'This essay explores the relationship between grief and personal expression. I use Sigmund Freud’s conceptualisations of the German word heimlich as a way to understand the ambiguity of a grief that has been buried and the narratives of self that ensued. I argue that writing and other forms of personal expression allow us to bring these ambiguities closer to us, to examine them and then to properly let them go. This is the story of how grief shook my family. The more theoretical aspects of this essay were drawn from research which formed part of my Master’s thesis at Curtin University of Technology.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper is in two parts. The first examines the relationship between creativity and madness as it manifests itself in the work of Freud and Lacan and culminates in Lacan’s theorising of the operation of suppléance, a proxy device that prevents subjective dissolution and provides a key to understanding the hidden order of artmaking. The second problematises suppléance by testing it against Ehrenzweig’s theory of creativity. The aim of the paper is to identify schemata that link madness and creativity using a psychoanalytic frame in order to question theory in ways that may be helpful for artists, and more specifically creative writers. It does so by focusing on Lacan’s conceptualisation of the real as ambiguous and ‘extimate’, two ideas also present in the work of Freud and Ehrenzweig. The ambiguity and ambivalence at stake here are retrieved from the unconscious as the ‘equivocation’ between the real and the imaginary (Lacan 2005a: 102; emphasis added). This equivocation is precisely what must be negotiated, I suggest, when madness beckons and a threat to the ego looms, unless some creative solution is found which enables the knotting of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. As an art, writing may be that which knots together the ex-sistence of the real, the consistence of the imaginary and the hole introduced by the symbolic, while also showing how these can each be transformed according to the way in which suppléance works at each level.' (Publication abstract)

'The contemporary verse novel for children and young adults, a hybrid genre that combines poetry and narrative, emerged concurrently in Australia and the United States in the late 1990s, and has continued to proliferate. In this interview, Elizabeth Claire Alberts discusses the young adult verse novel with three award-winning writers—Helen Frost, Steven Herrick and Ronald Koertge. The initial questions investigate how these authors position themselves, and their texts, within the verse novel genre—a classification that has been problematic because of its terminological implications. The subsequent questions consider the thinking and writing processes involved in creating a young adult verse novel, and if—and how—these processes differ from the creation of prose narratives or other types of poetry. Several questions explore the collaboration between poetry and narrative, and how these authors deal with the dualistic demands of the verse novel form. The creative processes involved in writing young adult verse novels have not been thoroughly discussed in contemporary theory, and the responses from Frost, Herrick and Koertge offer an enlightening perspective of writing in this form.' (Publication abstract)