AustLit
Texts
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How Fiction Works
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The Turning
Sydney
:
Picador
,
2004
Z1146280
2004
selected work
short story
(taught in 12 units)
The Turning comprises seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia. Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they've made for themselves.
These elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.
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The Disappearing
Sydney
:
The Red Room Company
,
2012
Z1884581
2012
anthology
poetry
multimedia
(taught in 1 units)
The Disappearing is an innovative new [free] app for iPhone, iPad and Android that (literally) explores poetry and place. Transform the world around you with new poems by some of Australia's finest poets, who've created a poetic map charting traces, fragmentary histories, impressions and memories.
Beginning with a collection of over 100 poems about Sydney, The Disappearing will stretch across Australia during 2012. Along with previously unpublished poetry, The Disappearing features exclusive videos of readings and interviews with poets. Users can upload their own poems to The Disappearing, preserving ideas, emotions and experiences about their own environment that vanish over time (publisher blurb http://redroomcompany.org/projects/disappearing/ sighted 5/9/2012).
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Having Cried Wolf
Mulgrave
:
Affirm Press
,
2010
Z1724642
2010
selected work
short story
(taught in 5 units)
'Small towns harbour secrets. Rising, receding and returning like the tides lapping the fictional coastal town of Kinsale, the stories in this collection revolve around Alice and Grace, friends since childhood, who grow to live vastly different lives.
Weaving in and around these women is a lattice of interconnecting stories drawing in their husbands, families, neighbours and strangers, each linked to one another by fate or circumstance. Having Cried Wolf is a contemplative and affecting collection - one that marks the arrival of an original literary talent.' (From the publisher's website.)
Description
In this class students are encouraged to consider the intersectional environments (natural, urban, cultural, historical etc.) that they interact with and within, and how their sensibilities differ living away from home to contemplate how a sense of place can be conveyed through writing. We will engage with a diverse range of readings – featuring many Australian authors – and discuss technical elements and affective poetics to learn how to ‘read as a writer’. Weeks are devoted to crafting the short story, contemporary indigenous storytelling, creative nonfiction, and poetry. The class emphasizes the importance of embodied interaction with the city through a field trip using ‘The Disappearing’ – a downloadable app featuring over 100 site-specific poems spanning a ‘poetic map’ of Sydney, created by The Red Room Company. Students will think about the possibilities of marrying new technologies with writing as they navigate using poems as landmarks. Students shall workshop their drafts during the course, learning how to effectively communicate critical feedback and how to be receptive to constructive critique.
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