AustLit

'The need to reconceive failure as something potentially creative and productive is well recognised within the field of creative writing (Motion 2011, Brien, Burr & Webb 2013, Kroll 2015, Webb 2015). Although a solid body of existing literature attends to this need on the theoretical level, there remains a need for more practitioners to share their specific, situated narratives of working with and through failure, for such narratives can act as models and offer hope to others facing similar scenarios. This paper aims to offer one such narrative in the form of the script for a speech I delivered at the 2016 AAWP conference. The speech acknowledges that the paper I initially intended to present had fundamental flaws––flaws only addressable, the speech suggests, via collaboration with others, and via engagement of slow scholarship principles (Hartman & Darab 2012, Bird Rose 2013). The speech is here accompanied by a summary and context statement, which explains how admitting failure in public at the conference helped me to find the collaborators I sought, and thus to continue pursuing the same objectives, but via an enhanced methodology, and with the benefits of the lessons failure affords. The context statement also discusses the curious ways in which my pragmatic ‘speech’ was (re)conceived by witnesses as a creative ‘performance’, and of how their responses led me to perceive the script’s potential usefulness to other creative writing researchers, particularly research degree candidates, as a narrative modelling possibilities for working with and through failure in creative writing research by reconceiving failure as creative writing research.'

Source: Abstract.

'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 limitsof 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.'

Source: Abstract.