AustLit

'From the author of the David Unaipon award winning novel Dancing Home.

'Paul Collis’ first collection of poetry is a book of difficult truths and profound connections. It charts a life lived on the streets, on country, in the deep time of tradition, of relationships to land and family. This book mourns those who have passed, and the current state of places and people held close in the heart and in the kinds of knowledge inseparable from self that might be called ‘being’, but is always much more than that. It is also a poetry of hope in the hopeless, of beauty in small moments, and the overwhelming ‘now’ that is memory.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'This essay is a 2020 collaboration between award-winning Barkindji poet and novelist Paul Collis and short story writer and essayist Alice Bishop, who has British background. Collis and Bishop became friends at the May 2019 Northern Territory Writers’ Festival and have been talking about writing, landscape, loss—and country music—ever since.'  (Introduction)

'Story Ground is a place of story, of attentiveness and support. A place where stories are held  safely and dearly, and are shared bravely—the very foundation of Community and Culture.

'Story Ground: The anthology is a collection of prose writing, poetry and storytelling deriving from a series of workshops based on traditional Indigenous practices of storytelling and knowledge. The authors come from far flung places. Their writings here are breathtakingly powerful. This anthology is for the keeping and for returning to—a collection that you will find yourself reading and embracing, time and again.'

‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

1. Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
2. We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
3. There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
4. Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
5. History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
6. Story transmits narrative responsibility. Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.

'This two-part paper discusses each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra. Part 1 discussed the first three groundings and was published in TEXT Vol 21, No 2, October 2017. Part 2 discusses the remaining three groundings.'  (Publication abstract)

'I wrote these pieces of writing for readers to understand and know something of my people, whom I love very much. Their lives were not lived in vain; they were beautiful people who held responsibility when they needed to; and they were strong people who have left, in me, great love. My people were strong and did not bow a head to any person, even though they suffered terrible violence through the hands of the state.

'My mother, her mother (our Law-woman), and her brother John were Kunya people. My father was a Wailwan/Wiradjuri man, and I was raised as Barkindji by my grandfather. I am living thanks to these people's great love. This writing is an expression of my admiration and love for them.' (Introduction)

'‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

• Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
• We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
• There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known. 
• Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
• History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
• Story transmits narrative responsibility.  Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.

This two-part paper will discuss each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article is co-authored by three writer-academics who have been collaborating as supervisors, doctoral candidates and co-authors over the past decade. Jen Webb supervised Jordan Williams during her creative PhD in digital poetry and Deleuze (awarded 2006); Jordan and Jen co-supervised Paul Collis’s creative PhD in fiction and Barkindji identity (awarded 2016); and he has long supervised both Jen and Jordan in their (informal) education in Indigenous epistemology. Over these years, the supervisor-candidate relationships have unfolded, developed, changed and folded back on themselves. We explore how this long-term relationship between three mature-aged writers and scholars, from three very different cultural backgrounds, has inflected our individual approaches to the preparation and writing of creative research, including the exegesis. We begin, therefore, with our own understandings of what the word ‘exegesis’ means to us, how it mobilised (or hindered) the generation of creative knowledge, what models are of value to us, and what we envisage as its possible future/s. We write this in the form of a three-way conversation, with scholarly annotations.'  (Publication abstract)