AustLit

'Writing about place is not always writing what is ‘real’. Writers often avoid specific, named and recognisable places in fiction – using literary devices and forms to write around them – and yet still manage to evoke a sense of place. In an exegetical reflection on my PhD novel, Hovering, this article explores my own journey in writing about my home town of Geelong by avoiding it. It discusses writing around place by employing an absurdist approach and explores how physical space intersects with virtual space in ways that invite formal modification and polyphony. The methodology I adopt is autoethnographic and mirrors my creative approach, but I also intersperse case studies of writers who have been central to my creative thesis, and who have represented place through defamiliarising strategies such as absurdism and disguise, multiplicity of individual perspectives and the voice of the crowd. Ultimately this article reflects on how we might write fiction about our places – our homes, towns, cities, streets; places that deserve to be seen; places that are tangible or virtual or a strange mixture of both – when we want to avoid reducing them.' (Publication abstract)