AustLit

'I closed the pages of Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia with a sigh of satisfaction at its beautiful construction and timeliness. The actions of her protagonist, Emma, seem a pertinent reaction to our zeitgeist: a world in which our flaccid government cannot mount a response to the recent IPCC report, which warns that ‘with further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers’. At the same time, I experienced a spell of disquiet at the way the novel mobilises disability to symbolise something that everyone, whether abled or disabled, should be able to recognise: the impact of our actions on the future.' (Introduction)

'Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.

'In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject's entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.

'The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.' (Publication summary)

'Krissy Kneen’s grandmother, Lotty Kneen, once built papier mâché dinosaurs ‘that didn’t fit inside the house. They were built in sections that could be taken apart, crammed inside my mother’s VW van and driven one at a time to the Sydney Museum for its dinosaur displays’. While these were Lotty’s most famous works, she ‘was fonder of the fairytale characters they made for book week at the local library. She would look at different artists’ impressions of Snow White, the Little Match Girl, Sleeping Beauty, then translate these to her own versions’. However, the female characters ‘ended up looking more like younger versions of herself than like the illustrations in the original books.’ When Kneen, who inherited her Slovenian grandmother’s ‘small round face, big eyes and plump cheeks’, stepped into the loungeroom, ‘a dozen versions of myself used to stare back at me.’ Here is a metaphor for the difficulties Kneen faced in trying to locate her history in a family that offered her scant details. She looks for the truth but finds only constructions, and each time the tale is different. She is modelled and controlled by an artist who did not let her out of her sight.'  (Introduction)

'On the second day of 2020, my partner and I caught a train through the suburbs of Munich  to Dachau, then a bus to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. It was bitterly cold, the morning air nipping our cheeks. Frost crunched beneath our feet and weak sunlight drifted through clouds. At the site, we passed beneath the grim words ‘Arbeit macht frei’, soldered onto the entrance gates (as they also were in Auschwitz and other concentration camps). We moved slowly through the rectangular buildings, reading squares of information about the inhumane treatment of the prisoners. By the time we emerged from the last building, we were weighed down with horror.' (Introduction)

'In 1766, Jeanne Barret dressed as a man and became the first woman to sail around the world, accompanying naturalist Philibert Commerson. At the close of their journey they disembarked at Mauritius, where Commerson located a ‘charming shrub’ with leaves of many different shapes. He named it Baretia bonafidia for the woman whose clothing, or leaves, concealed who she was. As Jeanne’s biographer Danielle Clode writes, ‘It is an apt plant to name after Jeanne – rare and difficult to find, with very little written about it, and a complex history of misidentification and reclassification’. The plant’s qualities – rarity, elusiveness, an identity difficult to pin down – also reference the challenges Clode encountered in researching and writing In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World. The records in the archive do not amount to much: ‘a handful of documents, a signature here and there, a reported conversation and descriptions from others, some malicious but mostly admiring. Most of the accounts were written or rewritten long after the event’.' (Introduction)

'Science Write Now is a network of people and resources that support creative writing about science. We believe that truth comes in many forms, some of which—like fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and memoir—help us translate complex or remote ideas into everyday lives, build spaces for empathy and change.

'We aim to:

(1) help writers and scientists explore creative ways of communicating science;

(2) inspire diverse writers to incorporate science into their practice; and

(3) facilitate sustainable, creative connections between scientists and writers.

'To achieve these goals, Science Write Now will build an inclusive digital space that showcases and supports writing and writers across the science/literary ‘divide’; collates inspiring scientific images and links; and builds new collaborative networks.'

Source: Science Write Now.

'It is often assumed that Deaf people cannot listen to, create or enjoy music, or that doing so requires a Beethoven-level genius. But Deafness is not a singular experience. For me, music is joy, abandon and a means of freedom.'

'When Melissa Fagan stands before the famed McWhirters building in Valley Corner, she tries ‘to decipher what this immutable object, this icon, means to the city and me’, but finds that ‘the building is in my way’ (2018: 8). In this book, she tries to move beyond the Art Deco department store to examine the lives and work of the women who were connected to it by blood and marriage. Weaving together research, reportage, imagined lives and personal memoir, she illuminates the impact of wealth, social expectations and loss across five generations of women.' (Introduction)

'When K. arrives at the unnamed village in Kafka’s The Castle, the village is ‘deep in snow’ (3). The hill on which the Castle stands is ‘hidden, veiled in mist and darkness’ (3). There isn’t even ‘a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there’ (3). K. stands on a wooden bridge that leads into the village, ‘gazing into the illusory emptiness above him’ (3). The snow and dark winter trail K. through the narrative as he encounters people in the village. Most of the denizens are obfuscatory, and none can give him clear advice on how to reach the Castle. • • •

'In July 2018, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) becomes available in Brisbane. Administered by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) it will, according to the NDIS website, ‘provide all Australians under the age of 65 with a permanent and significant disability with the reasonable and necessary supports they need to enjoy an ordinary life’ (‘What is the NDIS?’). It stemmed from a 2010 Productivity Commission inquiry into a long-term disability care and support scheme. In 2013, NDIS legislation was passed and the NDIS Act 2013 was created. Pilot studies were conducted for three years, then the national rollout began on 1st July 2016.'  (Introduction)

'Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.

'Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.