AustLit

'This paper is a collaborative reflection by four academic women using our creative writings about oceans and shorelines to think and reflect. We write from discrete locations along the Southern and Eastern coastlines of the invaded continent contemporarily known as Australia. Our methodology incorporates walking and creative writing. This walking-writing methodology has connected us to entangled feelings and lived experiences, including our embodied relationships with the ocean, our work in academia, and our rising levels of anxiety as climate change and related environmental crises coincide with our re-membering of oceans, bodies, rhythms and breath. To illustrate our re-membering, we intersperse fragments from our creative writing with reflective discussion. The social, environmental and political chaos surrounding us seeps into our processes, highlighting how neoliberal ideologies influence our inability to dis/connect, harming both human and beyond-human life. Through walking-writing, we seek to remember what we are losing and to imagine alternative futures.' (Publication abstract)

'Anna Spargo-Ryan’s debut novel, The Paper House (2016), is a layered articulation of loss and grief, perception and reality. It explores the nature of reality as felt and lived by protagonist Heather – not always what the other characters consider as real.' (Introduction)

'Climate change fiction (cli-fi) is a relatively new and burgeoning genre. As creative writers, this paper’s co-authors find many questions regarding how to address our current climate crisis in ways that protest stereotypical representations and over-simplified political systems. In order to develop climate change fiction that engages with the climate as something more than a backdrop for the action or as an adversary for the protagonists, as authors of cli-fi, we need to interrogate the roles of recognisable details, such as food, in our fiction. In this paper, we use Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy as a case study of how cli-fi novels can interrogate climate change by making use of food as a symbolic and narrative device within the work. From that foundation, we argue that reading and research crystallises imaginative prowess and galvanises new ways of writing in the genre of cli-fi.'