AustLit

'As we were proofreading this introduction, the new(ish) Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, responded to the warnings of a special report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by defending the Australian coal industry (Hannam & Latimer 2018). In reference to the Green Climate Fund, set up by the nations that make up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in support of developing nations responding to climate change, Morrison added, ‘Nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund. We’re not going to do that either. I’m not going to spend money on global climate conferences and all that nonsense’ (Karp 2018).' (Introduction)

'By taking as its starting point the concept of magazine exceptionalism, this essay argues that popular magazines such as the Australian Women’s Weekly play an important, if not always obvious, role in influencing perceptions of the natural environment. This occurs partly through feature articles on what commonly is called natural disaster, which tell stories of human interactions with nature when it behaves in unwelcome ways. Interrogating these stories over time can inform and challenge writing practice. To illustrate, the essay examines Australian Women’s Weekly feature articles on exceptional floods from 1934 to 2011. It identifies recurring tropes, most notably metaphors of warfare as well as, in some articles, a more ecocentric perspective. Findings are aligned with a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with the ways in which writers conceptualise non-human others. That scholarship calls for a posthumanist sensibility at a time when anthropogenic climate change will make humans’ relations to the natural environment more fraught.' (Publication abstract)

'This collaborative paper explores how the ‘spec-fic’ category may be responding to contemporary political and environmental challenges. It presents two case studies, in the personal writing and professional publishing experiences of authors Rose Michael and Cat Sparks, to consider the ways speculative fiction engages with real-world concerns. The paper acknowledges the genre’s contested relationship to harder-to-categorise cross-genre or interstitial forms of non-realist fiction, as well as its obvious antecedents in science fiction and its arguable overlap with ‘big L’ literature. As creative practitioners and published authors who dis/identify with generic labels in different ways, the authors contend that the use, misuse, and abuse of genre conventions has been, and continues to be, personally and professionally productive – particularly in a contemporary publishing landscape impacted by changes to technology and platforms that have transformed traditional relationships and roles.'  (Publication abstract)

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

'This paper argues that narrative theory and the political theory of assemblage complement each other in ways that can both illuminate and contribute to political struggle. Assemblage thinking points to complex, catalytic interactions that might open further lines of inquiry to key aspects of narrative analysis, such as meta-narrative, heteroglossia and collectivisation of memory. In turn, narrative theory offers the prospect of further elaborating the key processes by which human social assemblages are composed and decomposed and thus filling some of the critical ‘silences and absences’ (Anderson et al. 2012: 212) of assemblage theory.' (Publication abstract)

'Edited academic books garner neither research metric nor institutional praise, compared to peer reviewed journal articles or monographs. For the editor, there seems no reason to undertake such volumes. But we still do them; we still edit or co-edit them. Louise Edwards claims there are many good reasons why academics persist in editing (and reading) this type of academic output, her prime one being that they ‘meet a series of distinct intellectual and community needs’ (Edwards 2012: 62). This paper brings together two academics who have both contributed to and edited or co-edited such volumes. The scope of the paper is their experiences in editing and co-editing, in order to open up a discussion about the worth of such volumes: why, despite the university’s reluctance to recognise them as either creative or research outputs, academics continue to regard editing as a meaningful scholarly pursuit; and importantly, as we clearly do value these undertakings, how can institutional attitudes to their merit be changed? The co-authors discuss their own personal ethos and experiences about editing and co-editing these texts. This paper stems from a panel at the 2017 AAWP conference, an open dialogue with the audience facilitated by a collegial interlocutor, Dr Carolyn Rickett, herself a co-editor of books.'  (Publication abstract)

'In changing research climates in Australia, as elsewhere, non-traditional research outputs are increasingly incorporated into the scope of recognised intellectual activities beyond the PhD. While practice-led research has a relatively recent history in Australian universities, increasing numbers of academics hold doctoral level degrees with a creative practice component. In addition, a new focus in ERA on impact, and connections with communities outside academia, represents both challenges and potential for creative writing research. In these changing tertiary landscapes, early career artist-academics navigate complex institutional hierarchies and imperatives. Following Josie Arnold (2012, 2015), this paper takes an autoethnographic, ‘mystory’ approach to addressing these possible tensions and practical imperatives in a changing academic climate, proposing an initial framework for nurturing practice-led research in Australian universities.'  (Publication abstract)

'With heightened funding pressures on Australian universities, academics are being placed under more pressure to increase class sizes. Creative writing workshops, where students provide feedback on each other’s creative work, can be rigorous and demanding sites for teachers in ways that differ from ‘traditional’ classroom settings. This article surveys critical research on class sizes and the workshop model, as well as third-year University of Wollongong creative writing student perspectives, arguing that the in-person workshop model, while imperfect, remains vital to the discipline of creative writing. When successful, it can teach students the technical elements of craft as well as the skills to build workshop communities, consider process and develop a sense of who their audiences are. However, increasing class sizes make it difficult, if not impossible, to fulfil these potentials, and put the workshop at risk. If creative writing academics don’t fight for manageable workshop student numbers, our very discipline will be at risk with the rise of the information economy, as outlined by Paul Mason (2015).'  (Publication abstract)

'This article takes up Donna Haraway’s discussion of ‘diffraction’ as a remedial to the literal self-centredness of the figure of reflection, in order to propose an alternative learning objective for creative writing curricula. There, currently, ‘reflective learning’ is a common if implicit objective, often manifesting in the form of journal-keeping and some kinds of writing exercises, while a capacity for ‘reflection’ can be seen at least bureaucratically to validate the existence per se of university writing programs (Green & Williams 2018). In the educational literature, self-reflexive contemplation of one’s own experiences is said to be preliminary to the achievement of deep, life-long and transformative knowledge (Ryan & Ryan 2012). But, from a posthumanist standpoint, the discourse around reflection in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning appears ideologically committed to a subjectivity that is integral, insular and (thus) humanist, and constitutionally resistant to transformation. Here, I make use of the post-secondary educational literature on ‘object-based learning’ (OBL) to suggest that students’ touching of objects can be conducive to diffractive rather than reflective learning – that is, conducive to learning that avoids the humanist atomisation of subject from object and instead entails establishing one’s interconnectedness with environments. To this end, I propose a way to frame OBL activities as developing a reciprocal relationship between writing subjects and objects of study, in which students situate their writing not as a reflection on/of objects ‘out there’ in the world, but rather as an active and literal co-creation of the self-as-world.' (Publication abstract)

'Though often contested and difficult to define, the novella has become more visible in Australian literature in recent years. This increased interest in the novella has often been connected to developments in digital technology and reading culture. Some commentators suggest that the increased distractibility and time poverty of contemporary audiences may make shorter literary works more appealing (Dale 2012), while others claim that the reduced costs of digital publishing may make novellas more commercially viable (Tan 2016). This paper will examine and assess these claims in the context of past and current debate around the status of the novella, using Nick Earls’ Wisdom Tree (2016) sequence of novellas as a case study so as to consider whether the current rise of digital publishing platforms has shifted the ways in which the form is approached and understood. This discussion has direct implications for fiction writers considering the advantages and affordances of the novella. Writers will need to assess both the possibilities presented by the resurgence of interest in the novella, its long-term sustainability, and future possible directions for the form in a digitally saturated culture.'  (Publication abstract)

'Within a framework of trauma theory and its relationship to literature, this paper proposes a number of writing strategies that may enable crime fiction, in particular the domestic noir sub-genre, to portray narratives of trauma using textual cues that invite readers to enter the text in similar ways to trauma fiction. Despite the central role trauma plays in crime stories, the capacity for crime fiction to serve as a vehicle for representing trauma and to act as a catalyst for personal and social change has not been explored in any depth by critics or scholars. By employing an exegetical reflection and case study analysis of the writing of my completed PhD novel, Ebb and Flow, I show how analysis of these strategies can be aligned with the structure and literary devices typical of crime fiction This analysis offers tools to write a form of crime fiction that may deliver similar benefits to readers as trauma fiction. This leads the way for further research into the power that crime narrative has to evoke change through psychological and emotional growth and other inherent benefits for a genre fiction audience, as well as a potential new arts and health market for crime fiction writers.'  (Publication abstract)

'Child adoption practices in twentieth century Australia were largely reliant on Christian agencies to facilitate the separation of child from mother and the subsequent re-homing of that child with others, almost always married couples referred as suitable parents by their local minister or priest. Stories told by adoptees are frequently stories of loss, grief and abandonment, as recorded in memoir, government inquiries and research studies. The creative work presented in this paper is titled another Exodus: men women leaving children. In this work I chose to ‘embody’ the ‘shell’ of the King James Version of the first two chapters in Exodus, a book in the Bible’s Old Testament. The work forms part of my broader study of experimental writing, in this case combining a bricolage approach to research with the hermit crab form of the lyric essay, undertaken during my creative practices research. The reader is invited to form fresh, and perhaps transformed, understandings of the impact of the Christian churches’ role in adoption policy and practice in Australia, and the subsequent effects of that influence and intervention on our collective cultural and emotional psyche.'