AustLit

'Is writing, including creative writing and its teaching, inevitably on the other side of the natural environment and ecological systems? Is writing, by definition, an action of a mindfulness and inventiveness which implicitly creates a cognitive separation between the world of the text and the world of ecological systems? A number of critics have recently been trying to propose modes and structures which merge this divide, or minimise it borrowing from biology, cognitive theory and probability theory. The paper considers a variety of such formal structures but argues especially for a particular mode of attentiveness in our concept of language and proposes its centrality in the teaching of a contemporary ecologically mindful writing. ' (Author's abstract)

'Bucketty Diary is an extract from a journal written during visits to a cabin in the bush at Bucketty, north of Sydney, over a period of several years. At the beginning and end of the journal there are short accounts of the context of the journal. The writing observes the environment, and reflects on the experience of living close to the country, an experience like camping out. It is creative rather than critical writing, with a brief reflection at the end on influences and intentions. ' (Author's abstract)

‘An ecologically-informed point of view’, says Wendy Wheeler (2006: 91), is one 'that sees all life, including culture, as naturally co-evolved and interdependent’. We can be unconscious of the fact that we are ‘embodied creatures’ for whom ‘the natural world … is the ground-state’ (Wheeler 2006: 91). Constantly distracted by the mass of human-engineered activity, we have lost, Clive Hamilton says, our imagination, and the imagery to inspire an appropriate responsiveness (2005: 191). Beverley Farmer’s innovative ecocritical writing in ‘Mouths of gold’ (2005), with its nonlinear, associative structure and hybrid nature enfolding the prose poem, reveals her exemplary practice of seeing what is. Like the prose poem, the essay without a straightforward, linear structure requires focus and time to make your way through it and to understand what it is offering. John Tomlinson has noted that time itself is neither linear-progressive nor cyclic; it has accidents and surprises in store and is constituted by profound rifts and forks (2007). These rifts in time make us aware of the contingency of our existence. Survival and successful adaptation in environments that are in crisis in the early twenty-first century will require a constant reflexive re-balancing, an experimental approach, a strategy of improvisation. ' (Author's abstract)

'In this essay, I consider the poetics of the weather and studies in creativity, as a site to develop emplaced relations for a multi-species sense of place and research methods for place-based inquiry. I take up the theme of this TEXT Special Issue, ‘Writing creates ecology: Ecology creates writing’ as a conversation seeking generative responses to current dilemmas in terms of both ecology and higher learning. The context of the broader conversation sustains a personal inquiry that is quite specific and particular. The relationship I have to the work and that, to which it speaks, is intimate and lived. The themes woven into the piece are in tension with an individual and collective responsibility to respond to the more-than-human world in ecological crisis. The work is in progress, speculative and open-ended; I embody the work not merely as another project but as seeking a manner of life to live. The focus of these concerns can be summarised as revolving around varied forms of attention, modes of inquiry and modes of address. The material is accumulative and accretive, predicated upon the continuity of self-directed field and archival work, undertaken in the form of experimental philosophy, creative writing and living.The manner of writing is multimodal, non-linear, fractal, writing ecology as the resonance of a place from which the ecology emerges in the writing, reliant upon a recursive and synergistic recollection of fragments, shards, uneven and jagged pieces to formulate a whole. The ecological imagination at work morphs into a substantive form of creativity, as an everyday practice making sense and making art, as ecology and as cultural memory.' (Author's abstract)

'In one of her last essays, Val Plumwood wrote of her vision of how poetry and expository writing might find ways and forms of mutual excitement: ‘The enriching, intentionalising and animating project I have championed is also a project that converges with much poetry and literature. It is a project of re-animating the world, and remaking ourselves as well, so as to become multiply enriched but consequently constrained members of an ecological community’ (2009: 46). Such a project in these times seeks to open creative spaces in the midst of confusion and despair. ' (Author's abstract)

'This paper argues against abstracts. ' (Author's abstract)

'Victorian writer Christie Nieman has wrought a quintessentially modern Australian fiction from the sentiment so eloquently expressed decades earlier in Aldo Leopold’s Round river that ‘one of the penalties of an ecological edcation is that one lives alone in a world of wounds’ (1993: 165). The human cost in a country where environmental care comes 200 years too late is measured in the small story of one rural woman’s efforts to redress the harm with her own personal, self-sacrificing, and ultimately futile, action. ' (Editor's abstract)