AustLit

'The April 2021 edition of TEXT features seven provocative scholarly contributions to the discipline, largely concerned with what could be considered an ethics of care. This septet is led by Julienne van Loon’s timely reflection on creative practice as ‘nourishment’, originally presented as keynote to the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference held at Griffith University, November 2020.'

'The contribution from Cleo Mees takes a ficto-critical approach to the uncertainty, precarity and exploitation that characterises scholarly work for today’s sessional creative writing academics. Katherine Day’s research investigates the extent to which Australia’s defamation laws have created a practice of implicit censorship of non-fiction writing in Australia. Continuing the theme of an ethics of care, Owen Bullock offers insights into his principles and practices in running haiku workshops. Jack Kirne’s discussion of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018) bolsters an argument for the multirealist mode as an agile method for writing about the climate crisis. Kári Gíslason finds limited capacity in the broader culture for critically valuing and genuinely supporting multi-modal authorship. And a remarkable collaboration of six scholars engage in an experiment to explore the ‘differences, contradictions, sympathies, antipathies, and strange resonances’ between expressions of creative practice in relation to the ‘notoriously slippery’ yet personally significant notions of time and queerness. Also included are creative works focused on the process of writing, and 13 reviews of books of interest to creative writing scholars and practitioners.' (Publication summary)