AustLit

'Our April 2023 edition of TEXT features news scholarly work on metaphors for doctoral research, story cycles, writing the abyss, and writing through and out of the pandemic. Our scholarly article authors include Christine Howe and Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis (University of Wollongong), Julian Novitz (Swinburne University), Jenny Hedley (RMIT University), Alex Vickery Howe, Lisa Harper Campbell and Sean Williams (Flinders University) and Robyn Glade-Wright and Elizabeth A. Smyth (James Cook University). Creative works in this edition include new writing by BN Oakman, Sharon Kernot, Susan Presto and Saurabh Anand, while our reviews section features Jen Webb on Julia Prendergast’s ‘Bloodrust & Other Stories’, Kevin Brophy on Paul Magee’s ‘Suddeness and the Composition of Poetic Thought’, Dominic Symes on Marcelle Freiman’s ‘Spirit Level’, Julia Fazzari on Marion May Campbell’s ‘languish’, and Rosemary Williamson on Ros Petelin’s ‘How Writing Works’.' (Publication summary)

'This edition includes new work by: Michael Sala on the the dangerous ambiguity of using one’s feet; Charlotte Guest on feminist literary revisionism; Paul Magee on the immediacy of poetic thought; Rachel Hennessy, Alex Cothron and Amy Matthews on creating new climate stories; Sreedhevi Iyer, David Carlin and Alvin Pang on the digital writers’ residency; John Vigna, Rose Micheal and Penni Russon on teaching during Covid; Owen Bullock on tanka intrigue; Oscar Davis and Patrick West on writing and intuition; and Susan E. Thomas on preparing female tutors for gender bias in the writing classroom. We also include new poetry and prose on writing and the writing process and a range of new book reviews.'  (Publication summary)

'For some years, the regular edition editors at TEXT have followed a labour- intensive procedure in handling submissions and the peer review process, with all correspondence going through the central TEXT email address. We would like to improve our ability to track articles in the system, and also allow our authors and peer reviewers to check easily what stage an article is up to, what is required of them, and by when.' TEXT in the Future : introduction

'The April 2021 edition of TEXT features seven provocative scholarly contributions to the discipline, largely concerned with what could be considered an ethics of care. This septet is led by Julienne van Loon’s timely reflection on creative practice as ‘nourishment’, originally presented as keynote to the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference held at Griffith University, November 2020.'

'The contribution from Cleo Mees takes a ficto-critical approach to the uncertainty, precarity and exploitation that characterises scholarly work for today’s sessional creative writing academics. Katherine Day’s research investigates the extent to which Australia’s defamation laws have created a practice of implicit censorship of non-fiction writing in Australia. Continuing the theme of an ethics of care, Owen Bullock offers insights into his principles and practices in running haiku workshops. Jack Kirne’s discussion of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018) bolsters an argument for the multirealist mode as an agile method for writing about the climate crisis. Kári Gíslason finds limited capacity in the broader culture for critically valuing and genuinely supporting multi-modal authorship. And a remarkable collaboration of six scholars engage in an experiment to explore the ‘differences, contradictions, sympathies, antipathies, and strange resonances’ between expressions of creative practice in relation to the ‘notoriously slippery’ yet personally significant notions of time and queerness. Also included are creative works focused on the process of writing, and 13 reviews of books of interest to creative writing scholars and practitioners.' (Publication summary)

'The October 2019 edition includes scholarly contributions that espouse a wide variety of relationships between form, function and the writer – from the literary fragment, poetic form and interpretation, essaying with food waste, and explorations of narrated futures of place, to error, failure and the past self as ‘other’ in memoir, the contemporising of medieval forms, and a revision of screenwriting pedagogy.' (Ross Watkins and Julienne van Loon, Editorial.

'For some years, the regular edition editors at TEXT have followed a labour-intensive procedure in handling submissions and the peer review process, with all correspondence going through the central TEXT email address. We would like to improve our ability to track articles in the system, and also allow our authors and peer reviewers to check easily what stage an article is up to, what is required of them, and by when.' (Nigel Krauth and Julienne van Loon, Editorial introduction)

'Scholarly contributions to the general edition of TEXT Vol 22, No 2 include the second part of a ground-breaking article by Paul Collis and Jen Crawford on approaches to indigenous storytelling in the Creative Writing teaching and learning space. ‘Six groundings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander story in the Creative Writing classroom: Part 2’ furthers the authors’ case for the acknowledgement and presence of Australian indigenous storytelling in the Creative Writing discipline using an inclusive approach pioneered at the University of Canberra. Together with Part 1, this work provides Creative Writing teachers and academics across Australia with a method and a framework for inviting Australian indigenous story into the discussion and into the collective creative writing studio or workshop. Part 1 of Collis and Crawford’s article was published in TEXT Vol 21, No 2 (October 2017).' (From : Julienne van Loon and Ross Watkins, Editorial)

'Scholarly contributions to this issue of TEXT include a broad range of topics from reflective practice, improvisation, and collaborative writing as method, to questions of examination, experimentation, misinterpretation and activism.' (Source : Editorial)

'TEXT editors work closely with referees. We are deeply aware that referees do this work for the sake of their discipline and outside of their normal workloads. Each article published in TEXT is reviewed by at least two referees, and sometimes by as many as four if the re-writing is extensive and prolonged. It can be a painful experience for some writers to find their research put under the kind of scrutiny that is not possible to expect from friends and colleagues. We feel responsibility for not wasting referees’ time by sending on to them articles that have such fundamental flaws that little expertise is needed to point out the inadequacies of the submission. The editor’s role in these instances is one of gate-keeping, an uncomfortable position, but one that is part of the larger vision of keeping TEXT to the highest standards possible. TEXT is a journal particularly concerned to mentor and support both new and experienced researchers in the field.' (Editorial introduction)

'Recently, in the Runaway Bay newsagency (north of Surfers Paradise), my eye was attracted by a sign on one of the shelves: it said ‘Women’s Interest’. Below it, six magazines – all of them to do with creative writing: The Writer (US), The Writer’s Chronicle (US), Writer’s Digest (US), Writers’ Forum (UK), Writing Magazine (UK) and Literary Review (UK). They cost me a total of $92.16 . ' (Nigel Krauth, Editorial introduction)