Wednesday Canberra weather: regardless of any thing Neil Finn may have said, you don’t really have your own personal weather bubble. You can easily test this by travelling from the Woden Valley to the northside on foggy morning. Or getting on a plane in December and flying to Helsinki.
So those of you who are in Canberra today will probably experience much the same weather as each other. Warm to hot and slighty sticky. The weather equivalent of spilling cocoa on your new trousers.
Chemical interventions such as deodorant, sunscreen, mosquito repellent and anti-histamines are strongly indicated. Consider long before you commit to opaque tights, however hairy your legs are. Once the sun is over the yard arm, applications of gin and tonic may be beneficial.
“Pressed between the mind’s pages”: Denise Levertov’s ‘Rilke Index’ and practices of artistic cognition.
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.
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.
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.
Eugen Bacon: That danged gizmo‘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.
Penni Russon: Collaboration in the Academic Discipline of Creative Writing: A Thematic AnalysisCreative 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.
Rowena Lennox: CoolooloiThe 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).
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.
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
Is there WiFi on this plane?
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.
