AustLit

'The Dungeons & Dragons-inspired podcast, The Adventure Zone (TAZ) (2014-present), which is run by the McElroy family, is an ongoing narrative about three adventurers who work to find and destroy seven powerful Grand Relics. The narrative incorporates several different genres, themes, and both player and non-player characters. During the podcast, the youngest brother, Griffin, explains settings and story elements so that his two brothers, Justin and Travis, and his father, Clint, can react to them while playing characters that they have created. This paper argues that TAZ models a storytelling approach that incorporates and streamlines radio drama storytelling, chance, and roleplay into an organic, collaborative narrative. I examine TAZ’s audio gameplay, the discussions amongst the players between scenes (metagaming), and the metatextual discussions in the Lunar Interludes and other metaepisodes, in order to track the progression of the story and explore how the storytelling methods contribute to an engaging narrative.' (Publication abstract) 
 

'When future researchers look back on this generation seeking to understand our culture and society, the internet will be a rich source of archival study. We as a culture have begun to digitise not only our records and our history, but also ourselves. Contemporary internet users construct digital ‘bodies’ through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram –performing their personalities in order to participate in the online culture – while tracking bots and cookies monitor our use of the online space in order to predict which advertisements will be most effective. It is through this combination of deliberate construction and the (somewhat neutral) reflections of man-made, coded interpreters that our online ‘selves’ form. The purpose of this creative work is to explore identity-constructing practices in the online space, to reflect on the ways that the online archive can be read, and to develop an experimental non-fiction work using the internet as a base medium. The work takes the form of a travel memoir, told through a combination of my social media outputs and internet history between November 18, 2015, and March 1, 2016. I have selectively compiled posts and archived pages in order to produce what I consider to be an authentic representation of my experience, constructing a narrative of myself born from my deliberate social media posts and my internet history of that time, which gives the reader a glimpse into my mental state while I was travelling.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The 21st annual conference of the AAWP invited writers and academics to respond to the idea that, as writers, we are engaging in a type of ‘authorised theft’. Over 100 delegates responded enthusiastically by presenting papers that straddled genres, disciplines, modes of expression, as well as languages and cultures. Panel topics included sociologies of writing, poetry and song, narrative and narrative modes, responses to pain and trauma, digital literature and the online space, memoir/biography and travel writing, identity and voice, oral storytelling and ways of knowing, as well as translation and cross-cultural encounters.'

Source: Introduction.