AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Recently, in the Runaway Bay newsagency (north of Surfers Paradise), my eye was attracted by a sign on one of the shelves: it said ‘Women’s Interest’. Below it, six magazines – all of them to do with creative writing: The Writer (US), The Writer’s Chronicle (US), Writer’s Digest (US), Writers’ Forum (UK), Writing Magazine (UK) and Literary Review (UK). They cost me a total of $92.16 . ' (Nigel Krauth, Editorial introduction)
Notes
-
Includes reviews not within AustLit's scope.
- Paul Williams & Shelley Davidow, Playing With Words: An Introduction to Creative Writing Craft review by Alyson Miller
- Stephanie Vanderslice (ed), Studying Creative Writing Successfully review by Sally Breen
- Anna Leahy (ed), What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing review by Jeremy Fisher
- Roslyn Petelin How Writing Works: A field guide to effective writing review by Rosemary Williamson
- Toby Litt, Mutants: Selected Essays review by Maria Tumarkin
- Jen Webb, Sentences from the Archive review by Ioana Petrescu
- Sarah Corbett, And She Was: A Verse-Novel review by Linda Weste
- Jeremy Fisher, Faith, Hope and Stubborn Pride: Searching for heaven in Aotearoa and Australia review by Noeline Kyle
Contents
-
Editorial : Creative Writing Magazines,
single work
criticism
'Recently, in the Runaway Bay newsagency (north of Surfers Paradise), my eye was attracted by a sign on one of the shelves: it said ‘Women’s Interest’. Below it, six magazines – all of them to do with creative writing: The Writer (US), The Writer’s Chronicle (US), Writer’s Digest (US), Writers’ Forum (UK), Writing Magazine (UK) and Literary Review (UK). They cost me a total of $92.16 [1].
'These are genuine creative writing magazines aimed at the developing writer (with the exception of Literary Review which is equivalent to the Australian Book Review, relevant as it says, ‘For people who devour books’). They are magazines with pedigrees: The Writer has been published for 130 years; Writer’s Digest for more than 90 years; The Writer’s Chronicle represents the vast network of the American Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and Literary Review was founded 40 years ago at Edinburgh University and features reviewers who are ‘usually authors themselves, not just critics’. Each magazine has its own lively and informative website.' (Introduction)
-
Platform Games : The Writer, the Publishing Industry and Debates Over Non-print Book Formats in the Twenty-first Century,
single work
criticism
'The twenty-first century has seen significant evolution of publishing platforms. Since the publication of the first commercial ebook in 2000, much of the public discussion around the ebook’s place in English-language publishing has cast it as a rival to printed books and a threat to the industry, rather than an alternative vessel for content delivery. At various times during that seventeen years, both ebooks and paper books have been declared a spent force, with the other seen as on the brink of triumph. During this time, audiobooks have evolved significantly, and other narrative platforms have arisen. This paper examines the ongoing debates about platforms, the selective use of, and extrapolation from details that has occurred as part of it, and the framing of the predictions that have characterised it, many of which have proven to be inaccurate. It argues for a writer-centred view that understands this debate, but sees all formats as a way to reach readers, and worthy of consideration in a writer’s publishing plans. ' (Publication abstract)
-
Closet Writing,
single work
criticism
'In this article I view academic writing through the metaphor of ‘closet writing’, whereby the process of writing is concealed and erased, allowing public exposure of only polished articles as final products. I explore some of the reasons for the implicit shame and embarrassment that many academics, myself included, feel about their unfinished pieces and practices of writing. Among those reasons are the felt discrepancies between the imagined, and often mutually conflicting, ideals of academic writing as practice, process and product, and each individual’s lived experience of it. I question the sources of such ideals, and suggest some resistance to the ideal through advocating care for ideas, rather than ideals. I query where assumptions about writing as a clean, fast and easy process come from, and counter these assumptions with values of mess, uncertainty and struggle. I argue that the absence of conversation around academic writing, and ‘closeting’ of the often messy add to further mystification of it. Academics are invited to venture out of their closets of writing, and risk some exposure of the process through either shared drafts or honest conversations.' (Publication abstract)
-
#STREATstories : Mapping a Creative Collaboration,
single work
criticism
'#STREATstories is a storytelling project focused on the artistic activities and interventions of a social enterprise that successfully supports homeless and disadvantaged young people in Melbourne’s inner city. The project explores an ‘applied creative writing’ approach to creative fieldwork, critical perspectives and imaginative inquiry for researchers keen to employ their writing/research skills and interests to matters of social injustice and inequity. This paper goes ‘behind the scenes’ to uncover the orientation of four collaborators on this creative research project, all of whom come from very different creative practices, and examine what informs their approach – what and how they do what they do as co-creators and what brings them into this collaborative space. Areas of approach and interest range across ideas of friendship and ‘lovence’, the ‘intimacy of failure’, notions of ‘giving’ voice, and the ‘collaboration’ between artists and materials. The four contributors to this paper explore how these various interests influence the process of collaboration and co-creation as they negotiate ‘that simple but enigmatic step, joining hand, eye and mind’ (Carter 2004: xiii). ' (Publication abstract)
-
Displaced Metaphors : Poetic Engagements with Language in a Digitised World,
single work
criticism
'This practice-led paper discusses an ongoing creative and conceptual collaboration between three authors, in which poetry is approached as a means of exploring how lived experience and language are being transformed by the rapid evolution of digital devices and technologies. We reflect on our use of poetry to explore and interrupt the increasing invisibility of metaphors such as ‘cloud’ and ‘screen’ as applied to technology, by re-foregrounding the disjunctions between metaphor and what it describes. Engaging with the work of Paul Ricouer and Maurice Blanchot, we consider the unique operations of literary language and the ability of poetry to invite critical encounter in ways that foreground physical sensation and the free association of signifiers. We explore how such poetic engagements offer an important means of approaching questions concerning the implications of digitisation, via language and lived experience on what we perceive as the ‘real.’ In this context, we consider Baudrillard’s dystopic postulations regarding simulacra and hyperreality, and Susan Stewart’s perception of digital modes of communication as inducing a nostalgic longing for the immediacy of pre-digital reality. As this paper will discuss, such possibilities, at once dystopic and mournful, are at once complicated and offset by the generative potential of creative engagements with digitisation, which have exciting possibilities for creative practice.' (Publication abstract)
-
Risk, Constraint, Play: A New Paradigm for Examining Practice-research in the Academy,
single work
criticism
'This essay looks at my own learning as a writer in order to ask what constitutes creative practice and then takes particular examples to create a paradigm for examining practice-as-research in the academy: risk + constraint + play = change. I use creative readings of particular cultural encounters I have had during my own writing life – with Cornelia Parker, and Kathleen Jamie and Bridget Collins, for instance – to illustrate these ideas. Practitioners working in academia are increasingly required to defend practice-based-research and in this essay I use one of practice-research’s key facets – reflective practice - to provide one answer to a pressing concern. I set out to ask how higher education institutions might best support practice-research, with the aim of developing it, increasing outputs, and deepening its investigations. Throughout I ask the question: how can we resist essentialist positions and reductive structures that do not fit the authentic, process-led version of practice?' (Publication abstract)
-
‘Nhill’ and the Aboriginal Language Revival Movement : Relational Identity, Short Story Titles and ‘contracts of Homophony’,
single work
criticism
'This article takes a practice-led research approach to engage with a current debate in Australian post-colonialism centred on the language issues involved with the Aboriginal Language Revival movement. Using the author’s own short story, ‘Nhill’, as a case study, the article develops Amos Oz’s notion of the beginning of a story as a ‘contract’ that all texts make with their readers. ‘Nhill’ is a provocative instance of this sort of contract because it is an English-language corruption, and mis-hearing, of the Aboriginal word, ‘nyell’. Nhill is also a town on the edge of the Little Desert in the Wimmera region of Western Victoria. The article explores the relationship of this place to the implications of the contract that the title ‘Nhill’ makes with its readers. By tracking the practice-led shift in the title of the story from, originally, the English-language name ‘Little Desert’, through to ‘Nhill’ as a homophonic echo of ‘nyell’, the article explores the ethical implications of a ‘contract of homophony’ for the current debate around the Aboriginal Language Revival movement. However, because ‘Nhill’s’ author is a non-indigenous researcher involved in the field of Aboriginal Language Revival, the article’s focus on ‘homophonic ethics’ must itself be situated ethically. ' (Publication abstract)
-
The Writerly Art of Celebrating Difference : Reading Ambiguity in Ross Gibson’s The Summer Exercises,
single work
criticism
'The subject of Ross Gibson’s novel The Summer Exercises (2008) is a past society of which the author allows his readers only glimpses. How might Gibson’s work provide inspiration or direction for the fiction writer concerned with representing the other? In his work, Gibson utilises disparate real and fictional elements to reveal traces of a society no longer accessible: the city of Sydney, Australia, circa 1946. An analysis of the text, as it is understood by a creative writer in search of models for her own project, contends that the manner in which Gibson interweaves the miscellany of his narrative produces a ‘crowded style’, a form that eschews a dominant voice and invites a range of interpretive possibilities. The reader is thus encouraged to defer drawing any definitive conclusion from the text. Gibson’s experimental form and its ability to create a sense of ambiguity in its reading thus provides a stellar example of how one writer’s choices have mobilised imaginative and sensitive possibilities for representing the other.' (Publication abstract)
- Salti"Greek olives taste", single work poetry
- Alleysi"Like spaces between poems,", single work poetry
- The Writer as Farmeri"when you work alone", single work poetry
- R.I.P. Grammari"goodbye to good grammar", single work poetry
- Too Sacredi"talking about humour and satire", single work poetry
- Haunted, single work prose
- My Brother’s Map, single work prose
- The Humble Tool, single work prose science fiction
- You Get What You Dress for, single work prose
-
Talking Country,
single work
essay
'Gularabulu is a collection of nine stories told by Nyigina Elder, Paddy Roe, from Broome and transcribed, as spoken to settler academic, Professor Stephen Muecke, in the late 1970s. Its publication in 1983 was groundbreaking as it invited the settler, as a respectful listener into the rich history and stories of the Country of the West Kimberley. ' (Introduction)
-
Dreams of Waking,
single work
essay
'In his riddling, labyrinthine story, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1962), Jorge Luis Borges imagines a fantasy world of ideas created by a secret order of scholars in which, he writes, it is believed ‘that while we sleep here [on Earth], we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men’ (Borges 1962: 8). In this image of alternate dream-lives and divided selves, Borges speaks to some of the most pervasive themes in Letter to Pessoa, the first collection of lyrical and inventive short stories by Indian-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. The significance of dreaming in this collection – as a practical and metaphorical means of escaping, extending or interrogating reality – is also premised by the book’s elusive epigraph, an excerpt from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: ‘I feel as if I’m always on the verge of waking up’. (Introduction)
-
Wonder Tales,
single work
essay
'In her contribution to Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman’s collection, Rebellious Daughters: True Stories from Australia’s Finest Female Writers (2016), Krissy Kneen cites fairy-tale scholar Marina Warner, who notes that the original term for the fairy tale was Wundermärchen, the wonder tale. ‘To wonder’, writes Warner, ‘communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire’ (40). In the same way, Kneen observes, the (often horrific) fairy tales told to her by her grandmother, stories which did not at all adhere to the philosophy of characters who lived ‘happily ever after’, filled the young girl ‘with a powerful and dangerous curiosity’ (40). It is that desire to know, that epistemophilia, which not only drives the women and girls of the stories collected here, but those about whom they read, and whom we now, in this collection, voraciously follow, hungry for knowledge, for endings happy or otherwise.' (Introduction)
