I ‘trouble’ mainstream moral panics about children’s social media use. Respondents were invited to complete a survey that asks them to reflect on their use of Instagram as a form of diary-keeping. At a time when there is much negativity around young people’s use of social media, I explore how Instagram might be used by young people as a mode of cultural participation. This case study promotes a more nuanced understanding of young people’s everyday life storying and communication practices, and their relationships to certain publics or anticipated readers.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper explores the creative development of The Centre, an emerging play that reimagines Ancient Greek tragic characters as modern-day asylum seekers detained in an offshore detention centre. The construction of the play blends fictional character constructs of the Ancient Greek characters with information from reports on contemporary asylum seekers. While life narratives normally focus on the lived experience of one person, reimagined through a creative framework, The Centre uses multiple accounts of asylum seekers sourced from the public domain. The Centre is an attempt to work creatively at the borders of fiction and documentary theatre to highlight a contemporary issue through the self-conscious reframing of classical stories.

'This project has been supported by Playlab Australia and The Sunshine Coast Council Regional Arts Development Fund with feedback provided from dramaturges Peter Matheson and David Fenton. The play had an initial creative development with The Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble.'  (Publication abstract)

'Advocating a poetics of ‘decreation’ committed to ‘getting Me out of the way’, the experimental poet and classicist Anne Carson has typically invented strangely hybrid, trans-generic forms that resist and subvert conceptions of self, subject, or even an agential ‘center’. Yet auto / biographical questions are foundational to her work, even as it seeks to depart from conventional life writing forms. Taking up the troublesome problem of ‘Me’ in Carson’s work, this article attends specifically to the emergence of Carson’s decreation poetics in ‘The Glass Essay’ (1995). It examines the process of (self) decreation as a relational, anti-subjectivist proposition and as a textual phenomenon that ultimately poses intractable paradoxes for readers, including the paradox of a ‘dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work, and the teller disappears into the telling’ (Carson 2005: 173).'  (Publication abstract)

'Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a childhood, 1939–1948 was first published in 1995 in Germany, and in English translation in 1996. It purported to be a Holocaust memoir: the author wrote of his experiences as a six year old in concentration camps in Poland. Doubts were raised as to its authenticity, and eventually the memoir was revealed to be a ‘hoax’. Wilkomirski (whose actual name was Bruno Grosjean at birth) had been given up for adoption by his mother, who was poor and the victim of an accident that left her with brain injuries. I argue that the author of Fragments could not find a sense of identity or belonging as an adoptee, but did as a Holocaust survivor, and through a long and complex process he came to produce a narrative that explained his life as he saw it. I discuss the case in detail to build a picture of Wilkomirski as an adopted person rather than a literary hoaxer, and utilise the work of Betty Jean Lifton, who postulated that the damage done to him in childhood reverberated through the years into his adult life. A discussion of trauma (and trauma theories), as it relates to adopted persons and their life narratives, and the Divided Self theory adapted by Betty Jean Lifton and Jo Sparrow, are employed in providing a reading of Fragments as a troubled adoptee memoir, one that is embedded within the ‘false’ or ‘hoax’ memoir of Holocaust survival.' (Publication abstract)

'The story of three little boys who drowned in a dam on Father’s Day in 2005 is sad and shocking. After two long trials, Robert Farquharson was found guilty of the murders of his three sons and imprisoned for 33 years. This paper will examine works by two authors who tell this same story, each in a different way and from different perspectives. Helen Garner and Megan Norris both explore this tragic true crime by presenting two quite different grief narratives. Both are courtroom narratives that simultaneously question and explain the court system, but their respective examinations of grief, despair and fractured lives have resulted in two very different approaches. The article examines the narrative choices made by each author. It suggests that writers of such narratives bear a heavy responsibility towards the characters they portray as well as towards their readers, many of whom are not familiar with court processes and the criminal justice system.' (Publication abstract)

'This creative work is a personal response to difficult events. The matter of this work concerns the nature and processes of writing about universal themes of love and loss. It explores ‘Life Writing in Troubled Times’ through processes of storying an intimate and foundational relationship – a relationship which continues to have an active presence in my world and inner life. I am mourning my mother. She has been gone twelve years. Venturing into history, into what this amazing woman gave and has given to me, and as a way of mediating emotional pain, I play with concepts and expressions of time, while excavating deeper stories and past-present-future relationships. For me, and for my mother, writing has had an important role to play in processing life events and the human condition, in processing moments-years-decades of loss …and love. My mother’s own writing has supported a process of witnessing her life and lived experiences. It has offered a ‘protective workspace’ for my own contemplation and writing, magnifying my awareness of relationships and enabling a ‘being with’ and a ‘writing together’ even though she is no longer here (Walsh and Bai 2015: 26). Writing this piece sustains my connection to her in her absence. It offers a place to dwell amongst generational and everyday stories, the fragments that are known, read, or overheard. And, it creates new spaces – authentic, honouring, embodied, and generative spaces – enabling mourning, connection, responding and becoming.'  (Publication abstract)

Amy Benn uses poetry and comic art to  explore the experience of her brother’s suicide.

'In this article, I explore the challenges and opportunities associated with using ‘informed imagination’ to write a speculative biography of an historical figure. In the process, I problematize the notion of the archival gap, which has been recently romanced by numerous writers, including myself. By citing archival gaps as a justification for creative license, we neglect the fact that all archives are inherently idiosyncratic in ways that invite, perhaps even demand, the use of both speculation and imagination. Here, I make a case for what I am calling the archival overlap. A careful examination of the existing sources, however sparse or abundant, is likely to reveal reoccurring clues that can be used to shape how we image and construct our subjects. Before we consider the gaps we should tend to these overlaps, I argue, using a current work-in-progress case study of the colonial artist Adelaide Ironside to explore how speculation and imagination are intrinsic to these stages of the biographical process.'  (Publication abstract)

'The death of an aunt, criminal charges against her daughter, and family management of that crisis drove me into research. The charge together with the press coverage of the case brought collective family shame. I wrote first to understand my cousin’s plight and secondly to avoid conflict with my father. Most writers draw on experiences shared with or contested by others. Some transform source characters in order to analyse ideas in cognitive mode but at arm’s length; others write to bear witness. Life writers frequently write perceivably true accounts. This paper will assert writers right to research experiences that belong to others whilst respecting vulnerable subjects. It relies on Anna Denejkina’s proposed model exo-autoethnography – that is writing trauma vicariously suffered through family or personal connections – for the purpose of representing and clarifying complex problems, short-circuiting authorial paralysis, and expanding empathy.'  (Publication abstract)

'Questions about the relationship between memoir, what really happened, and public history especially in times of significant societal change and disruption – troubled times  have no doubt been around since the earliest examples of the genre, most likely predating Ceasar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Memoir and biography readers encounter life’s suffering, dread and loss, alongside hope, achievement, redemption. For life writers, recalling and ordering in memoir, events that shape them, is there a danger of forgetting or expunging the discomfort, pain or distress those events provoked for the self or others? Do writers have responsibility in terms of their self curation to those others either inside or outside of the text? Beyond the text what imperative if any, exists for the reviewer or critic to raise ethical questions arising from the writer’s recollections? This article considers two recent examples of life writing presenting narratives of bohemian lives which have fulfilled requirements for higher degrees in creative writing. The conversational frame of this article, which nods to Ross Watkins’ and Nigel Krauth’s (2016) exploration of new forms for the journal article, is used intentionally to foreground the authors’ personal observations and responses to the texts, particularly as these intersect with the texts. This subjectivity is a springboard for questions about the social value of memoir and life writing in troubled times.'  (Publication abstract)