AustLit

'This paper explores the complexity of collaborative authorship in the humanities, proposing the string figure as a dexterous model with which to map connections amongst a broad network of contributors. Drawing on the recent work of Donna Haraway, in addition to post-structuralist thinkers like Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, string figures (eg cat’s cradle) are rendered as adequately supple and striated to the diagramming of creative synergy. To this end the authors deploy fictocritical and experimental writing techniques, as well as images, probing the complexities of joint composition. Their text takes on the shape of a string game passed back and forth across a motley crew of agents and actors.' (Publication abstract)

'Bricolage as a research methodology in the creative arts, and creative writing in particular, has become popular in the twenty-first century, following the lead of qualitative researchers in education and the social sciences. Although many base their understanding of bricolage on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s seminal explanation in The Savage Mind (1966), they have neglected to consider how he differentiates the bricoleur from the artist. This distinction also escapes a number of creative writing researchers who have adapted bricolage as a research methodology. They enumerate the benefits without sufficiently acknowledging the drawbacks, which include superficiality, overgeneralisation and misinterpretation of the theories and practices of other disciplines. Exploiting multiple disciplines can lead to insights that might not arise following a more conventional approach, but appropriate support needs to be given otherwise creative researchers risk producing work that cannot be deemed rigorous.' (Publication abstract)

'In public discourse, there is a tendency for arts and science – or, more broadly, academic research – to be cast as irreconcilable at best and oppositional at worst. However, the explication of trauma, resilience and wellbeing in creative writing is as much a matter of science communication as literary practice. It involves writing down the bones of the phenomena that researchers chart and treat, exploiting the narrative and poetic properties of such endeavours, and making explicit both cognition and affect, empirical evidence and felt experience. It is evident in fictional worldmaking, creative nonfiction, poetry, and in hybrid works such as narratives that combine memoir and scholarship. Such diverse approaches to literary expression do not necessarily aim to extend theory or present experimental data, but to provide opportunities for alternative ways to view and review such material content, and explicitly incorporate imaginative and evocative engagements. At their best, such writings enact a form of affective, micro-macro testimony that has the potential to demystify scholarly findings, personalise and humanise related issues, confront denial and minimisation, and build bridges between what C.P. Snow named the “two cultures”. This paper begins by considering Snow’s advice to rethink how science and literature operate, and moves on to discuss hybrid and multiple lines of knowledge and practice – in fiction, memoir and personal writing, and healing workshops – that can build bridges across knowledge domains and social cultures, and afford recovery from personal, community and environmental trauma.' (Publication abstract)

'A growing body of evidence points to the potential of life writing about anorexia to foster “disordered reading” practices in certain readers (Seaber, 2016), with particular concerns raised about the breakthrough eating disorder memoir, Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted (1998). With this article, I shift the focus from readers to authors, exploring the positive and negative health consequences of writing as depicted in Wasted and three anorexia memoirs by British authors, selected on the basis of their meta-literary reflections.

'On the one hand, these memoirists describe various forms of what I term “disordered writing”, or writing that is implicated in the perpetuation of illness. On the other, these memoirists accord writing a role in recovery: affording metacognitive insights, it allows them to challenge the “anorexic voice” and nurture a voice of their own. I suggest that in texts that ascribe both harmful and healing effects to writing, the co- ordination of narrative voice has consequences for narrators’ reliability. Where the three British memoirists clearly differentiate between experiencing and narrating “I”s, and structure their texts to perform recovery, Hornbacher’s highly ambiguous project to “translate” her body leaves ample scope, I argue, for “disordered reading”.' (Publication abstract)

'“Blood don’t lie” is a work of creative nonfiction that seeks to understand writing and sickness through the work of Flannery O’Connor. By analysing her correspondence, biographical details, ephemera and three short stories, this essay applies a feminist disability studies reading to her work and asks: to what extent can the experience of sickness be read “backwards”, from biography to fiction; from reading to reader; and, in the case of both O’Connor and the author, from generation to generation? It identifies the thematic concerns of her work – family, time, sickness and body – and emphasises how they might be employed to counter the resistance of pain to description in language and, further, to explain the relationship between language, power and otherness in writing about sickness. By combining techniques from literary criticism, biography and autobiography in a hybrid form, it produces new writing towards a speculative literature of sickness.' (Publication abstract)

'Anthropologist and poet Edith Turner (2012) sets out a narration of communitas to demonstrate its endless variations through fieldwork, how it appears often unexpectedly, and how it is a felt sense; “a collective satori” or sudden enlightenment. She calls communitas “togetherness itself”. This paper outlines the discovery and experience of communitas as it applies to creative writing in several different creative writing and research settings: 1) the genesis and makings of an interdisciplinary creative practice research group within a university setting 2) a durational creative exploration of writing and walking (not-walking), and 3) a performative “un-panel” exploring nonfiction as queer encounter. It borrows the concept of communitas as a loanword from the field of anthropology and ritual studies (Victor Turner, 1969; Edith Turner, 2012) and identifies generative characteristics of communitas for creative writing purposes. It investigates the development of the idea of togetherness itself through a feminist and queer sensibility in relation to Hélène Cixous’s non-acquisitional space and jouissance, and the communitastica of joy. This paper offers a way of thinking about the gift of communitas, including the elements needed to allow it to happen within creative writing, hand in hand with a sense of joy, jouissance and possibility.' (Publication abstract)

'This article frames three individual perspectives on the experience of unsettling disciplinary and institutional subjectivities through teaching and learning practices in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. At the centre of this experience is a common engagement of teaching and learning with sovereign knowledges. More specifically, the accounts in the article are drawn from experiences in 2020, when the forces of extra-academic life – especially lockdown during COVID-19 in Victoria – intensified the objectives and the means of challenging the boundaries of settler colonial expertise. The authors find that collaborative and iterative sharing of teaching experiences and methods not only supported them during a time of acute change but also empowered them to take risks that challenge disciplinary authority. In seeking to un-learn their privilege together and with their students, the authors reflect here on a set of new pedagogical contexts and approaches that are perpetually in-process.' (Publication abstract)

'A new literary journal of the Northern Territory, Borderlands, launched an online pilot edition in 2019 and an online print edition in 2020. The publication comes twenty years after its predecessor, Northern Perspectives, ceased publishing due to losing its Australia Council funding and support from Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University). As the editors of the journal, in this article we analyse how we funded and published the journal’s pilot editions against the backdrop of precarious arts funding and a ravaged arts sector, due in part to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. We provide a cost breakdown of publishing the journal and analyse our approach and processes in order to offer some insight and transparency to stakeholders, patrons and others contemplating literary journal publishing. Despite the challenging landscape of arts funding in Australia, ultimately the benefits of pursuing literary publishing in the regions to foster regional writing as part of Australian literature are worth the obstacles encountered on the path to publication. Our research suggests there are four key pillars integral to a journal’s success and sustainability in an underfunded sector: a flexible approach, community support and engagement, early stakeholder consultation, and transparency surrounding the costs of literary journal publishing.' (Publication abstract)