AAWP 2016: Authorised Theft

Caren Florance (& Angela Gardner) 
Working Papers (jostles)
Exhibiting space: Building 2, Lower level A Foyer

These are large-scale reproductions of small process moments of Working Papers, an artists' book collaboration with poet/printmaker Angela Gardner. We are exploring the sense and nonsense of composition, the immersive space of creativity. She works with her own poetry, casting and gleaning, and I work with hand-set letterpress, re-arranging her words to make new strange castings. The small moments of play, experimentation and process are caught, copied, and thrown up and out to allow quick or slow contemplation. 

Laser-printed tyvek, 6 pieces, 841 x 1189mm ea. 

Jen Webb (poems), Paul Hetherington (poems), Andrew Melrose (music)
‘he sat weeping on the shore’: remembering those who mourn  (The Odyssey 5.82)
Exhibiting space: Room 2B2

In 2001, the Norwegian container vessel MV Tampa responded to a mayday call that led to the recovery of refugees, mostly Hazaras, seeking refuge in Australia. A period of international tension followed, with Captain Arne Rinnan insisting on landing the refugees on Australian soil, and the Australian government denying the request. This event is only one instance in a history of similar events; a history that is ongoing, with no let up in sight of the flows of desperate people. The objects in the installation seek to concretise the fragility of those seeking refuge; the poetry and other textual and sonic materials will attempt to re-imagine this event, and remember things that are forgotten in official representations of the global refugee crisis.

Mixed media: ship model, Preiser figures, eggshells, folded paper: 3D installation with sonic element, and handmade poetry collection for distribution 

Lorraine Webb and Jen Webb 
Letter and Line
Exhibiting space:  Upper level, 2B7, space outside room. 

These works are part of a larger collaboration between two sisters, one a painter and the other a poet. We are trying to find ways to work together within and across our forms: ways that are neither illustration nor ekphrasis. How does colour speak to word? What is the relationship between a line of poetry and a line of paint? Our first approach to this project is to break with some formal constraints: painting not on canvas but on odd-shaped objects; writing not lineated lyric poetry but prose poetry and fragments. Next is the openness that is a mark of most creative collaborations, a moving to and fro between images, ideas, conversations, essays into objects. We are concerned more with gestures than with the mark or the gaze, and with determining how, through the movement of eye and hand and conversation, we might make letter that speaks to line, line to letter. 

Christophe Charle describes the “divorce between the symbolic occupation of writers and the real basis of their social location” as “the main problem of the sociology of literature”. Unlike other professional groups, he argues, writers need have nothing in common except a passion for writing. Charle’s perspective is that of the French social context of a century ago, but there are some parallels to the contemporary Anglophone context. In a recent investigation of contemporary poets in nine Anglophone nations, my co-investigators and I necessarily considered whether it is possible to produce sociological accounts of this community that is not a community, this field that is at best only a sub-field. Who or what constitutes a poet? Is there anything that can be understood in terms of field, in both the constitution of subject as poet, and their operations in the social space? In this paper I discuss the issues we needed to address, particularly the relationship between economic and symbolic identity, and between self-identification and the “judgment of posterity”, as well as the principles of legitimation that operate to attribute value to oral and written/ performance and publication modes of production.

Bourdieu’s references to social inertia has provided a compelling paradigm for exploring the motivations of early career literary writers. Through situating the field of literary production in relation to a broader understanding of the changing relationship between Higher Education and the labour market, it allows research not only to advance beyond both social normative (‘labour of love’) and economistic (‘bad gamblers’) interpretations of artists’ motivations, but also to develop a properly sociological account of non-pecuniary rewards (‘psychic income’) through attention to the conditions that dispose individuals to value them.
     In support of this approach, and in the spirit of the reflexive turn Bourdieu encouraged, this paper considers how narratives of social inertia are produced by the research relation. Drawing on interviews with graduate literary writers in Melbourne, a UNESCO recognised City of Literature, it describes the production of evidence of the social inertia effect in the context of the well-understood advocacy role of most arts sector research, the position-taking of emerging literary writers, as well as the implicit ‘consciousness raising’ agenda of social research.

The mediatized and globalised literary field opens up numerous possibilities for the democratisation of writing while consequently and simultaneously restricting the resources available to writers to find publishers and to be legitimised in various ways. In attempting to understand how emerging writers create pathways to publication, this paper focusses on the stories of two writers with contrasting publication journeys, based on fieldwork conducted in India from 2011 to 2014. I suggest that in seeking out opportunities to get published, these writers engage in what I call ‘practices of friendliness’ that emerge out of the Bourdieusian sense of interest in disinterestedness that subtends all economies of symbolic goods. This paper is a preliminary attempt to begin to develop a cartography of friendliness, to map this ‘grammar of social capital’, to survey its hierarchical constructions, its entanglements, its politics. In doing so, it hopes to contribute to the discussion about the training of creative writing students in the academy.

Advocates have used stories of suffering and survival to bring about change in policy and practice to confront violations of law and human rights.  There is an essential, accompanying requirement that the telling must not constitute theft. Identities must be protected. Ownership must be respected. But undoubtedly, sharing stories ensures awareness of the humanity behind what legal and theoretical debates. The personal can influence the policy. Stories are powerful instruments for change. This writer sets out to show how that might be done.
      There has been a change in international norms regarding rape in war. After centuries of acceptance that rape in war was inevitable there is now recognition of it as a deliberate tactic of war. There has been accompanying rejection and international response. The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda – and the international criminal tribunals set up to deal with crimes in those arenas were instrumental in establishing tactical rape as a serious breach of international law, a war crime, an instrument of genocide and torture.
      In the United Nations, in the courts, in the public media and in academic debate, stories of victims and survivors played a part in effecting attitudinal change. Stories of indifference on the part of authorities were highlighted. The strength as well as the suffering of victims and survivors was told.
      Using these stories brings great responsibility – to avoid sensationalism, to protect and respect the owners of those stories. Used with respect they are powerful and can make a positive difference. 

This paper examines the legacy of Romanticism on Australian settlement.  It investigates how a public hungry for writing of all genres and schooled for centuries by the adventure tales of white heroes—“free”, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, “of the complexities of relations with white women”—came to believe in the authority of the theft of Aboriginal land, and to so casually disregard the violation of her people.
      Through close analysis of an account by the Victorian settler, Joseph Tice Gellibrand, this work seeks to unveil how word and action often belie one another, acting to legitimate what was in fact unlawful through what Foucault refers to as a “hazardous play of dominations”.
       Furthermore, I examine how the perception of legitimacy continues to operate in the contemporary Australian milieu, seeking to make clear through anecdotal evidence the connections between ideologies past and present, and to demonstrate how in this country (more perhaps than any other), the written word has everything to do with property, and ownership, and authority.
      In this way I conclude that it is through the written word, first and foremost, that we can help to bring about social change: through writing that seeks, as Jen Webb states, “to make things visible”, to “provide a platform” from which to disrupt the cultural orthodoxy and the phenomenology of colonialism and thus unsettle notions of settlement and sovereignty.  
      My work draws on Tim Fulford, Martin Green, Peter Kitson and Saree Makdisi’s explorations of British Romanticism; on the post-colonial discourse of Bill Ashcroft, Clare Bradford, Paul Carter and Stephen Muecke, and on Michel Serres exposition of the sensate realm of experience and the history of the Australian state of Victoria in an attempt to bring into being alternate narratives of place. 

Karen Gibson:  Re-Reading Jeannie Gunn and Laura Ingalls Wilder:  Racism, Myth-Building, and Reader Identification in Two “Pioneering” Narratives

Two books, both initially aimed primarily at juvenile audiences, have enjoyed immense popularity in their own countries of origin and around the world.  Yet, in recent years, both have received mixed reviews from critics regarding their portrayals of indigenous people.   Both authors reflect back on an earlier period of their own lives with nostalgia, a nostalgia that becomes entangled with early twentieth century myths of nation building and “settling” of “unoccupied” territories, resulting in often unfavorable representations of indigenous communities.  Despite these disparate readings by critics, both books continue to be used in educational settings and are often prominently displayed on library shelves.
      Drawing on post-colonial theories of children’s literature, this comparison of The Little Black Princess of the Never-Never (Australia; 1905) and Little House on the Prairie (U.S.A.; 1935) will focus on the books’ similarities, and the underlying messages they convey to young readers, in an attempt to understand their enduring popularity as well as to evaluate their potential value for a new generation of readers.  

Rosemary Sayer: Identity theft: The missing narrative identity of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia

More than 65 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide; the highest number since the end of WWII. In his book  Across the seas – Australia’s response to refugees: a history (2015) Klaus Neumann describes the response to refugees and asylum seekers as “one of the twenty first century’s most controversial and seemingly intractable ethical, political and social issues …”  Much of the public discourse about refugees and asylum seekers in Australia is de-humanising, negative and politicised. Governments and media have often created untrue narratives by grouping all asylum seekers and refugees together and exploiting people’s anxieties about security, borders and terrorism. This has resulted in a theft of identity for many individual people from a refugee background and the development of a misleading collective identity.
      In this paper, I will explore how narrative identity can be re-discovered and developed by refugees through a collaborative process of working with a non-refugee narrator. In producing an alternative narrative and different view of the lives affected, I will also explore whether greater community engagement can be fostered at the same time as expanding the scholarship of education and human rights. As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith posit in Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004) “personal narratives expand audiences around the globe to be educated about human rights abuses”. Life stories can engage and influence readers to become more informed, reflective and active. I will discuss how this collaboration can be empowering for refugees to help them reclaim their stolen identities and dispel misleading narratives being disseminated about them.

In 1948, after many years living with the Wonguri-Mandjigai people, Ronald M. Berndt published an English language translation of a non sacred song of the Sand-fly Clan: the Song Cycle of The Moon-Bone. In 1977 Les Murray wrote his own version based on the Berndt translation The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, a white mans revision. This earned him both congratulations and consternation. Critics referred to this poem as a ‘respectful parody’; he had, after all, omitted the lyrical I, a big ask for someone who believes in spiritual dominion. 2016: I have authored a homosemantic emulation, retranslated Murray’s translation, transgressed his vision of city folk holidaying on grandma’s farm and responded with Aboriginal To Nowhere: Song Cycle of The Post Modern Dispossessed. Written in thirteen cycles this poem signals a contemporary poetry of dispossession and anti-sentiment, ventures into transliminal territory, explores those in-between places of perpetual generational change, hyperaware of incremental shifts. I have restored the lyrical I, unable to see myself as a collective, metaphorical evidence of ontological fractures in the definition of what it means to ‘be human’. Perhaps Murray is correct and modernist sensibilities are dominated by fragmentation, cynicism and a morbid depression. I certainly fit here, lost and broken and deeply distrustful of ‘the official story’. This is all I have, what of the world I have inherited from my forebears; fragments, pieces of nothing and empty alienation.

Owen Bullock:  Response mode: taking everything and the genre

This hybrid paper of creative and critical writing reflects on my explorations of poetry. I write in what I call ‘response mode’, which is a group of behaviours, beginning with impersonation, and open to understandings gained from other art forms. After studying the style and techniques of other poets, I move towards a mid-point between another poet’s voice and my own, effectively, a new hybrid voice. The engagement with some literary ancestors enables evolution to an expression more fully my own. Stealing the designations of genre ensures a continued experiment. The challenges and variety of voicings made possible by prose poetry and haibun are important. The haibun influences other new hybrid forms, which encompass found poetry and appropriate language in a way which is redolent of the times. We take from exhibitions, songs, film, poems, conversation. Poets eavesdrop; I do it on the bus. If there is stealing, it is on a spectrum, which includes intertext. My poems draw from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yunna Moritz and Alan Loney, and from sculptor Cori Beardsley, who suggest to me new possibilities.

While watching Tarantino’s Django Unchained, I was given a flashback back to my early teenage years, when I first encountered Richie Havens singing ‘Freedom’ in the Woodstock movie. Here was the Django film, set in 1858, screened in 2016 and using a song recorded in 1968, and the legitimate theft of the song was used very effectively to enhance the film’s narrative. Nevertheless, while we are aware of ‘cynical’ product placement in movies, the trend for placing protest songs is an interesting ‘appropriation’, which I will address – especially in relation to my own interventions. Songwriting is the little sister in the writing world, arguably the most popular but least considered in critical terms. This paper is part of research into my forthcoming book, Writing Song Lyrics: a creative and critical approach (forthcoming, Palgrave, 2017).

A bowerbird collects pieces of blue, arranging stolen objects to form meaning; a pattern leading the way home. So, too, this braided essay gathers pieces of writing and arranges them to form new meaning. I am a thief, stealing stories from the ghosts of place to weave through my own. A brief discussion of the braided essay form, and the creative writing process behind this braided essay, situates the creative work.

The braided essay draws on my travels to a tiny island in the Scottish Highlands called Eilean Munde. An older story weaves through mine, a story found through research into the history of dark treachery and bloodshed in the surrounding area of Glencoe. The final thread in the braid is a critical discussion, about place and about the ghosts which sigh through the long grasses of the Isle of the Dead. Excerpts from the braided essay will be presented.

This paper speaks to the ‘cognitive turn’ in creative writing research (Freiman 2015). Reflecting upon a recent period of archival research examining the early notebooks of mid-Twentieth Century American poet Denise Levertov at Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University, it considers the poet’s various ‘notebooking’ practices during the years 1946-58 through the lens of ‘4E’ (or distributed) cognition. Specifically, via Richard Menary’s second wave extended mind thesis: ‘Cognitive Integration’.

A lifelong keeper of a range of journals and notebooks, in the early years of her career Levertov also created and maintained a personal and idiosyncratic index to the Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1902-1926 (Trans., R.F.C. Hull, 1946), a text she noted on several occasions as playing a formative role in her artistic development. Several concepts and passages from the Selected Letters

would appear in Levertov’s notebooks and published writings throughout her career and as such this ‘index’ not only prompts consideration of the role of homage (or theft?) in the creative writing process, but also suggests a new negotiation of the line between influence studies and intertextuality, one which does not jettison the embodied writer for the sake of the text. Rather, Cognitive Integration takes a hybrid, systems view of mind in which the keeping of notebooks (and related artefacts) is viewed as an example of extended cognition. By this view, ‘artistic cognition’ (Sutton 2002) is constituted by bodily manipulation of word on page by a situated writer in a practice of cognitive-material looping. Such a perspective allows for a dynamic view of creative writing ‘thinking’ as ‘embodied’, ‘embedded’, ‘enacted’ and ‘extended’, and of influence as a feature of a cognitive practice comprised of embodied writer actively engaged in a coupled dance with the materiality of language. 

When authors publish under their own names they make a social contract with readers, declaring that the work is original. Foucault (1977), Bourdieu (1996), Sawyer (2006) and Sennett (2008), among others, have problematised the concept of authorship by focusing on its cultural and economic functions in a complex marketplace. The copyright page in a printed text or online publication confirms to the world that the writer claims ownership, with statements such as ‘all rights reserved.’  Authors, therefore, cannot but be aware of a continuum inhering in the literary process that begins with unattainable originality and ends with intentional theft. Along this continuum exist varying degrees of unconscious and conscious borrowing of another’s words or ideas. The terms original, plagiarised and self-plagiarised can be both descriptive and emotive. This paper interrogates the practices of plagiarism, self-plagiarism and double-dipping in order to clarify the dangers of misappropriation and violation of copyright; it also considers forms of intellectual and creative theft. The manner in which writers integrate literary and critical influences to produce authentic work has become more challenging in the twenty-first century where so much of the past and the present exist online. An understanding of concepts such as originality, creativity and plagiarism can help practitioners and students to negotiate this mercurial educational and cultural environment.

The submission requirements for Manhattan-based agent Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management read:
Please email your cover letter and paste in the first page or so of your material at the bottom of the letter (no attachments, please). Let's repeat that again: first page of your manuscript. Not a synopsis. First page. Please.
Julie Barer, another prominent agent who founded The Book Group, allows authors to submit ten pages. These examples are typical of the industry, underlining the point that beginnings are critical for authors within the commercial environment. Interestingly, despite this industry focus on beginnings, the subject area hasn’t attracted much theoretical attention. Key texts in the field include Edward Said’s Beginnings (1975) and A.D. Nuttall’s Openings (1992) as well as edited collections such as Brian Richardson’s Narrative Dynamics (2002) and Narrative Beginnings (2008). However in the larger field of novels and narratology relatively little attention has been paid to something that is determining much of our literary industry. As narratologist James Phelan states (2007): ‘Previous narrative theory, for the most part, has emphasized the textual rather than the readerly side of narrative beginnings’ (15/6). This paper will explore beginnings from both a critical and readerly/writerly perspective, arguing they are important to consider, not only for commercial reasons but because, as in Said’s words, ‘[b]eginnings … inspire anticipation. A beginning ‘is already a project under way’. That is, beginnings set up the stories we can tell.

NIcholas Velissaris: “Now where I have seen that before?” Using Genre Conventions as Shortcut to Aid Narrative Comprehension

Melete’s Story is a choice-based narrative similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series published by Bantam books in the 1980s/90s. In choice-based narratives the reader is able to choose how the story proceeds and many examples of this form use genre as a shortcut to assist the reader in making decisions.
      Using genre rules and conventions enables a writer to borrow from existing stories and events to help the reader quickly understand the narrative. This type of priming allows a reader to more easily grasp the flow of the story and encourages a level of agency that permits the reader to make decisions about how the story should proceed.
      Melete’s Story borrows heavily from the genres of political and conspiracy thrillers and from world events from the 1970s and 80s.  The narrative is based upon three major world events: the Watergate scandal, the end of the Cold War and the rise of military dictatorships throughout South America. Several sources, both fictional and factual, serve as the backbone for the story, these include Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), and Costas-Gavras’ State of Siege (1972) and Missing (1981).
      As these events have occurred in the recent past (the last 50 years), this presents an interesting dichotomy that allows for a blurring between the facts and the fiction. The writer can (and does) exploit this so that the reader will make assumptions about these events, and these assumptions can be used to control a reader’s focus and to anticipate how they will make decisions within the story.  This paper will look at how ‘borrowing’ from genre and recent history has shaped the development and construction of Melete’s Story and how this has extended my creative practice.

‘Colour me grey’ is a story about a teenage girl managing the care of her dysfunctional mother and her confused grandfather. The story is told in first person from the perspective of Annie’s daughter, Chelsea. ‘Colour me grey’ was a finalist in the Glimmer Train International Short Story Award for New Writers (US) 2013 and the Glimmer Train International Family Matters Short Story Award (US) 2014. The story was a finalist in the Southern Cross Short Story Competition 2015, judged by Tony Birch. The revised work was shortlisted for the Josephine Ulrick Prize 2016 and published by Review of Australian Fiction (RAF) 2016.

In the context of authorised theft— ‘Colour me grey’ is a response to a haunting spark. In an interview with Claude Grimal, titled: ‘Stories Don’t Come Out of Thin Air’, Carver describes how remembered detail can be fashioned into story. Carver says:

I use certain autobiographical elements [from my life…] an image, a sentence I heard, something I saw, that I did, and then I try to transform that into something else. Yes, there's a little autobiography and, I hope, a lot of imagination. But there's always a little element that throws off a spark […] Stories don't come out of thin air. There's a spark. And that's the kind of story that most interests me.

That’s the kind of story that most interests me too. ‘Colour me grey’ is a story about light in dark—shades of grey.

Stull W L (trans), 1995-96, Prose as Architecture: Two Interviews with Raymond Carver, Clockwatch Review Inc.

http://sun.iwu.edu/~jplath/carver.html

This paper investigates the difficulties in writing about victims of violent crime and draws on the author’s own experiences of researching two books about murdered women. It examines the legal processes and ethical issues involved in gathering information. Do writers treat the dead differently? What are the principles and practices involved in writing about the dead? What motivates a writer to write about a murder victim is not easily explained. It may be an image, a headline, a vague idea that only becomes clearer the more they investigate. Writing about the dead involves penetrating below the surface of things, uncovering the complexities of narrative and character. There is always lurking at the back of the writer’s mind an uncertainty, a constant self-questioning: Am I doing the right thing? If it’s true that all writing of the narrative kind is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – then, for the writer, writing about the dead involves a journey into the unknown, driven by that innate curiosity we all share of what lies beyond the grave. 

Empathy is defined as the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person. However there has been a long-held belief that empathy has limitations as feelings and thoughts, although they can be talked about by others, cannot be seen, or had by them, leaving empathy as an approximation of what is felt. In contemporary theories of empathy personal experience and self-awareness are seen as the shaping forces behind how close the approximation of feelings and thoughts can be. Psychoanalysis shows that it is possible to improve self-awareness and challenges the contexts of our self-narratives, raising the question of whether it is possible to construct an experienced and aware self which is capable of a higher, more accurate empathetic response. 
      Through the lens of psychoanalysis this paper will explore the empathetic relationship between reader and trauma texts using reader transaction theory and fictocriticism. Reader transaction theory emphasises a dialogic relationship between reader and text and will be used to demonstrate how the reading experience develops self-awareness and how that awareness shapes further reading experiences. This development of self will be combined with fictocriticism, a genre which occurs in the excess of speech and knowledge, in an attempt to fill in the gaps in the empathetic experience of a traumatic text. This combination of reader transaction and fictocriticism will be used to explore the following question: What are the limits, in the reading process, on forming a complete understanding of a traumatic experience?

Since the late 1970s, autoethnographic research and writing has progressively demonstrated that non-fiction creative writing practice can aptly utilise this alternate-ethnographic method as part of its research and narrative, producing rigorous creative work which is palatable both by the academy and the general audience: bringing a social science closer to literature.

This paper proposes the use of the methodological model I am calling exo-autoethnography as a distinct ethnographic method of qualitative research within non-fiction creative writing, and autoethnographic writing, that deals with intergenerational familial trauma.

Exo-autoethnography is an approach to research that seeks to analyse (graphy) individual and private experience (auto) as directed by the other’s experience or history (exo) to better understand:

1. A history that impacted the researcher by proxy; and

2. Personal and community experience (ethno) as related to that history.

Exo-autoethnography is the autoethnographic exploration of a history whose events the researcher (author) did not experience directly, but a history that impacted the researcher through familial, or other personal connections.

Placing focus on a history that impacted the self (author) by proxy, the methodology aims to connect the present with a history of the other through intergenerational transmission of trauma and/or experiences of an upbringing influenced by parental trauma.

The genre of personal non-fiction narrative holds gravitas in creating social awareness and in helping a writer come to grips with their own reality. However, much thought must also be given to issues of ethics and privacy. Authors should ask themselves: under what circumstances do they have ownership over another person’s story? Further responsibilities must be considered if that person is actually the storyteller’s child.
      This presentation primarily draws on the author’s Doctoral project, Painting the spectrum: Everyday stories of families living with high functioning autism, a collection of narratives that fuses together the author’s reflections on being a mother with the stories of interview subjects. The presentation also draws on the exemplar text Beyond the pale: Folklore, family and the mystery of our hidden genes (2016), whereby author Emily Urquhart finds “salve in the search” for information about her daughter’s albinism (p 257). Urquhart utilises conversations, photographs and legends to piece together her daughter’s genetic make-up. Rather than a biography on her daughter Sadie, it is a nuanced piece of research on albinism and accepting a child with difference. It offers pause for thought on how to tackle vulnerable writing about one’s own family, and how to adequately represent the complexities of parenting and disability.
      Both Beyond the pale and Painting the spectrum (a work in progress) employ writing techniques that creatively retell the stories of others, including the authors’ own families. Neither text professes to share the entirety of their subjects’ stories, however they do go part way in providing a map upon which readers are invited to reflect and respond. The challenge for the authors is in knowing where to ‘draw the line’ and where to place the map’s boundaries.

Creativity is often still Romantically conceived and valued in terms of its purity and originality. However, this paper argues that theft – or revisionism – has been a fundamental methodology of creative practice from ancient times through to the digital age. Creativity is visionary only insofar as it is revisionary, and this is because, as common sense confirms, it always emerges from within a cultural domain. The first section of this paper outlines a revisionary theory of creative praxis that contests the Romantic concept of the auto-intoxicated creative practitioner. Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I advance a theory of revisionary creativity grounded in the ‘field of cultural production.’ The second part of the paper explores how literary revisionism manifests itself as a central methodology of creative practice in the digital era. The paper concludes with a brief study of an interactive digital narrative project that draws attention to theft or revisionism as its central methodology. We Tell Stories is a collaborative venture between Penguin Books in the UK and the digital games developer Six-to-Start, which consists of a series of six interactive digital narratives, each one of which revises a literary genre or classic story. In line with David Jay Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation, this project of theft or appropriation illustrates the revisionary interplay and competition between different media in the cultural field. Certainly the revisionary methodologies of We Tell Stories, as this paper argues, are inextricable from a transitional publishing economy in which the digital both threatens conventional literary publishing and embodies its commercial future.

In the twentieth century many writers experimented with the form of the novel, from the Modernists James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; to the Oulipo group of Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec; to contemporary writers such as Jennifer Egan, Mark Z. Danielewski and Robert Coover. Despite their attempts the overall shape of fiction narrative has not been significantly altered in the popular consciousness. Meanwhile, an entirely new and extremely popular medium for narrative has emerged in recent decades—that present in interactive digital entertainment, or video games—and its writers and developers are grappling with many of the experimental narrative techniques previously attempted by many fiction writers. In this paper I compare the works of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style to the games Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and The Stanley Parable, and argue that there are significant parallels in their use of randomness and narrative repetition and revision. I conclude that significant narrative experimentation is now being played out in the minds of many game writers and designers around the world, and suggest that a popular revolution in narrative form anticipated by writers such as Queneau and Johnson might not take place in the novel at all, but in games. 

This paper will trace my creative process as I move from writer of traditional literature to digital literature. This proposes a number of challenges for the traditional writer moving into game writing. They must understand the reader is a player with motivations related to gameplay (solving puzzles, achievement, progression). Narrative can provide a context (a game world) and incentive (reward) for gameplay, but challenge is to communicate the motivations of the characters within the story to the player. These challenges are tied to the ability of the writer to communicate the story to the development team and work with them to articulate it in the game.
       Facing these challenges meant shifting to a design approach to storytelling as a narrative designer. An approach with a revisionist methodology: thieving the voyage and return plot structure and retelling it with a game narrative toolbox. This analysis of my writing practice shows that literary theft was crucial for considering the wider possibilities of interactivity that move beyond read-response theoretical understandings (Iser 1976) of how the reader constructs their understanding of the text. Given a game is an ergodic text, the player will construct the meaning of the narrative in this way and also construct their game experience.  I argue writing for games requires the author to also imagine the reader’s and the player’s interactions, and this paper investigates the implications of this on the creative writing process.

This short story is a non-traditional research output produced as part of a PhD in creative writing that explores the narrative possibilities of humour in the ethical representation of family members in regional Australian family memoir.
     While offering a counterpoint to the recent shift towards trauma narrative in Australian autobiography (McCooey 27), this short story explores how techniques of humour can be employed to navigate the very real challenges around representing living family members in narrative.  

The dog holds a special place as companion, worker and icon in Australian culture and the nation’s rural heritage. Representations of dogs in Australian art, literature and other media reflect the interwoven lives of dogs and Australian people, and reinforce the dog’s iconic status. Dogs are also portrayed as valued workers and companions in many recently published memoirs of rural Australians.
Relational narrative – that is, narrative about related others in the autobiographical writer’s life – is a common feature of contemporary memoir. It enables the writer to relate their own story through other characters, and can offer a more extensive account of the writer’s life events and defining relationships. Rural Australian memoirs frequently include relational narrative in which the related others are the writers’ dogs.
This paper examines how dogs’ life stories are incorporated as relational narrative in rural Australian memoirs. It draws on memoirs published since 2001 – such as Kerry McGinnis’s Heart Country (2001) – to illustrate that the dog’s and writer’s portrayed life experiences can be intertwined in such a way that the dog’s memoir is embedded in the personal memoir. The findings of this paper will relate to and extend scholarship on Australian life writing and, more specifically, relational narrative.

This paper retells the semester-long experiment I ran teaching a subject titled ‘Writing across borders’ at the University of Wollongong in 2016. Using Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance as the spine of the course, students addressed the literary techniques of cross-cultural writing, magical realism, metafiction, creative nonfiction and cross-platform writing. With the focus on Scott’s novel came the focus on race and on Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships in Australia and the stories told of these relationships. I employed Fiona Nicoll’s approach to race discussions in the classroom by utilising her concept of critical whiteness theory and the significance of Indigenous sovereignty to discussions of this ilk. I also used her 2004 essay ‘Are you calling me a racist?’ (Nicoll, 2004) as a guide and companion across the course. Was it a success? Depending on the measure – student engagement, experimenting with the course ideas in their work, richness of the classroom discussions – the outcomes were a mixed bag. But was it fruitful, challenging and rewarding? Yes. Would I do it again? Of course. 

 Denise Beckton (Donna Lee Brien, Margaret McAllister, and Alison Owens): Robbing from Peter to Pay Paul?: Insights from a study investigating Interdisciplinary Doctoral Research Training Opportunities 

Recent studies on the contemporary PhD report that conventional approaches to doctoral preparation do not always effectively produce graduates who are confident researchers, and call for effective approaches to meet training needs. Yet within the higher education sector there are pockets of innovation that, because of the separation of disciplines, do not reach the wider community. Moreover, discipline-based competitive research evaluation processes deplete incentives for cross-fertilisation and exchange of ideas. This paper reports on a recent pilot project involving interdisciplinary collaboration between research higher degree supervisors from the seemingly very distinct disciplines of creative writing and nursing. This paper explains how we took from varied sources from within the same institution – and indeed from the same campus – to use it for other purposes and how, in this practice, although we were transgressing disciplinary boundaries, we were also yielding superior outcomes. The paper begins by identifying contemporary Doctoral candidate academic training needs and will describe how, in gathering strategies that were effective in overcoming impasses encountered by both RHD candidates and supervisors, a series of common research thresholds were identified. It then investigates how these may be met in an interdisciplinary manner. In this, interdisciplinary Doctoral training practices using creative writing as a key disciplinary contributor are identified.

 Kirk Dodd: Imitatio specialis: Shakespeare, Virgil, chronographia, and a new play called Bennelong

This paper seeks to promote the classical ethos of imitating a master’s art, imitatio specialis, as a legitimate method for creating original work and a productive application of academic research. This involves a demonstration of my imitation of one of many devices used by Shakespeare, chronographia (or the vivid description of time), in the development of a new play called: ‘The Tragicall Hiftorie of Woollarawarre Bennelong, Native Ambassador of Nova Hollandia’, which aims to achieve a ‘Shakespearean’ aesthetic. This paper will introduce the ethos of imitatio specialis and Shakespeare’s application of chronographia, before analysing two passages from my play Bennelong that imitate Shakespeare’s concerns with chronographia. The paper also examines a figure developed by Virgil to assist writing chronographiae, and how Shakespeare imitates this figure; thus in turn, how I imitate Shakespeare’s imitations of Virgil. Where Shakespeare is an authority on most things poetical, and Virgil was one of Shakespeare’s authorities, this becomes a demonstration of authorized theft that provides productive contributions to both ‘creative writing’ and ‘author study’ pedagogies.

Enza Gandolfo: Whose space? Feminism and creative writing pedagogy

Where is feminism in creative writing pedagogy? Creative writing programs in Australian and overseas universities are often taught by feminist writers and academics. This is evident in the scholarly articles published by writer academics about their own writing, and about writing practice, theory and research that often engage with feminist theory. However, little has been written about how feminist theory is incorporated into the creative writing classroom if at all.
      As a feminist researcher, writer and academic, I am committed to developing and delivering a critically engaged curriculum that celebrates the diversity of feminism and feminist approaches, and encourages writing that exposes and challenges privilege, and investigates issues of power and inequality in relation to gender but also in relation to sexuality, race and disability. I am interested in how feminism can encroach on the often apolitical space of the creative writing classroom and transform it.
      This paper is a review of the literature on creative writing pedagogy, and an exploration of the way that a feminist approach to teaching writing pedagogy can provide an effective means of engaging students in creative writing that is politically and socially engaged. 

Ben Stubbs - After Dark: A nocturnal exploration of Madrid, published by Signal http://www.signalbooks.co.uk/2016/05/after-dark/

Nigel Krauth - Creative Writing and the Radical: Teaching and learning the fiction of the future, published by Multilingual Matters, http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781783095926

This writing workshop is grounded in the premise that collaboratorsbegin from a point of mutual entanglement, in the quantum physical sense of matter (read: the writer) attaining ontological definition at and not before the moment of union with other matter (Barad 2007). The quantum understanding of time and space in fact renders theft impossible – or, rather, it designates theft an existential condition. My boundaries as an entity come into being through my subsuming of other substances into my own definition: taking anything is taking shape.
       The workshop’s structure and process borrows (steals) two figures – one from literature, the other from science – as devices for thinking and making with. Renga, the traditional Japanese mode of collaborative poetry, provides a formal structure: participants will be asked to write poetry with each other, responding to each other’s poems, three lines followed by two lines, on and on, spontaneously and anonymously. Yet renga’s linear nature will be foregone in favour of an experiment in hyperbolic space, most easily recognised in the curvaceous, crenelated, coral-like surface that crochet brings into being (see Wertheim 2003; Crochet Coral Reef 2016). Participants will write their two- or three-line segments of poetry on either a pentagonal or a hexagonal card, which will allow ensuing three- or two-line responses to be connected to any one of that card’s 5 or 6 edges. As it goes on, the multi-authored poem elaborates itself into an inter-connective fabric with no fixed beginning or ending – an object suggestive of the light-fingered workings of entanglement.

Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning.

Crochet Coral Reef. Institute for Figuring. http://crochetcoralreef.org/about/index.php

Wertheim, Margaret (2007). A field guide to hyperbolic space: An exploration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft. Los Angeles: Institute for Figuring

Caren Florance (& Angela Gardner) 
Working Papers (jostles)
Exhibiting space: Building 2, Lower level A Foyer

These are large-scale reproductions of small process moments of Working Papers, an artists' book collaboration with poet/printmaker Angela Gardner. We are exploring the sense and nonsense of composition, the immersive space of creativity. She works with her own poetry, casting and gleaning, and I work with hand-set letterpress, re-arranging her words to make new strange castings. The small moments of play, experimentation and process are caught, copied, and thrown up and out to allow quick or slow contemplation. 

Laser-printed tyvek, 6 pieces, 841 x 1189mm ea. 

Jen Webb (poems), Paul Hetherington (poems), Andrew Melrose (music)
‘he sat weeping on the shore’: remembering those who mourn  (The Odyssey 5.82)
Exhibiting space: Room 2B2

In 2001, the Norwegian container vessel MV Tampa responded to a mayday call that led to the recovery of refugees, mostly Hazaras, seeking refuge in Australia. A period of international tension followed, with Captain Arne Rinnan insisting on landing the refugees on Australian soil, and the Australian government denying the request. This event is only one instance in a history of similar events; a history that is ongoing, with no let up in sight of the flows of desperate people. The objects in the installation seek to concretise the fragility of those seeking refuge; the poetry and other textual and sonic materials will attempt to re-imagine this event, and remember things that are forgotten in official representations of the global refugee crisis.

Mixed media: ship model, Preiser figures, eggshells, folded paper: 3D installation with sonic element, and handmade poetry collection for distribution 

Lorraine Webb and Jen Webb 
Letter and Line
Exhibiting space:  Upper level, 2B7, space outside room. 

These works are part of a larger collaboration between two sisters, one a painter and the other a poet. We are trying to find ways to work together within and across our forms: ways that are neither illustration nor ekphrasis. How does colour speak to word? What is the relationship between a line of poetry and a line of paint? Our first approach to this project is to break with some formal constraints: painting not on canvas but on odd-shaped objects; writing not lineated lyric poetry but prose poetry and fragments. Next is the openness that is a mark of most creative collaborations, a moving to and fro between images, ideas, conversations, essays into objects. We are concerned more with gestures than with the mark or the gaze, and with determining how, through the movement of eye and hand and conversation, we might make letter that speaks to line, line to letter. 

In October 2015, Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Aleksievich was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Her series Golosa Utopii (Voices of Utopia) includes five books: The Unwomanly Face of War (Russian original published in 1985), The Last Witnesses: One Hundred Lullabies Not for Children (1985); Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices form the Afghanistan War (1989); Chernobyl Prayer (1997); and Second-Hand Time (2013). Several of these books have been turned into plays and documentary films.
      In a 1995 interview with a Russian journalist, she defined her writing project in these words:  ‘From thousands of voices, from fragments of our life and living, and from words and from that which remains beyond words, I compose not reality (because to grasp reality is impossible), but its image; an image of our time; the way we see it and the way we represent it to ourselves.’ And ‘the authenticity of what I write,’ she explains, ‘derives from the multiplicity of viewpoints it tries to encapsulate. I want my books to be read as chronicles, almost like an encyclopedia of my generation. What sort of life did the people live? What did they believe in? How did they allow themselves to kill others and how were they themselves killed?’
      There is a strong moral imperative that defines the creation of Aleksievich’s books. Behind each book she has a personal story to tell but that story is intimately tied up with a much larger story, the purpose of which is to look for answers to some fundamental human questions.
      The press release of the Swedish Academy announcing the Nobel Prize described Aleksievich’s books ‘… polyphonic, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.’ It is likely that they were called polyphonic because they reproduce testimonies of thousands of witnesses in their own voices.
      However, I find Aleksievich’s books polyphonic in the sense of the word conceptualised by Mikhail Bakhtin, the twentieth-century Russian literary philosopher. The objective of my presentation is to draw attention to the narrative style of Aleksievich’s documentary fiction. If her books are ‘authorised (authored) thefts’, the act of stealing she authors has a moral purpose: to create from thousands of voices a chorus of polyphony that can produce a heightened emotional impact.

If someone says or writes something about themselves or someone, is it verifiable?  The idea of truth when dealing with narratives is problematic, because the information could be the truth in the narrator’s opinion.  However, it may in fact not be true according to independently recorded or popularly held views.  In this way, narrators can be considered unreliable. 

So, if a narrator can be unreliable, then what aspect of their narrative is of value?  Personal narratives could still be used as historical evidence. Ricks (2015) argues narratives are about meaning, not truth, and that narrative is closely tied to identity and the actions which follow.  He also asserts that narratives do not rely on truth for their success but rather on impact.  The most successful narratives are the ones which are most influential. 

This paper explores the dichotomy between truth and meaning in personal narratives.

Creative writers have long followed the tradition of romantic exile, looking inward in an attempt to construct new viewpoints through acts of imagination. Writers working in this tradition may conceive the self as transcendent and reflexive, encompassing a multiplicity of imperfect selves, which could be revisited from different standpoints based on new experiences and perceptions (Aboulafia, 2010, 74). The post-romantic writer, however, occupies a more complex and interestingly ambivalent position, which is heightened in cross-cultural contexts where writing emerges from the experience of a separation from home. For a writer producing creative work through the experience of dislocation, whether enforced or self-inflicted, regional or international, can be overwhelmingly difficult, but it can also recruit opportunities for creative capacity and expression.
      This paper will investigate the idea of the creative writer as exiled self through reflections on the traction and slippages between ideas of place, dislocation and writing. This will be explored with reference to David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978). In his celebrated novella, Malouf arguably depicts exile as phenomenological prerequisite for a writer’s self-transformation, demonstrating the necessity of an exilic journey of becoming. His Ovid’s discovery is that the writer must be at the edge of things, noticing differently, available to possibility, able to embody and to channel being as metamorphoses through creative expression. Keeping Malouf’s text in view, we consider how a writer away from her place of origin can make use of dislocation as strategy and concept in a way that can fuel new creative expression.

This poem sequence both re-enacts and re-frames as ‘between-three’ my recent writing, in fiction, of the life of Millicent Bryant, Australia’s first woman aviator. In so doing it inhabits Paul Ricoeur’s argument that ‘selfhood … implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, instead that one passes into the other … ’ (1992: 3), while reframing the interest in ‘an other’ that Julia Kristeva draws from her reading of Hannah Arendt and expresses as ‘between-two’ (2001: 14). The poem sequence disrupts the usual repertoire of the writing of lives, first, by introducing a third party in mediating the biographic subject (a party connected personally to the subject as well as to the writer). Second, it conceives i) the writing of ‘an other’ as a faceted ‘Im/personating’ that incorporates elements of multiple selves; ii) ‘personating’ as the writing activity; and iii) the representations produced either of oneself or ‘an other’ as ‘impersonations’.

If asked to think about female characters in fairy tales, a number of popular classics spring to mind: Snow White and the Wicked Queen who attempts to have the girl murdered; Cinderella who endures the bullying of her stepmother and stepsisters and is rewarded for her patience; Gretel who saves her brother by pushing a child-eating witch into an oven. The antagonism between girls/women in fairy tales has been the subject of much discussion, particularly among feminist researchers and theorists, in recent decades. However, significantly less attention has been paid to the critical absence of collaborative female relationships both in traditional fairy tales and their retellings, an absence that is reflected in wider cultural narratives and which we might well regard as an ‘unauthorised theft’. In this presentation, I explore the idea that the cognitive sciences, and schema theories in particular, may offer insights as to why these types of positive female relationships receive such scant representation in contemporary re-visioned fairy tales, and why such tales often – though by no means always – continue to replicate the common narrative dynamic of acrimony among girls/women. It is useful to consider the ways in which story schemas and person schemas might intersect in the unconscious of the creative writer to influence her intuitions – or feelings of ‘rightness’ – that accompany story creation and development. The adoption of new frameworks through which to reflexively interrogate our tacit storytelling knowledge, however, can lead to real cognitive change and subsequent advancements in our creative practice. A case study of the writing of “Burnt Sugar”, a novelette produced as part of my ongoing creative PhD research, is presented as an ‘in practice’ demonstration of the possible effects of schemas upon narrative creation.

There is a stark disparity between how multicultural characters and mainstream characters are portrayed in young adult literature. Portrayals of non-mainstream groups often perpetuate harmful stereotypes, essentialist viewpoints and negative clichés that re-inforce the minority status of many groups. Multicultural literature is an effective means of countering the harmful rhetoric surrounding women and minorities that is often present in young adult literature. Multicultural literature should attempt to normalise non-mainstream groups. As such, narrative focus should be placed on aspects other than a protagonist's race, culture, ethnicity or gender. In this excerpt I have attempted to create a female multicultural protagonist that avoids these trappings. It is informed by the professional literature as well as a textual analysis of two novels with female multicultural protagonists, Born confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier (2002) and Does my head look big in this? By Randa Abdel-Fattah (2005).

Abdel-Fattah, R. (2005). Does My Head Look Big In This? . Sydney: Pan Mcmillan.

Philip Levine and Bruce Springsteen have regularly been credited for their delineations of ‘familiar’ and ‘authentic’ (Rauch 1988: 33) characters, whose individual struggles to negotiate their identities are exacerbated by the pressures arising from workplaces, social and familial expectations, and notions of cultural propriety. Nevertheless, in asserting that Levine and Springsteen render naturalistic characters who conform to their respective social structures, current scholarship has neglected the multitudes of liminal characters in their narratives, particularly their marginalised female protagonists. By undertaking an analysis of their songs and poems from the framework of liminality discourse, this paper demonstrates how Springsteen’s and Levine’s females are routinely situated outside of dominant, male-oriented structures, and enact the transgressive and inversive attributes of liminal identity. Extending the liminality paradigm established by anthropologists Victor Turner (1967; 1969; 1974; 1978) and Arnold van Gennep (1960) to contemporary scholars exploring liminal identities from manifold disciplines, including social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970) and spatial scholar Doreen Massey (1994), this paper contests the evaluation that either Levine or Springsteen articulate female experience in ways material or verisimilar. Instead, it applies theoretical concepts of liminal identities, outsiders, and relationality to a close comparative reading of Levine’s verse and Springsteen’s lyrics, positing that their female characters denote an infraction of dominant male structures, while occupying a peripheral position that promotes the definition and delimiting of normative masculine identities. 

According to Reid, story structures now describe a diverse range of human activities and, “we make our word go around chasing our tales”. But, do these story structures dictate our lives or just describe them? How does the process of re-writing life (in memoir or biography) work to “reclaim” or “reshape” lived experience and, does this matter?
      In this paper I draw on the personal experience of establishing a tourist, float plane, business on Magnetic Island to investigate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives and lived experience. The establishment of the business was the subject of public debate and many of these events have been reported in courts of law, television media, newspaper articles, the internet and academic journals.
      The story reported in the press drew on two dominant, western male, cultural narratives; the “hero” and the Aussie “battler”. The framing of our personal struggles within these narratives was successful in gaining public support for our business because the audiences were able to easily identify the moral and cultural issues that underpinned them. Over time, however, they became the way in which the public related to my husband Paul and myself and our roles in the business.
      This paper explores the concept of dominant cultural narratives can operate as authorised theft by the co-opting of stories to exclude others. It argues that women can re-claim agency through re-telling their lives. It highlights the importance of writing as a resistance to dominant cultural narratives and posits that unless we tell our stories the status quo will remain the same. As Ker Conway advises, “we should pay close attention to our stories” (1999, p. 177); for it is only in the telling and re-writing of stories to claim agency, we make space to shape our lives and the lives of others.  

‘Frequency illusion’ describes a situation where an individual encounters something seemingly new, and thereafter, encounters it everywhere (Zwicky 2006, p.1). This reflection on creative writing practice-based research discusses how identifying elements in filmic Gothic texts similar to my narrative led to questioning my creativity. Expressing what occurs within one’s mind during the writing process may assist in exploring cognitive approaches to creative writing research (Frieman 2014, p.127).
      Inspired by research on Victorian science and the occult, my Gothic serial fiction-in-progress merges elements of sorcery with biomedical experimentation. While writing, I noticed many of my story elements in contemporary Gothic media such as The Walking Dead (2010-2016), True Blood (2008-2014) and The Knick (2014-2016). I began to doubt the originality of my narrative choices and avoided Gothic texts for fear of encountering more of my ‘original’ ideas. I diverted my attention to Fantasy fiction and was soon confronted by giant arachnids.
      Fantasy writers appear to have no misgivings about embracing the Fantasy trope of the oversize spider, which dates back two thousand years to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2004). The originality of each spider lies in each writer’s unique approach to its animation, be the beast be made of ice (Martin 1996), have legs like steel blades (Rothfuss 2007), have an aggressive nature (Tolkien 1954) or demonstrate mercy (Rowling 1998). These writers have inspired me to embrace the tropes of my genre and strive for originality in their reanimation. As I endeavor to renege on the narcissistic illusion that the world mirrors my creative ideas (Kirwan-Taylor 2009), I acknowledge that influences on my work extend far beyond those I had consciously recognised.

The dominant patriarchal literary culture names certain feminine qualities grotesque based on historical ideas of the classical masculine body. In an act of disobedience, feminist humour plunders the literary tradition that makes women disgusting and turns to the comic and regenerative power of the grotesque to claim and empower the female body. The feminist grotesque estranges the masculine bodily ideal implicit in the grotesque female form, and transports the female body from the abjected grotesque to a powerful subject. This paper will discuss the grotesque in relation to humour and the body, and particularly the female body. Revisionist feminist literature, such as Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, appropriates the abjected female body, the repository of this fear, and inverts the power structures that name it. The disobedient writer negates the power of the dominant authority. Humour such as irony and satire, and narrative strategies such as polyphony and metafiction fracture the single voice of authority and create new meaning. Humour alleviates the shock of the horror invested in the grotesque body and polyphony and metafiction disrupt the traditional novel form because it reminds the reader that single narrative voices are not as reliable as dominant ideology would have us believe. At the heart of Angela Carter’s text is the disruptive polyphonic fracturing of the single misogynistic voice of patriarchy. Carter appropriates the power that patriarchal laws governing femininity deploy when it names the grotesque female body.

A prose piece that can be performed as a reading or presented on a panel. In the piece I steal the ideas and experiences of dead philosophers and poets comparing them with my own experiences of transgression. I steal the ideas and experiences of Gilles Deleuze and Sylvia Plath. Gilles Deleuze jumped from the third floor of his apartment later dying from the injuries.  The philosopher must not be scared of death. Similarly, I had fears of jumping off the third floor of my public housing apartment. In contradiction to the philosopher I am scared of death. When the protagonist in Sylvia Plath’s Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams is given e.c.t Johnny Panic ‘appears in a nimbus of arc lights on the ceiling overhead’ (1977, 39). Similarly, in my pink room in Graylands a man hovers above me in a dream or flashback. The piece is creative non-fiction. It gives the account of two hospitalizations.

This creative paper explores a re-creative model for reproducing the cannibale1 genre for non-Italian readers. It outlines the necessity and outcomes of such a model, which is required to overcome the difficulties in translating the genre’s texts.

Cannibale texts are loaded with critique of Italian culture and relies heavily on assumed social and knowledge to satirise the readers’ social norms. The use of Italian dialects and colloquial phrases, regular references to Italian popular culture icons, and the presentation of the Italian concept of ‘other’ enable cannibale texts to connect with Italian readers but simultaneously make translations unapproachable for foreign audiences.

While attempting to translate these texts, the characters and dialogue become so heavily altered so as to maintain their impact that a new creative piece is produced rather than a close translation or trans-creation.

The current presentation will visually display a model for analysing and producing cannibale texts. Appropriate sections of Italian examples will be introduced and compared to a new, Australian version of cannibale literature entitled Fair Day. A translated section of text by Niccolò Ammaniti will also be shown to highlight the impact of forced re-creation on the accessibility of the text for a non-Italian reader.

1 An Italian word meaning ‘cannibal’. The genre includes the work of authors such as Niccolò Ammaniti, Aldo Nove and Isabella Santacroce.

What exists at the intersection of image and word? Where does the photographer end, the writer begin? Who owns the story? “Bits of Worth”, an artefact and rationale from and for Worth, attempts to address such questions. Combing iPhone photos and 1000 word stories, Worth is an evolving collaborative narrative by Daniel Baker and LJ Maher, skirting the borders between author and reader, lived experience and fictional reality, which, at its core, outlines a creative practice predicated on sampling, remixing, remediation, and authorised theft. Underpinned by the work of Lawrence Lessig and Henry Jenkins, Worth is positioned at a nexus of practice and theory, concerned with the historical image of the ‘original’ artist and their relationship with economic, social, cultural factors. As such, questions of reader agency, collaborative vulnerabilities, artistic originality, and creative ownership naturally arise. Fundamentally, then, “Bits of Worth”, and the larger project of which it is a part, constitute something of a refrain, the unifying theme coded into a creative dialogue between its participants where each picture and each story is both conversation and consideration.    

‘That danged gizmo’ emerges from collaborative practice between two culturally diverse authors: a retired American living in Georgia, and an African Australian living in Melbourne. The writerly alliance sees one author focus on characterisation (‘deep south’ dialogue), and the other on literary elements (playfulness with language, style and structure), both in quests to contribute to the quality of form in the work of science fiction. Each author approaches the writing with their own knowledge, their own biases, their own craft. Together, while navigating inherent challenges in multiplicity of voice, the artists reinvent discrete ideas and creative practice into a collective storytelling. Collaborative practice is a type of theft where literature is made up, where a multiplicity is endowed with significance. The success of multi-authored work relies on the participants’ ability to negotiate their diversity, adopt each other’s creative elements and engender uniqueness to an artistic formation that is singular and seamless to the reader. In a contemporary context of digital and cyber realms, ‘That danged gizmo’ borrows from science fiction as a kind of hyperreality, where a machine destabilizes the relationship between a man and his wife. 

Creative writers, with their flexible, empathetic working methods and willingness to explore new methods and new ideas, may be particularly well suited to collaborating. There is a growing trend in academia to the rewarding of funding to projects in which several disciplines combine their resources to tackle complex problems, and creative writing scholars may find themselves increasingly under pressure to explore interdisciplinary research opportunities. This thematic analysis provides a broad overview of themes in current discourse about collaborative practice in the academic discipline of creative writing. The main findings suggest that while the romantic image of the ‘solitary genius’ persists, creativity has social dimensions and creative writers can benefit from renewed engagement with their own discipline through the exposure to other disciplinary methods and working practices. New methods arise in the space between disciplines that allow for the tacit knowledge, unexpected discoveries and flexible thinking styles characteristic to creative practice. Communication is vital, and maintaining strong links with your own disciplinary community is also essential. In her presentation, Penni illustrates the main findings of her thematic analysis with examples from her own interdisciplinary collaborative project designing and developing therapeutic content for Orygen Youth Mental Health.

The etymology of the word ‘interview’ comes from Middle French s’entrevoir – to see each other. Using interviews to research relationships between dingoes and people on Fraser Island (K’gari) enables me to see the people who talk with me and to see a complex situation from different perspectives. Some of the controversies around dingoes and people on K’gari are exemplified in the case of Jennifer Parkhurst, a dingo researcher who in 2010 was prosecuted by the Queensland government for feeding dingoes and for interfering with a natural resource on K’gari.
      An interview is a staged dialogue between an interviewer and an interview participant for an audience or reader that also requires ‘a continuous negotiation of terms’ (Masschelein et al. 2014, p 25). As a form of collaborative practice an interview combines ‘preparation and anticipation’ with ‘improvisation and spontaneity’ to create something that is ‘never entirely predictable’ (Masschelein et al. 2014, p 21).
      The qualities that make an interview a collaborative work of art in its own right involve trust. They relate to an interviewer’s preparation, what an interview participant says and/or does, the ways both participants shape the live interview, and the context that an interviewer provides in the transcription and narration of the interview when it becomes text.
      This extract, ‘Coolooloi’, applies techniques of ‘repair, assemblage and re-assemblage, stitching together, a kind of bricolage or experimental tinkering’ (Gibbs 2015) to an interview with Jennifer Parkhurst. It aims to balance the documentary aspect of the situation (Gornick 2001, p 13), or the ‘problems and provocations’, with the ‘sensations, affects, intensities’ that the writing is seeking to create as its ‘mode of addressing problems’ (Grosz 2008, p 1). From this interplay emerges the story itself, which belongs to neither Parkhurst nor me. Ideally interviewer and interview participant become complementary narrators who allow the voice of the reader ‘its role in the creation of the narrative’ (Adelaide 2007).

What began as a project examining abandonment, and possibly the role of inherited psychological trauma in explaining why many adoptees report higher than usual levels of emotional distress about trust, security and the capacity to fully engage with others, has transformed into an exploration of the meanings and symbols adoptees attach to their conception and birth. My reading of the literature revealed several things:

1. adoption is largely silent in Australian histories and social commentaries, even those authored by feminists;
2. adoption literature and research focuses in the main on the experiences of relinquishing mothers; and
3. that most (if not all) adoptee stories are grief and identity stories, focusing on abandonment, trauma, loss and commodification.

Largely unexplored are the meanings attached to conception and birth in adoptees’ narratives. Making use of the significant bodies of literature about how place defines, influences and shapes peoples’ lives, and the literature that suggests ways of coming to terms with the experiences of being an outsider, I am creating a map tracing the stories of 10 adoptees from conception to their current tracks upon the Australian continent. The form of this work about place and memory and the ties that bind and identify is experimental, drawing on the practice of fictocriticism and various iterations of the essay.

The Trixie Belden Mystery series, about a tomboyish girl detective, was published in the US from 1948-86. Trixie was very different to the more popular Nancy Drew, who was traditionally feminine, upper middle class and perfect in every way. Tart Noir is a subgenre of crime fiction that became popular in the 1990’s, and featured flawed female protagonists who were working class, operated outside of the conventional social order, and transgressed traditional gender roles. Neither ideologically sound feminist detectives, femmes fatales or scientific investigators in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Tart Noir protagonists displayed prodigious appetites for food, sex and danger. They solved crimes through a combination of physical action and intuition, rather than science and ratiocination. This paper will argue that these characters pay homage to girl detective Trixie Belden, using her influence to explore contemporary discourses on third wave feminism and to accurately reflect the complexity of female experience. It will also discuss the use of homage more broadly in crime fiction. How does an author decide which conventions to appropriate, and which to discard?  And how does a crime writer, particularly of detective fiction, successfully use pastiche without tipping over into parody?

The legacy of Romanticism infiltrates contemporary nature writing. Without questioning the link, writers may end up reinforcing misconceptions about nature. Nature writers of the Romantic Movement, such as Thoreau, responded to the exploitation of natural resources and loss of untamed nature in an age of technological innovation but the Romantic idea of ‘nature as a redemptive force’ and the ideological separation of nature and culture remain problematic. In this paper, I explore some of Romanticism’s legacies for nature writing and how contemporary writers both draw on and resist Romantic conventions in the genre. I argue that Australian cities provide sites of resistance for writers, where they might address some of the more problematic aspects of Romantic thought. Cities are places not traditionally associated with nature writing and places where nature/culture relationships might be re-imagined, complicating notions of place, nature and the urban to arrive at new post-Romantic ways of writing nature. 

Negative Romantic images of urbanisation during the industrial revolution have been continually renegotiated by writers seeking a more hopeful representation of urban life. What Walter Benjamin described as “the new Romantic conception” of the cityscape and Virginia Woofe called “street haunting” transferred the sense of romantic wandering to urban environments. Key to these portrayals is a Romantic sense that the specific experiences of individuals can provide a way in to urban experience more generally; that “the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but … can put on briefly bodies and minds of others” (Woolfe) and indeed a semi-mystical connection with the infinite – as if instead of finding the “universe in a grain of sand” (Blake) we might find London in ‘lead pencil” (Woolfe).

While contemporary author as Orhan Pamuk, particularly in his recent novel A Strangeness in my Mind have continued this sense of the city as a site of Romance and indeed nostalgia; other authors mindful of identity and post-identity politics have questioned the appropriateness of attempting to “put on … the minds of others”; which can be seen as a kind of larceny or appropriation; even if that process is an admitted to be an “illusion” (Woolfe). Increasing understanding of the diversity of urban experience; for example between the Melbourne of Tsiolkas and Lagos of Chris Abani and have also complicated the sense that individual urban experience can be seen to representative of a larger macrocosm called The City. This paper will examine the ongoing influence of Romantic ideas on contemporary fiction and particularly; in the context of the author’s own novel manuscript – discuss possible narrative strategies for representing urban experience by recovering a sense of connectedness and the numinous advocated by the Romantics without losing the valuable insights of postcolonial and postmodern thinking.

This paper presents two scenes from a play that re-applies Shakespeare’s creative techniques to the creation of five act drama called: The Tragicall Hiftorie of Woollarawarre Bennelong, Native Ambassador of Nova Hollandia. By imitating Shakespeare’s style and dramaturgy, I aim to develop a ‘Shakespearean’ aesthetic that can harness something of the power and epic sweep of Shakespeare’s plays – so suited to historical drama. Where most contemporary verse dramatists tend to separate themselves from Shakespeare yet fail to hold onto strong audiences, I believe this is because audiences bring with them an inescapable expectation that equates Shakespeare with verse drama. I therefore seek to use academic rigour to discover the methods used by Shakespeare and to re-apply these to a verse drama that seeks to conform to audience expectations. Where many theatre companies tend also to corrupt Shakespeare’s texts in order to ‘reinvent’ them for the stage, my approach to creating new ‘Shakespearean’ plays allows us to celebrate what is authentic about Shakespeare’s contribution whilst simultaneously enjoying new drama. By using Shakespearean techniques – internalised soliloquys, rhetorical flair, the telescoping of chronology (to allow Pemulwuy’s war into the narrative) to name a few – these have allowed me to incorporate themes more pertinent to an Indigenous perspective than a Eurocentric one; a perspective that has been traditionally misunderstood, silenced, or written out of the historical record. The forcefulness of Shakespeare’s blank verse can therefore help generate a stronger connection between the audience and the play’s perspectives because of its structure and aural qualities, and a stronger connection can allow us to re-view the events of history more critically. I continue to submit this play to the scrutiny of consultation about its cultural content according to the protocols recommended by the Australia Council for the Arts.

In this text, the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet will be recrafted as a poem incorporating the advice given to Italian princes by Niccolò Machiavelli, the most infamous political theorist of the 16th century.
     Shakespeare’s 1597 Romeo and Juliet play was based on an Italian tale, told and retold by Italian writers, the most important of whom were Masuccio Salernitano (born in 1410), Luigi da Porto (born in 1485) and Matteo Bandello (born in 1480). Bandello’s novellas were translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau (born in 1517) and François de Belleforest (born in 1530). These French translations, in turn, were translated into English by William Painter (born 1540) and Arthur Brooke (born 1563). Literary critics agree that the primary source of inspiration for Shakespeare’s play was Brooke’s narrative poem, titled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which condemns the young lovers for neglecting the authority of their parents.
     By taking a poetic leap, using fragments, insights and variations of the original Italian novellas and their translations, the poem will attempt to unveil the Italian flavour of the plot, lost behind all those rewritings, reinterpretations and well-intended but nefarious distortions which embellished the tale beyond recognition. Adding a layer of realpolitik inspired by the writings of Machiavelli, the raw political moral of the story will become apparent, almost.

What is it about the sonnet that contemporary poets feel compelled to revisit, while also deviating from its conventional attributes? Even as the sonnet was first being adapted from the Italian language into English it immediately sounded different from its Italian models. Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch in ways that were somewhat idiosyncratic, and that suited his particular aims as a poet. He did not always write in what we now think of as conventional poetic metre or rhythms. His sonnets indicate a reluctance to find easy solutions to the problem of writing truthfully, and a recognition that poetic form often has to give way to various kinds of awkwardness if it is to register the sometimes messy travails of thought and feeling. Almost five centuries later, in the age of so-called ‘free verse’, the sonnet retains a particular allure – and continues to invite what one may call discrepancy. The ongoing experiment with the form would suggest that it has some essential relationship to certain fundamental poetic compulsions. It asserts itself persistently and is, more than a set of explicitly identifiable properties, a poetic centre of gravity that draws in even the untidiest of its relations. Two poets here investigate the untidiness of English sonnets in their earliest manifestations, and explore how – in their own recent work – they have used and adapted the form for their own purposes. 

Taking the form of a lyric essay, this paper reflects on innate synergies between apophasis and the poetic process, situated within a discussion of writing and dispossession, and points out the inherent (and for a writer) apparently insurmountable irony at the heart of apophasis. Apophasis is the term for the rhetoric of negation. It is derived from the Greek words phanai “to say” and a prefix apo ‘which in this use means “away from”’(Gibbons, 2007). For many centuries, writers across the disciplines of philosophy, theology and poetry have traditionally used apophasis when attempting to “speak of” concepts or phenomena that either resist language or lie beyond human knowledge, such as the Divine. I engage with the issue of being “lost to and for words,” both from a phenomenological and poetic perspective, and I reflect on how coming up against the limits of language is, for the poet, at once desirable and problematic. Drawing from ancient and contemporary literary and theological texts such as The Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionsyius, the poetry of Rumi, and the writings of Alice Notley, among others, I argue that being “lost to and for words” is a form of dispossession, though of whom, and by what, is open to conjecture. I propose apophasis as a useful framework within which to survey this conundrum, describing how it offers to a writer the potential for surprising and unexpectedly rich poetic and critical outcomes.

“Does your work straddle the line between poetry and prose? Then it’s a prose poem. Is it solidly narrative in its presentation? Then it’s probably flash fiction.” – Writer’s Relief, 2013.
      Peter Johnson suggests ‘if there is such a creature as the prose poem, […] its existence depends partly on its ability to plunder the territories of many other like genres’ (Johnson 2000). The distinction that separates prose poetry from micro-fiction or other short forms of prose often relies on the role (or ‘solidity’) of narrative. In this account, poetry is defined as an absence (or limitation) of narrative. In this presentation we will be questioning these generic distinctions by considering an example of a very short story (or microfiction) and a (lyric) poem. We will analyse each piece in terms of its narratival and lyrical qualities, identifying the techniques and degree that mark each as more or less ‘narrative’.  We suggest these different forms can ‘plunder’ the lyrical and narrative from each other and that his ‘plundering’ isn’t limited to the hazy definitions of prose poetry.

Since 2012 Australian organisation The Stella Prize has been counting the ratio between reviews of work by male and female writers.  The findings of Stella, like the findings of US organisation VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts have found that creative writers are much more likely to get their work reviewed if they identify as male rather than female. In 2015, I partnered with Stella to conduct their first ever Diversity Count which examines not only gender, but also race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity and ability of creative writers in Australia. While I am expecting that women from diverse backgrounds are reviewed (and also, probably) published less than white, heterosexual, non-disabled writers, the more interesting question for me is how are they reviewed?  Does their diversity or difference come into play in their reviews and for what purpose?  This is critically important. If we continue to fetishise or exoticise the work of certain groups within our writing community, then we keep casting these groups into the margins of our literary world at the same time as fixing the patriarchal canon at the core of what we consider to be great or universal work.  In this paper, I will speak to the findings of The Stella Diversity Count and examine the nature of the reviews received by diverse writers.  It is my contention that our reviewing culture keeps some stories at the fringes of our literary culture and this had ramifications on not only what kinds of books get published, but also limits what certain writers feel that they can write about.

To piqueer (also pickeer) means ‘to pillage, to make a flying skirmish’ (Walker & Smart 1836, pp. 468; 464). In this paper, this archaic word is taken to reference Cixous’ employment of the double meaning of the French verb voler (to steal and to fly) in relation to women’s writing, yet extend this productive duality to specifically address an act of queer literary “theft” and “flight”. This act is a piqueering of the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, which uses remediation and digital collage techniques to make a “new” creative work from the source text. Comprising part of this paper, this work – The idea of queer: The Velveteen Rabbit remix – is used to explore connections between theft and collage in relation to cultural (re)production and queer belonging.

Moving Beyond the Self: How Blog Posts Can Inspire Narratives of Representation

‘Narratives of representation’ allow readers to see their own identities reflected within texts they access and can increase empathy by exposing readers to varied experiences (Smolkin & Young 2011: 217). Researching personal topics has traditionally relied on approaches that require direct contact between a researcher (writer) and a participant (Wilkinson & Thelwall 2011: 387), which can be time-consuming and expensive. The expression of personal experiences through autoethnography has also been adopted in the creation of these narratives as an alternative approach, but can limit the conclusions presented due to the restricted scope of experiences that can be explored (Méndez 2013). Critical analysis of blog posts offers new possibilities, allowing writers to explore how members of a social group candidly discuss their identities and the issues they face with each other and external parties. Accessing blog posts written by members of the queer community has allowed me to create specific narratives of representation underpinned by accurate and authentic depictions, ensuring readers are exposed to diverse perspectives that reflect reality. This paper explores the ways blog posts written by the queer community have influenced my depiction of queer identity in creative works and exegetical writing by inspiring and informing the exploration of issues such as mislabelling, stereotyping, discrimination, and fear.

In Charlotte Wood’s The Writing Room, Wayne Macauley says, he began ‘writing under the influence of a teacher’ (2016). His teacher, he says, ‘energised whatever was in my head’. Through an ARC Discovery Project (DP130100402) investigating creativity, we asked 75 practicing poets across nine English-speaking nations about their first encounter with poetry. Our quantitative data shows a high percentage of poets were ‘switched on’ to poetry by a teacher. In this paper we explore the metaphor of genetic coding and the relationship between poet and teacher as an impetus for ‘switching on’ the poet. Mere ‘exposure’ in the classroom is not enough. The origin story of poets is a story of relationship where that which is taken, borrowed or, in some cases, stolen has a life-shaping effect.
Wood, Charlotte 2016. The Writing Room. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Creative writers may experience anxieties in relation to their creative practice, often describing these experiences as stressful and inhibiting. At the same time, a growing body of literature shows that mindfulness approaches can be beneficial when applied to experiences of anxieties.
      This paper draws from multiple disciplines to investigate the question: “How does the relevant literature support the ways in which a mindfulness-based approach might assist creative writers to approach anxieties in relation to their creative practice?”
      In terms of method, I have examined literature across relevant knowledge fields including medical science, health science and psychology. The findings shed light on how a mindfulness approach might influence the physiological response to anxiety. A key concept is that the body does not, in fact, possess an ‘anxiety response’, when facing a threat that causes anxiety. Instead, the body often responds with a fear related fight-or-flight response. In this paper I argue that mindfulness approaches can assist creative writers who experience anxieties in creative practice by powerfully enabling an alternative response to the fight-or-flight response.
      This paper provides a new lens to the perennial issue of anxieties in creative writing practice by drawing on inter-disciplinarity, while remaining strongly grounded in the home discipline of creative writing studies. The findings are significant because – with the exception of composition students in the context of contemplative pedagogy, or first-person accounts by professional writers who meditate – there has been very little attention focused on adult creative writers and mindfulness approaches in relation to anxieties.

Kay Are: ‘Collaboration and entanglement, renga and crochet’

This paper, connected to yesterday's workshop, is grounded in the premise that collaborators begin from a point of mutual entanglement, in the quantum physical sense of matter (read: the writer) attaining ontological definition at and not before the moment of union with other matter (Barad 2007). The quantum understanding of time and space in fact renders theft impossible – or, rather, it designates theft an existential condition. My boundaries as an entity come into being through my subsuming of other substances into my own definition: taking anything is taking shape.
     The installation's structure and process borrows (steals) two figures – one from literature, the other from science – as devices for thinking and making with. Renga, the traditional Japanese mode of collaborative poetry, provides a formal structure: participants will be asked to write poetry with each other, responding to each other’s poems, three lines followed by two lines, on and on, spontaneously and anonymously. Yet renga’s linear nature will be foregone in favour of an experiment in hyperbolic space, most easily recognised in the curvaceous, crenelated, coral-like surface that crochet brings into being (see Wertheim 2003; Crochet Coral Reef 2016). Participants will write their two- or three-line segments of poetry on either a pentagonal or a hexagonal card, which will allow ensuing three- or two-line responses to be connected to any one of that card’s 5 or 6 edges. As it goes on, the multi-authored poem elaborates itself into an inter-connective fabric with no fixed beginning or ending – an object suggestive of the light-fingered workings of entanglement.

Angela Savage: (Un)authorised theft: Using real life to inform fiction

Writers commonly steal from the lives of those around us as fodder for our fiction, though we are not subject to external oversight regarding the ethics of such practice. It is left up to individual writers to set our own ethical standards. Does poetic licence exempt us from the ordinary moral rules of human engagement? In this paper, I provide examples of different ways in which I have stolen from the lives of others to lend authenticity and resonance to my current work in progress PhD novel, Mother of Pearl. I discuss the ethical issues raised by my practice, and concur with guidelines proposed by Claudia Mills to protect privacy and confidentiality, and minimise the harm caused by using people I know as a resource for my fiction. However, when it comes to theft from the lives of distant others—in my case, writing in the narrative voice of a Thai woman—I argue that a different approach is needed, suggesting that Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of the respectful cross-cultural conversation at the heart of cosmopolitanism provides a way forward. Significantly, I argue that metaphorical conversation between the writer and their research, as well as literal conversation between the author/text and representatives of the communities we write about, are essential elements in an ethical practice for fiction writing across boundaries in a globalised world.

Young Adult fiction is a constantly evolving genre. It draws inspiration from other fiction, from popular culture, from publishers and theorists, and even from itself. We will explore, as best we can, some of the ways that YA fiction collaborates with its influences – whether by writing back to a publishing trend, or by writing back to its fans, or by writing back to the worlds created by a particular author – and how these collaborations affect theorists’ understanding of the genre overall. ‘Stealing the limelight: the effect of global Young Adult bestselling fiction’. This research, drawn from Beckton’s masters thesis, exposes the strategies and behaviours that facilitate, hasten and heighten changes in the YA market. This can lead to narrowed reading, writing and publishing opportunities within the genre.

This conference asks, “Where do we find the sources for our ideas, our language, our stories?” For award winning Australian Young Adult fiction author Fiona Wood, the source is, in part, her own work.
     Wood’s books contain a range of intertextual references to external sources, including direct references to novels such as Jayne Eyre, plays, movies, magazines, as well as thematic allusions and imitations of classic fairytale narratives.
      Additionally Wood references, reuses, or steals characters from her own stories, promoting minor characters to protagonist status, and relegating them again. She also references her earlier narratives in her later works. In doing this across her books, Six Impossible Things (2010), Wildlife (2013), and Cloudwish (2015) Wood creates a trilogy or series, of sorts, where characters are related through their educational experience and relationships.
      The fictional world inhabited by the characters continues as they grow and age across the books, allowing Wood to continually explore the stories and lives of her characters who are diverse culturally and socially, and yet also closely connected.
      This paper suggests that Wood constructs the storyworld in these books in ways that support revisiting them intertextually, somewhat authorising Wood to steal from her own stories. This argument will be developed through analysis of the texts using two of Gerard Genette’s five types of transtextuality, intertextuality and hypertextuality (as detailed in Genette’s, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree’ (1997)), to explore the use of these transtextual elements in the storyworld.

‘Finding Kerouac’ represents a response to the theme of the conference  - Authorised Theft – through two extracts from the novel We Ate the Road like Vultures. The novel is a revisionist history of the later life of writer Jack Kerouac and explores the ways in which fans respond to the writers they love, and the way their language in turn is an evolution, a reflection and a ‘theft’ of the works of these writers. Sixteen-year-old Lulu inserts herself into the world that she has read about, unmasking Kerouac in his hiding place and becoming a part of the imagined life of the writer she admires. The novel follows her journey to find Kerouac living out his days incognito in Mexico, and then to find herself, by convincing him to go ‘on the road’ one last time. The narrative demonstrates the hyper-real nature of revised and imagined history, and is at once real and imagined. Reality and identity is examined as something fluid - something that can change according to the belief surrounding it - with religion as the metaphorical backdrop. ‘Finding Kerouac’ presents two sections of the first chapter of the novel describing the search for, and discovery of Kerouac and the ways in which the believable are stretched to accommodate this fantastical re-versioning of events. Lulu discovers the writer’s house in Mexico but finds that her discovery of Kerouac’s hiding place triggers a violent episode that resulting in a death. The second extract describes her realization that Neal Cassady too, is alive and living with Jack in the old hacienda – a verbal war that shows both her love for Kerouac’s words and her frustration with them. 

The scope of Irish Studies research is a vast cornucopia of stereotypes, topics, debates, discourses and fissures where writing as an act of homage and as an act of theft can occur. Irish migration narratives are not an unknown field of scholarly study and research into women’s lived experiences is a matter of continuing interest.

This paper argues that, despite some of the Irish official documentation about female Irish migrants (which can be seen as an act of theft), the POBLACHT NA hÉIREANN (Irish Proclamation) is one document that can be seen as an act of homage. Viewing POBLACHT NA hÉIREANN in this way allows my project to (re)locate Irish women (including Irish female migrants) within the ‘Ireland’ of promised equal rights and equal opportunities for all its citizens. To do this, my research project recognises, and will call for the recognition of the sacrifices Irish female migrants made, big or small, willingly or unwillingly, for the ‘Ireland’ that followed enactment of the 1937 Irish Constitution, and the continuing struggle for gender equality in Ireland. Gender equality was promised in 1916 and 1922, but in practice it never happened; the earlier ambitious promises were progressively watered down by the time of the 1937 Constitution. It is in this intersection between the many questions that remain unanswered about Irish women and Irish female migrants, and the call to recognise their contribution to Ireland, where the magic and the ‘once upon-a-times’ can begin.

The first English-born artist to excel at miniature painting was Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), who trained as a goldsmith before going on to paint Elizabeth I and her successor, James. Hilliard documented his process and influences in his unpublished Arte of Limning. This manuscript, according to Thornton and Cain, combines “more formal and rhetorical passages with personal observations, outbursts and what amount to grumblings on subjects where his feelings are roused or his professional pride is touched” (1992: 11). What emerges from the manuscript are resonant fragments of Hilliard’s inner world, as experienced in his fifties. Writers developing novels based on Hilliard’s life might take these at face value, assuming a close correlation between what he felt and what he wrote. With respectful nods to founding feminist critics Judith Fetterley and Adrienne Rich, I have chosen to read Hilliard’s treatise against the grain when constructing my own narrative about his life. I am more interested in how his statements might function as distractions or dissemblings. What might this document suggest about his younger self? What might it hide? The lacuna at the centre of his text is striking—Hilliard does not reveal how he made the shift from goldsmith to painter, nor who taught him the closely guarded secrets of the illuminator’s workshop. The name most compelling in its omission is Levina Teerlinc (1515?-1576), a Flemish woman appointed as royal paintrix to the English court from Henry VIII to Elizabeth and thought by many to be the most likely candidate for the transmission of these techniques. She remains largely unknown outside of art-history circles. This paper examines Hilliard’s manuscript for evidence of a working relationship between the two, producing a resistant reading which argues for his debt to a marginalised female painter.

Thornton, R.K.R. and Cain, T.G.S. 1992 ‘Introduction’ to Hilliard, N, The Arte of Limning. Carcanet Press, Manchester, pp, 9-38.

William Hatherell (2007) categorises the ‘home-front novel’ of World War II as a subgenre of Australian War literature. More specifically, within this subgenre, are what Hatherell calls the ‘ensemble novels’. These include the classic Come in Spinner (1951) by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James, Soldiers’ Women (1961) by Xavier Herbert, and the Brisbane-set Time Out for Living (1995) by Estelle Pinney. The ‘ensemble’ in each case is comprised of a small group of white, heterosexual women, whose differences – and intertwining plot trajectories – are contrasted and played out along the lines age, class and marital status. The intention of each novel is to detail, according to the authors’ gendered standpoints, the social disruption of an Australian city in wartime with an emphasis on the impact brought about by the ‘friendly invasion’ of American servicemen during World War II. Tales of a Garrison Town is a self-conscious work of historical fiction – or what Hutcheon dubbed, historiographic metafiction –which acknowledges, through intertextual references (both overt and subtle), the home-front ensemble novel as its precedent. Beginning with Taylor’s (1983: 6) premise that, ‘In no other Australian city [Brisbane] was the reaction to the uncontrollable forces and rapid impact of the invasion of the American forces as completely and keenly felt’, TOAGT re-imagines the Brisbane home front as a site of historical and narrative contention, entwining themes of gendered resistance, place, collective memory, nostalgia, and the connection of history to the literary (Hutcheon 1995). In this paper, I use a practice-led methodology to reflect on the process of (ironically) embedding and referring to the historical texts (that is, newspaper articles, oral histories, photographs, ephemera, music, artefacts, memoir, popular histories and academic research), while also responding and paying homage to the narrative tradition of the home-front ‘feminine ensemble’ novel. 

This paper contributes to recent scholarship on literary networks and collaborative practice by exploring the literary relationship between two Canberra authors, John Clanchy and Mark Henshaw. John Clanchy has written several works of literary fiction, for example, Vincenzo’s Garden (UQP, 2005) and Her Father’s Daughter (UQP, 2008), as has Mark Henshaw (Out of the Line of Fire, 1988; The Snow Kimono, 2014). Together, Clanchy and Henshaw have published crime fiction, writing as J.M. Calder.
     In the following, I discuss an interview I conducted with Clanchy and Henshaw in the context of recent scholarship on literary networks and ‘communities of practice’, a term borrowed from sociology and used by Anitra Nelson and Catherine Cole to describe groups of writers who support each other and provide feedback on each other’s work. As part of our discussion, Clanchy and Henshaw describe the differences between writing a novel as sole authors, and writing crime fiction together. They describe the extent to which working together on If God Sleeps (Penguin, 1997) and Hope to Die (Penguin, 2007) has inflected their writing practices. The paper pays particular attention to the cultural contexts in which Clanchy and Henshaw work, and the extent to which they revise their fiction. It compares their statements about their process with Hannah Sullivan’s contention in The Work of Revision (2013) that the current emphasis on revision in literary fiction is social and cultural, and tied to modernism and technology.

This paper details how three previous scripts written by a practitioner influenced the creation of anew work titled Lifeline. The aim of this paper is to show how ideas and concepts can evolve not justwithin a singular project, but through various iterations from the same creator. This is achieved bywhat Brad Haseman refers to as an Artistic Audit – the examination of previous work in order toprovide contextualisation for a practitioner within their field.
The plays chosen are Slumway (2010), Tick-Tock (2011), and Pistol (2011) – three projects that thewriter has worked on prior to beginning the development of Lifeline. This paper provides a quicksynopsis of each project, before detailing themes and concepts that are further evolved throughpractice and seen in Lifeline. Attempting to understand the constant evolution and modification ofcore issues and themes allows creative practitioners insight into the importance of new work, andwhere it fits within the context of their field, as well as creating a better sense of an artists work as awhole.

PhD candidature research and writing has introduced me to literary larceny as a perpetrator. My historical creative non-fiction arts-based project titled Victorian Community Theatre: an analysis of the history and culture of Victoria’s non-professional performing arts sector, has assumed the role of ‘Mr Big’, urging my authorised theft of knowledge and recollections from over one hundred non-professional theatre companies across regional and suburban Victoria. I case victims by sending pre-interview questions, luring them to hand over their valuable goods. No need for microphone or camera accomplices, just the good old reliable tools of pen, paper and a combination of shorthand and longhand writing, to ensure safekeeping of this precious heist of historic and socio-cultural knowledge. Surprisingly, all victims sign a consent form authorising this literary larceny! Eventually all stolen goods will be returned to their owners after writing their stories, and shared with a broad readership community. So, who says ‘crime doesn’t pay’? The non-professional theatrical arts sector has an abundant treasure of knowledge and recollections hidden in Victorian communities, awaiting discovery by authorised theft.

Using the found poetry of on-line forums, we create permanent compositions from an ephemeral stream of words and words as image. These works explore the phenomenological capacities of the page and seek techniques that build poem-compositions that account for space as much as line to give expression to the idea that a poem is ‘felt’ rather than ‘read’.

This creative research project engages with the idea of process-driven writing as a potential method for ecopoetics. Such a method draws of Heideggerian ideas of ‘dwelling’ to propose that through daily directed engagement with the immediate environment the poet can in some way be permitted access to the ‘four-fold’ of things.  Adding an additional layer of complexity to the process, the composition is created in concert with the creative and critical work of the great mid-west poet William Stafford. Stafford pioneered ideas of process-driven writing before the development of ecocriticism. Heavily identified with the pacific north west, his work Averill (2001: 279) proposes allows everyone to feel centered ‘-in place, in language, in sensibility’. My creative work emerges from a daily practice of reading Stafford’s work and writing my own in response. February in Oregon collages my impressions of the Oregonian landscape with those of Staffords, seeking a way to feel at ‘home’ in the foreign landscape of Oregon. My paper is evenly divided into a critical section addressing the development of my compositional method and a performance of the resultant poem.

Ten poems are presented, sampling my PhD research exploring how poetry might harmonise “Western” scientific and “Eastern” spiritual worldviews. The poems invite a liminal consciousness where science’s epistemic authority may meet on equal — not privileged — terms with the more ancient authorities of body and Earth. My chosen primary foci are modern physics, philosophical Daoism, and the ecosystemic perspective afforded by complexity theory (Capra & Luisi, 2014), in which large-scale patterns emerge unpredictably from relatively simple processes. This emergence, as Smith (2006, p. 172) remarks, is helpful in theorising how an artwork frequently “develops its own autonomous identity and ... takes the creator in directions quite different from his or her original intentions.” My methodology carries this further by seeking to abandon intention entirely. To achieve this I choose randomly from lists of sources and writing experiments. Influenced by the aleatory processes of conceptual writing and LANGUAGE poetry (Dworkin, n.d.; James, 2012), I appropriate, combine and re-present ideas and text from creative and non-fictional works. I take words from books or from what Tobin (2004, p. 126) calls the mind’s “other place” of poetry. A poem may or may not emerge; if one does, I have little idea what it may say or do. I work with eyes and fingers, pointing, highlighting, cutting and shuffling. I select and place text using body and instinct, not the thinking self. This non-intentional composition strives for the Daoist ideal of wei wuwei, action without action — egoless, selfless, apparently-effortless action. Moeller (2004) likens wei wuwei to Csíkszentmihályi’s (1990) concept of flow, the focused, effortless mental state also called “the zone”. Aspiring to become daojia shiren, “poet of Philosophical Daoism”, I practise yun you, “wandering like a cloud”, “searching everywhere” for the Way (Chen & Ji, 2016, pp. 178, 188).

The mid-1700s witnessed, in England, the development of a standard format to tell the stories of malefactors. In this way storytelling was simple as tales of various criminals followed a strict pattern of crime, capture and punishment. The origins of this was seen most obviously in the formula relied upon by Samuel Smith in the preceding century. Samuel Smith was the Ordinary of Newgate, a position that would be referred to today as the prison chaplain, and throughout his tenure, from 1676 until 1698, he would publish Accounts of criminals and their grisly ends. These Accounts, of which there were over 400 editions – offering over 2,500 biographies of hanged men and women – published between 1676 and 1772, were incredibly popular. With a price point of only a few pence, print runs were in the thousands and by the early 1700s the Ordinary was earning up to £200 per year for his entrepreneurial efforts. This paper argues that these biographical, and ostensibly didactic, stories were stolen: as criminals were perpetrators of a crime they were also the victims of greed. The practice of this authorised theft of criminals, their lives and exploits, clearly established the fact that penitence and profit make comfortable bedfellows, ensuring that true crime writing became a firm feature of the business landscape. That victims and villains suffered was, of course, very regrettable but no horror was so terrible that anyone forgot there was money to be made.

This scholarly presentation explores the story of a real-life Australian teen-killer: Matthew Stephen Milat. The eighteen-year-old wrote a series of poems in the aftermath of murdering his seventeen-year-old friend with a double-headed long-handled axe on the victim’s birthday, 20 November 2010. The presentation takes as its title the characterisation of those poems by contemporary media. What intrigued me about this case was not only the killer and his direct familial blood-ties to an Australian serial killer, but the transgressive nature of the teen’s poems as apparently anomalous forms of homage to an ancestral legacy originating with the most infamous Australian serial-killer in modern times: Ivan Robert Marko Milat (b. 1944). Resonances between Milat crimes—primarily its location and the familial connection between Ivan and Matthew Milat, together with the assumption by people outside the literary field that all poetry is confessional—inspired the conviction that the grand-nephew’s acts were in part paying homage (from Medieval Latin ‘hominaticum’) to those of his grand-uncle. ‘Homage’ seems a fitting term if ‘To pay homage to someone with a thing … is, to make an offering’ (Millot 2010, p. 71). The ‘thing’ Matthew Milat offered as homage was, apparently, not only a murder echoing salient features of his grand-uncle’s signature, but a series of poems seemingly memorialising as homage the legacy of the Milat family infamy.

Bode, Barbara 1995 ‘Angels and devils: child sexual abuse in Peter Carey's The Tax Inspector’, Antipodes, Vol. 9, No. 2 (December): 107-110. <http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.usc.edu.au:2048/documentSummary;dn=970100102;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 0893-5580. [cited 29 Jul 16]
Carey, Peter 1991 The Tax Inspector, London: Faber & Faber
Keane, Michael, Guest, Andrea and Padbury, Jo 2013 ‘A Balancing Act: A Family Perspective to Sibling Sexual Abuse’ Child Abuse Review, 22: 246–254. doi:10.1002/car.2284

Gay Lynch: Theft in Fiction as Cognitive Act

Most fiction-writers draw on experiences they share with others, at least to some extent, and many make little attempt to disguise the practice. Through imagination and for expedient reasons, they steal and transform them: to express themselves as creative agents and to analyse problems in cognitive mode and to bear witness.  Memory, a kind of recount, is mediated by perspective and is, therefore, fiction. 

This paper will consider how many writers, including me, feel compelled to write about others as a means of making cognitive sense of experiences that might be construed as traumatic. Virginia Woolf wrote to acknowledge pre-existing truths that she had repressed; Phillip Roth believed he was creating truths by explicating and enlarging, from multiple perspectives, relationship problems that troubled him.  Both saw truth as a kind of reality: Roth enlarged; Woolf distilled.

As electronic publishing offers more opportunities for short form publication and the affordable reproduction of image alongside text, contemporary creative non-fiction writers are increasingly incorporating images into their work. This presentation will investigate the cross-thievery that occurs between image and text in three very recent works of creative non-fiction (Antonetta 2016, Dentz 2016 and Reeder 2016) and how our reading of such works may change as a result.
      Using the frame of Bakhtin’s (1992) dialogism, I explore new chains of responses that may be read into a textual work when images are incorporated alongside, between or around the text. When a different creator is the ‘author’ of such images, the reader may interpret such polyphonic heteroglossia as contradiction, validation, appropriation, theft or a combination of all these. For example, in Antonetta’s work Curious Atoms (2016), the images from NASA appear to act as validating mechanisms and yet they may also be read as a thread of scepticism, questioning, for example, her analogy between the universe’s dark matter and her own brain’s unruly (bipolar) state.
      By presenting examples of the conjunction of text and image in short form creative non-fiction, I will examine creative ways of reading such juxtapositioning, suggesting new possibilities for creative exploration as writer as well as reader.

Antonetta, S.P. (2016) Curious Atoms. Essay Press groundloop series, 68. Wyoming, USA: Essay Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1992) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Dentz, S. (2016) Flounders. Essay Press groundloop series, 62. Wyoming, USA: Essay Press.
Reeder, E. (2016) One Year. Series: Essay Press groundloop series, 66. Wyoming, USA: Essay Press. 

Arising from the ashes of a wrecked motorcar “face covered in repair shop grime, a fine mixture of metallic flakes, profuse sweat and pale blue soot” (Marinetti 1909, p2) Marinetti declares war on the past in his Futurist Manifesto (1909). Championing violence, speed, dynamism and the machine, the manifesto had a resounding impact on European culture, particularly in regard to visual arts and literature. This paper focuses on Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto on Literature, a vicious attack on the literary establishment.  In his manifesto Marinetti seeks to strip down the barriers of language, laying waste to grammar and syntax, relishing in the chaotic grinding of the machine and the rattle of the automatic weapon. The principles of The Futurist manifesto transcend traditional views of literature, encompassing not only the thematic nature of text but it’s physical form and interpretation.
      According to Futurist scholars Tisdall and Bozolla “Almost every twentieth-century attempt to release language from traditional rules and restrictions has a precedent somewhere in Futurism” (Tisdall & Bozolla 1985, p10). In his writings Marinetti offered a revolutionary set of principles for emerging artists and writers to engage with new technologies of the early 20th century, absorbing them into their work and shedding classical pre-conceptions. Drawing from the works of Marinetti and following a stream of literature through the French writers Antonin Artaud and Pierre Guyotat this paper seeks to argue for a continuation for the war on form. By re-examining the Futurist manifesto for the modern era this paper  seeks to prove that writers in the 21st century can challenge current literary preconceptions and carve new pathways to artistic creation at both a thematic and textual level.

Since 2014, I have been researching a biography of Sir William McMahon, prime minister of Australia from 1971-72. The only prime minister to have not been the subject of a biographical study, McMahon has offered an exciting way to approach and explore the issues that confront biographers during their work. For me, the most pressing of these issues have been the ethical ones: questions of ownership, of the multiple responsibilities owed by a biographer, and the consequences of a finished work.
     In this paper, I examine the historical treatment and understanding of these ethical issues in order to contextualise my response to them as they’ve arisen in my practice. I argue that contention with these ethical issues is a necessary part of modern biographical practice and, indeed, demands both recognition of biography’s ‘profane’ nature and a justifying answer from the biographer—a tentative one of which, for my own work, I offer here.

David Unaipon (1872-1967) has been described as a scientist, author, anthropologist, preacher, inventor and public speaker. To these descriptions can be added musician, lecturer, curator, political activist, guide, and door-to-door salesman. A master of many trades, descriptions of Unaipon have struggled to merge the various aspects of his life into a single, coherent narrative. This paper focuses on Unaipon’s life stories – the stories told about him and his family and the stories he told about himself. A central argument of this paper is that, rather than describing Unaipon as a jack of all trades (or, worse, a master of none), Unaipon can accurately and productively be described as a “rhetor,” a person using various forms of media (and various forms of life writing) to present arguments across different social, political and cultural contexts to change beliefs about Aboriginality. To describe Unaipon as a rhetor can re-energise the arguments he put forward during his lifetime, can reveal the consistency and relationship between arguments he made in various fields or disciplines, can explain inconsistencies and contradictions in his life and writing, and, most importantly, can provoke debate and discussion about Unaipon’s life and writing at a time when, despite his prominence as one face on Australia’s $50 note, as the namesake of Australia’s most prestigious award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing, and as an author anthologised in collections of Australian and Aboriginal writing, his writing is all but ignored in Australian culture and literary criticism.

Janet Malcolm, the noted journalist and author, asserts that: ‘The biographer at work…is like the professional burglar’.1 However, this notion of theft transcends the limits of biography to include the life writing genre which often takes the stories of others in producing a text. This writerly practice raises ethical tensions for authors negotiating the space and intersections between self and other, and proprietorial entitlement. Increasingly, with the heightened awareness of vulnerable subjects and familial allegiances, harm minimisation is often a consideration constraining narration.

The focus of this paper is the method in which Australian author and journalist David Leser navigates these tensions – journalistic investigator and the dutiful son; former husband and doting father – in constructing his patriography To Begin To Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father.2

A prolific story teller, narrating the story of his father, publishing great Bernard Leser, was impossible earlier in Leser’s career. But enmeshing it with his own story, ten years later, somehow bridged a tacit gap between father and son.

Through memoir, Australian politicians may reflect on leadership broadly but also on the particular challenges they face during extreme weather events. This is so in Julia Gillard’s My Story, published in 2014, and Anna Bligh’s Through the Wall: Reflections on Leadership, Love and Survival, published in 2015. Gillard was Prime Minister and Bligh was Premier of Queensland during the 2010-11 ‘summer of sorrow’, when floods wreaked havoc on large parts of Queensland. Gillard’s memoir devotes several pages to natural disaster, including the 2010-11 floods, and Bligh’s devotes over two chapters to the floods.

This paper will identify and compare the ways in which Gillard and Bligh frame their experiences of the 2010-11 natural disaster in the writing of their political selves. A possible consequence of this framing, it will argue, is that the memoirist serves to characterise not only herself, as a leader, but also the natural environment, as an adversary. This will be illustrated with particular reference to Bligh’s Through the Wall.

The paper will draw on and extend scholarship in the environmental humanities in a novel way, by viewing political memoir as a means by which dominant and potentially problematic views of the natural environment can be perpetuated. The writing of political memoir, in this sense, involves ethical considerations beyond those typically associated with the genre.

Caren Florance (& Angela Gardner) 
Working Papers (jostles)
Exhibiting space: Building 2, Lower level A Foyer

These are large-scale reproductions of small process moments of Working Papers, an artists' book collaboration with poet/printmaker Angela Gardner. We are exploring the sense and nonsense of composition, the immersive space of creativity. She works with her own poetry, casting and gleaning, and I work with hand-set letterpress, re-arranging her words to make new strange castings. The small moments of play, experimentation and process are caught, copied, and thrown up and out to allow quick or slow contemplation. 

Laser-printed tyvek, 6 pieces, 841 x 1189mm ea. 

Jen Webb (poems), Paul Hetherington (poems), Andrew Melrose (music)
‘he sat weeping on the shore’: remembering those who mourn  (The Odyssey 5.82)
Exhibiting space: Room 2B2

In 2001, the Norwegian container vessel MV Tampa responded to a mayday call that led to the recovery of refugees, mostly Hazaras, seeking refuge in Australia. A period of international tension followed, with Captain Arne Rinnan insisting on landing the refugees on Australian soil, and the Australian government denying the request. This event is only one instance in a history of similar events; a history that is ongoing, with no let up in sight of the flows of desperate people. The objects in the installation seek to concretise the fragility of those seeking refuge; the poetry and other textual and sonic materials will attempt to re-imagine this event, and remember things that are forgotten in official representations of the global refugee crisis.

Mixed media: ship model, Preiser figures, eggshells, folded paper: 3D installation with sonic element, and handmade poetry collection for distribution 

Lorraine Webb and Jen Webb 
Letter and Line
Exhibiting space:  Upper level, 2B7, space outside room. 

These works are part of a larger collaboration between two sisters, one a painter and the other a poet. We are trying to find ways to work together within and across our forms: ways that are neither illustration nor ekphrasis. How does colour speak to word? What is the relationship between a line of poetry and a line of paint? Our first approach to this project is to break with some formal constraints: painting not on canvas but on odd-shaped objects; writing not lineated lyric poetry but prose poetry and fragments. Next is the openness that is a mark of most creative collaborations, a moving to and fro between images, ideas, conversations, essays into objects. We are concerned more with gestures than with the mark or the gaze, and with determining how, through the movement of eye and hand and conversation, we might make letter that speaks to line, line to letter. 

The French historian Jules Michelet considered the act of history to be one of resurrection, something joyous, beneficial to the dead brought back into the present. But there are two sides here: rescue and then wresting; resurrection or disturbance. Some days I am sure that what I am doing is right, and on others the choices I have made and the steps I have taken gnaw at my conscience. The thing I am doing is writing family history, composing a memoir of the journey I have been taking and making to discover the pasts of my grandparents, their parents, and their parents’ parents. The results are partial, exhilarating, and disturbing. The search was impelled by objects, by thousands of things left in an upstairs room, and I have stolen some of those things. The developing story was (and is still being) complicated and embellished by stories pinched, personalities surmised, and moments filched. Everything about the tale is questionable, including my desire—sometimes need—to tell it. And yet, do we not have a responsibility to remember and record? How could an amnesiac world in which we don’t remember even be considered? Michelet knew that the dead do not go away.

“My past…was both simpler and more complicated than I had ever thought it to be,” writes Eula Biss—how might contemporary memoir reflect this apparent contradiction? A genre based on theft, memoir takes situations and characters from real life, appropriating the techniques of the fiction writer even as it claims the factual bedrock underlying traditional nonfiction. This paper will propose a way of recording our personal past which embodies the experiences, anxieties and understandings of our post-postmodern world.

Advances in memory studies have questioned the relationship between an actual event and how we remember it. Stealing insights from the growing fields of cognitive neuroscience and so-called ‘Neuro Lit Crit’, my creative practice aims to reflect the complexity of the workings of our mind. With an awareness of the brain’s tendency to create snapshots of key moments, I’ve adopted the form of lyric essay, a genre which steals the best qualities of lyric poetry and personal essay to offer flashes of intense clarity within the blur of everyday life.

This paper addresses the temporal and psychological space between the ‘I who wrote’ and the ‘I who writes now’ that the memoirist must often navigate. Using the journals I kept during a period of travel and my PhD’s creative work-in-progress, a memoir about place, in this paper I consider two selves: the self that is found in my journals, that represents immediate, corporeal experience, and the self that seeks to craft these journals into a memoir. Examining what writer and academic Micaela Maftei asserts is ‘the very real emotional, intellectual and psychological changes human beings undergo over time’, this paper considers selfhood, memory, and truth, and the intricate relationship between them.

Creative non-fiction writer Sean Prentiss uses philosopher Immanuel Kant’s notion of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds to describe two different kinds of truth: the noumenal, actual world, and the phenomenal world of appearances, that we experience individually through our senses. I argue that this distinction between truths is a critical means by which, in their process of remembering and writing, the memoirist can navigate the multiplicity of selves that inevitably emerges in their work.

Rather than seeking to answer the many questions that the themes of truth, memory and selfhood prompt, by illustrating how I navigate numerous selves in my creative practice, with this paper I wish to open a dialogue about how we might view and move between old and current selves when writing memoir.

Melete’s Story is a choice-based narrative similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series published by Bantam books in the 1980s/90s. In choice-based narratives the reader is able to choose how the story proceeds and many examples of this form use genre as a shortcut to assist the reader in making decisions.

Using genre rules and conventions enables a writer to borrow from existing stories and events to help the reader quickly understand the narrative. This type of priming allows a reader to more easily grasp the flow of the story and encourages a level of agency that permits the reader to make decisions about how the story should proceed.

Melete’s Story borrows heavily from the genres of political and conspiracy thrillers and from world events from the 1970s and 80s.  The narrative is based upon three major world events: the Watergate scandal, the end of the Cold War and the rise of military dictatorships throughout South America. Several sources, both fictional and factual, serve as the backbone for the story, these include Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), and Costas-Gavras’ State of Siege (1972) and Missing (1981).

What began as a project examining abandonment, and possibly the role of inherited psychological trauma in explaining why many adoptees report higher than usual levels of emotional distress about trust, security and the capacity to fully engage with others, has transformed into an exploration of the meanings and symbols adoptees attach to their conception and birth.
      My reading of the literature revealed several things:
1. adoption is largely silent in Australian histories and social commentaries, even those authored by feminists;
2. adoption literature and research focuses in the main on the experiences of relinquishing mothers; and
3. that most (if not all) adoptee stories are grief and identity stories, focusing on abandonment, trauma, loss and commodification.
      Largely unexplored are the meanings attached to conception and birth in adoptees’ narratives. Making use of the significant bodies of literature about how place defines, influences and shapes peoples’ lives, and the literature that suggests ways of coming to terms with the experiences of being an outsider, I am creating a map tracing the stories of 10 adoptees from conception to their current tracks upon the Australian continent.  The form of this work about place and memory and the ties that bind and identify is experimental, drawing on the practice of fictocriticism and various iterations of the essay.

Postmodern theorists have unsettled the idea of the auto/biography as a fixed, coherent record of an essential ‘truth’, paving the way for alternative understandings of personal memory and family history as socially and historically contingent constructs; the result of what might be called creative processes. This paper explores creative possibilities opened up by the short story cycle—collections of independent yet interrelated stories—to represent potent aspects of personal experience without fidelity to historical accuracy. The cycle achieves this through the cumulative effect of small narrative arcs drawn from the mundane, described variously throughout western literary history as epiphanies, moments of being, flashes and revelations. These snapshots, when pieced together as a whole, create a deeper, richer picture of personal transformation over time. This can be appealing for writers interested in the essence of experience. As author Alice Munro remarked that: ‘I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience’ because ‘I don’t see that people develop and arrive somewhere. I just see people living in flashes. From time to time’ (in Hernáez Lerena 1996 9 and 20). In this paper, I draw on my own creative practice using the short story cycle to reflect on and capture formative moments in my personal and family history.

Hernáez Lerena, María Jesús. 1996. ‘The apostrophe as narrative design in Alice Munro’s short story cycle The beggar maid’. REDEN 12:9–25.

Women doing the cooking are responsible for the foodways decisions of their family and their community. (Re)writing sites of food preparation, as well as women’s roles in the creation of food, allows for a re-examination of the power that women wielded within this sphere. This paper will focus on the findings of food studies scholars as they relate to my creative practice of short story writing where women and their role in food production are given priority. This paper argues that when women make foodways choices, it gives them authority and autonomy. This is because foodways knowledge is an important asset in cultural maintenance. Most importantly, this article will consider the impact of foodways on individual and community ethnic identity where food is shown to be more significant than other factors such as birthplace, language or religion. It argues that women’s knowledge of foodways is considered an asset because of this significance to the maintenance of culture, which is especially important to groups that have migrated to a new place. The women of the food studies and within my fiction are the custodians of their cultures, and as the author, I have been required to borrow (or steal) from their store of knowledge.

This research is part of a larger investigation examining female protagonists’ interactions with the landscape in young adult fiction. It will argue that a close study of Lucy Christopher’s novel, Stolen (2009), demonstrates her use of the landscape as a vehicle to both create and negate trauma for the protagonist, Gemma. This can be depicted by reading the novel in relation two notions of environmental writing described by John Stephens (2006). The first ideological perspective Stephens describes in fiction is a human – landscape relationship where characters appear to be positioned embodying a higher status. This assumes control over the environment, creating trauma when characters face harsh landscapes. The second perspective models feelings of belonging within the landscape, prompting the protagonist to care for it. This enables characters to overcome their trauma and subsequently achieve a new sense of agency.

The paper will also draw upon Clare Bradford’s (2008) definition of agency in young adult dystopian fiction. Bradford’s book focuses on social, institutional and cultural arrangements that produce conflict in utopian and dystopian fiction. Her ideas on agency will be applied to this research but rather than examining human-made structures that engineer conflict, this paper will consider non-human conflict from the novel. Drawing also upon Christopher’s (2011) auto-ethnographic paper on Stolen, this research will ultimately analyse the ways that Gemma's relationship with the landscape is the vehicle used by Christopher to subsequently reshape her characters agency when viewed through the lens of Stephens' (2006).

The supervisory relationship is centrally important to successfully navigating postgraduate study.  At its best it can be a supportive and positive collaboration that develops both candidate and supervisor. However, to varying degrees, this isn’t always, or even often, the case.

This panel discusses the ways that postgraduate students might re-envision this relationship, particularly as it pertains to studies in writing.

• Managing expectations in relation to supervision.
• Recognising ​​different styles of supervision and how to work differently with each.
• Supervision and the creative doctorate.
• Professional and productive engagement practices.
• Warning signs that the relationship is not working.
• How difficulties are negotiated and overcome.

In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that we are blind half our lives because of what we miss at night. If we writers, researchers and travellers are all blind half our lives because of what we miss during the night, what are the narratives and the perspectives on place that we’re missing out on?
      This paper will explore the history of nocturnal travel writing in Europe through the 18th and 19th Centuries, focusing on work by flâneurs, or “noctambulators” as Beaumont calls them, who walked their cities in darkness: from Dickens and his night walks in London (1861) through to Restif de la Brettone (1789) and Nerval who embraced the possibilities of caprice with his “extreme” nocturnal wandering in Paris (1852).
      The second part of this paper will look at nocturnal travel writing and the flâneur from a modern perspective. This will be an auto-analysis of my own work in After Dark: A nocturnal exploration of Madrid (2016) which seeks to capture the same perspective of the “amateur detective and investigator of the city” as inspired by Walter Benjamin, though in a contemporary, nocturnal setting. Beyond presenting a unique perspective of the “otherness” of the city at night, it is my hope that After Dark also challenges the stasis of many contemporary works of travel writing, by not becoming “a function of learned judgement” (1978, p.67) as Said cautioned against in Orientalism, rather a piece which has an identifiable creative and ethical core.

Language journalism is a genre of writing which has emerged out of creative nonfiction over the past few decades. While the usefulness of genre classification has been debated in literary studies, a linguistic perspective sees genre, and the social contexts genres exist within, as essential in text creation. This paper discusses how language journalism has emerged as a result of how writers have responded to the changing social context of the past half century. Noam Chomsky and his influence in the field of linguistics and the status of English as a global language are used to illustrate the social contexts from which language journalism has emerged due to the ways writers have responded to these changing circumstances. 

'The Art of Travel' is an extract from a chapter of the same name in Permission to Speak: An Australian Student in China, 1979-1983, a memoir that explores the continuing process of personal transformation sparked by living among Chinese people and students from different countries in early post-Mao China. As she studies modern Chinese literature at Nanjing University, the narrator acquires a growing appreciation for Chinese poetics, inflected with a western Anglophone feminist sensibility and further re-shaped by limited Chinese linguistic and cultural proficiency. ‘The Art of Travel’ is a transcultural rumination on the purpose and aesthetics of travel, and on different ways of seeing. It identifies travel as the juxtaposition of moments of intense realization and discovery with those of extreme tedium, irritation and incomprehensibility. It explores the workings of resonance as a Sinophone sensibility in an Anglophone memoir genre.

Does the application of literary theory stifle the act of creative writing? Should one theorise only after the creative act? This paper argues that the fictional reinterpretation of a complex literary character may be facilitated and indeed enhanced by the prior application of theory. To be more specific, I argue that my creative rewriting of the Wife of Bath (of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) has been empowered by Elizabeth Fowler’s theory of ‘social persons’. Further, I propose that Fowler’s character theory has the potential to enrich the creation of many kinds of textual character. The following paper first introduces Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and one of its constituent characters, the Wife of Bath. It then describes Fowler’s theory and applies it in broad brush-strokes to the Chaucerian portrayal of the Wife. Finally, I demonstrate the way in which such theory and practice of literary critique may inform creative writing in the case of my historical novel of the Wife of Bath, The Scarlet Woman. 

Rates of between 10 to 20 decasyllabic lines per minute were not unusual, Albert Lord notes, in reference to the Yugoslavian oral poets whom he and Milman Parry recorded composing on the spot in the 1930’s. Lord offers two possible explanations for the poets’ extraordinary speed, a factor one could witness at any live performance. Either each such a poet is a ‘phenomenal virtuoso’; or ‘he has a special technique of composition outside out own field of experience.’ (1960: 17). Lord opts for the second of these possibilities and proceeds to explain the composition of oral poetry in terms of the poet/singer’s stringing together of a series of formulaic phrases (“wine-dark sea”, “Rosy-fingered dawn”, “swift-footed Achilles”), i.e. pre-given clusters of words whose metrical and other properties might facilitate “rapid composing in performance.”  In Lord’s words, the oral poet not only ‘makes no conscious effort to break the traditional phrases and incidents’, but is rather ‘forced by the rapidity of composition in performance’ to use them (1960: 4). One might think of duelling in rap. But the Iliadic phrases I have just cited are an indice to the fact that Lord and Parry’s work, though conducted on present-day Yugoslav materials, was intended to cast light on the composition of the Homeric poems as well, and is widely  (though not unanimously) accepted by classical scholars to have been successful in this regard. The Homeric poems were not transmitted through some fantastic act of memory but rather by being repeatedly and rapidly made up on the spot, on the basis of pre-given elements, which included as well as diction, stereotypical scenes and familiar plots.
      Having set forth something of Parry and Lord’s extraordinary empirico-speculative researches, I turn to Elizabeth Minchin’s nuancing of the Parry-Lord account (2001), which suggests that the oral poet’s creation of ‘typical scenes’ or ‘themes’ owe their formulaic nature less to the processes of traditional bardic inheritance Lord and Parry sketch than to the schemas of episodic and procedural memory we instantaneously draw on in everyday conversation and thought to represent our world. I note a surprising resonance between Minchin’s arguments and those William Wordsworth put forward in his famous ‘Preface’, one of the inaugurating manifestos of that modern, verbally iconoclastic poetic project (‘to break the traditional phrases and incidents’) Lord alludes to, and distinguishes oral poetries from. I am referring to Wordsworth’s claim that repeated perception of the everyday passes through the generalising processes of memory into the acts of ‘spontaneous overflow’ at the core of poetic composition (1909: 6). For Wordsworth too, the poetic act is a matter of sudden remembering. Can one remember something new?

Unknowing is a fictocritical piece combining science fiction and essay to explore how ecological crisis necessitates new modes of story-telling. It is an experiment in writing the Chthulucene – a term coined by Donna Haraway that captures “real and possible timespaces” (160), borrowing from Lovecraftian horror to evoke the global, tentacular systems of inter-species being and becoming in the context of climate crisis, species loss and natural disaster.
      This piece appropriates the work of science fiction/weird writers China Miéville and Jeff Vandermeer to put forward some embryonic ideas on thinking, feeling and knowing in the Anthropocene, taking vegetal life as a powerful actor in worlds of mutual transformation between humans and non-humans. It therefore steals now only from existing literary practice but also the semiotic processes of plants themselves to suggest a way of recognising the subjectivities of autopoietic lifeforms within living systems of exchange.
      Informed by recent work in plant intelligence and new theories of posthumanism that call for a “flow of relations with multiple others” (Braidotti 50), Unknowing evokes the constantly evolving affiliations and assemblages that characterise vegetal life, especially within periods of planetary flux. It is a preliminary work that hopes to contribute to discussion of the role of weird, monstrous and fabulist writing in response to environmental crisis. 

As Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe acknowledge in their introduction to an edited 2013 collection on the topic, the very mention of the term ‘narrative ethics’ ‘carries with it . . . a certain ideological charge’ (1). This charge signals a turn away from the assumptions—if not the tools—of the literary theories of structuralism and poststructuralism, and toward a contemporary discourse returning us to earlier notions of literature as an essentially ethical project. The new turn, or return, to ethics may be distinguished by its figuration as a rhetorically-constructed encounter or relationship between an author, the form of the narrative, and a reader. Conceiving of the reading experience as an ‘encounter’ shifts our conception from reading the ethical content of a work toward reading our encounter with that work.
     Lorrie’s Moore’s short story ‘People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Oink’ stands out as a text in which the readerly encounter is dominated by the ethical claims of the narrative. It may be more accurate to say that ‘People Like That are the Only People Here’ is a story built across what I might call ‘zones of narrative ethical ambiguity’: Moore’s story is told in a precarious and ethically-charged boundary space between fiction and non-fiction; art and reality; and narrative and the limits of narrative. The exceptional position of such a text makes equally exceptional ethical claims on its readers, and in this paper I work through attempts to negotiate these claims. 

Is creativity a way to take control of chaos? In creating, the artist takes a chance on an uncertain outcome: a risk for something important, a need to express a view of the chaos of life, to make sense of the nonsensical. Considering how real life muddies the logic of ethical analysis, any attempt at recreating reality must take responsibility for reality’s unknowability.

‘Maris Dissents’ is a fictive short story based on an oral history interview: a form of authorised theft. The story demonstrates the way imagination can intersect with historical evidence to explore emotional and narrative constructions of the past. While, the oral history is given with permission, the interviewee’s name is changed in the story to demonstrate the fictional quality of the work and to protect their anonymity. This story is part of my on-going creative practice investigating the ways creative writers can imaginatively engage with historical sources to represent the past, and the relationship between historical fiction, historical evidence, and representations of the past. In-keeping with creative practice-led research methodology, I engaged deeply with the scholarship around oral history and historical fiction to produce the creative work.

Oral histories can be rich sources of personal, affective knowledge about the past, and demonstrate the ways history ‘lives on in the present’ (Grele 2006, p.59). Similarly, historical fiction is a form that is a product of the present imaginatively representing the past. This quality of historical fiction can draw attention to the nature of historical knowledge (Pinto 2010). Thus, historical fiction informed by oral histories has the capacity to explore the personal impact of historical events, and in doing so, draw attention to the narrative construction of the past. This short story demonstrates the way fiction can be a means of drawing attention to the day-to-day lives of people in the past, often lost to historians, and their means of sense-making, which is often an on-going process. In this way, the story demonstrates how historical fiction, though fictional techniques, allows an occupation of a character’s subjectivity, and in doing so, demonstrates the personal significance of past events.

This paper retells the semester-long experiment I ran teaching a subject titled ‘Writing across borders’ at the University of Wollongong in 2016. Using Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance as the spine of the course, students addressed the literary techniques of cross-cultural writing, magical realism, metafiction, creative nonfiction and cross-platform writing. With the focus on Scott’s novel came the focus on race and on Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships in Australia and the stories told of these relationships. I employed Fiona Nicoll’s approach to race discussions in the classroom by utilising her concept of critical whiteness theory and the significance of Indigenous sovereignty to discussions of this ilk. I also used her 2004 essay ‘Are you calling me a racist?’ (Nicoll, 2004) as a guide and companion across the course. Was it a success? Depending on the measure – student engagement, experimenting with the course ideas in their work, richness of the classroom discussions – the outcomes were a mixed bag. But was it fruitful, challenging and rewarding? Yes. Would I do it again? Of course. 

Australia is a post-colonial society, with the trauma and cruelty of the colonisation process still affecting both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies, and it asks we, as writers, to consider ethical questions and the creative writing practice of how to honour Indigenous pasts and re-present Indigenous people and issues. To be able to address current issues, I argue that we need to continue to acknowledge and understand the past, accept historical consequence and the legacy given to us by our past generations, to sustain a dialogue of empowerment and positive change in Australian fiction writing for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. 

“All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,” write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy. If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin?
     We propose five groundings for this work:

1  There is no such thing as indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.  

2  Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.

3  We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.

4  Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.

5  Story transmits narrative responsibility.  Narrative responsibility requires ‘fierce listening’. 

This paper explores play as a practice, as a disposition, and as a crucial element in the production of research and new knowledge. Informed by a multidisciplinary literature review on play (from psychoanalysis to animal studies, ludology and anthropology), the paper showcases the results of an ongoing qualitative research project on the relationship between play and research practice.
     Drawing on material collected from interviews with twelve leading Australian researchers, the paper highlights possible links between research and creative production success and lifelong practices that enable and prioritise play and playfulness. A key focus is surety versus contingency, or rules versus the absence of rules, and the way in which these two forces or frameworks shift and interact during the process of research. How do new knowledge and innovation play off uncertainty? What is the role of the accident, the dead end, and the serendipitous in the creation of new work?
      My research is based on the premise that play is as crucial to the production of innovative research in traditional academic fields as it is to the production of new work in the creative arts. It emphasizes similarities in regards to research practice across the Australian Research Council’s five key discipline areas, and signals opportunities for further research in this area.
      This paper extends on early work on this topic presented at the Australasian Association of Writing Program Conference in 2015. It speaks to the one of the conference’s central themes for 2016: the question how we make. The broader intention is to raise the status of play as a means for fostering innovation, experimentation and new knowledge, and to argue for research policy frameworks that actively foster contingency, possibility and the unforeseen. 

Lynn Jenner: Opportunity, Fixed Points and the Space In-between: The Creative Writing PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters 

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 Bots and Cookies track our use of the online space in order to predict which advertisements would 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 through the glimpses and ambiguous realities of the online world.

Stealing Others' Lives: Constructing Aesthetic Biographies initially addresses a number of literary techniques and approaches in biographical method, and deals with the writing and reading of biography and autobiography. Language and the part it plays in biography is a focus, as is the 'problem' of aesthetics. In place of orthodox approaches, a version of biography as 'sociological history', based on the reflexive epistemology of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, is presented. Empirical examples are taken from the fields of music and fine arts in contrasting this approach with conventional approaches. Both theoretical and practical issues are considered in this light, and how writing implicates the generative nature of subject-object relationships present in biographical co-construction is examined. Finally, parameters are suggested in terms of what we can, and cannot, know about 'others' lives' within cultural fields.

In this two-part workshop, participants will consider a range of theoretical approaches to Creativity and their applications in practice from diverse perspectives, including philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and psychology. The aim is to explore the essential features of Creativity and how they play out procedurally from different points of view.
      In the morning session, participants will be introduced to the topic and will be presented with a synopsis of the different approaches. Suggested readings will be provided. However, we are asking participants to come with their own readings and experiences of Creativity with respect to their particular media. We are aiming to have as many practical examples as possible, please.
      In the afternoon session, Creativity will be presented within more of a social frame, in particular, that derived from the French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu. A copy of Professor Michael Grenfell's translation of Bourdieu's seminar with fine art students in Nîmes will be provided for participants prior to the workshop. This debate sets creative endeavor within an analysis of the field of cultural reproduction, and the dynamics it contains. This field will be explored, as it exists in the twenty-first century, and the use of Bourdieu's tools both in understanding and operating within it. In particular, participants will be encouraged to consider 'Social' and 'objective art' as contrasting terms which might help us to better understand the way the creative impulse is instantiated in trans-historic and contemporary contexts.