AustLit

'This special issue of TEXT had its origins in a three-day symposium on Creative Collaborations in Intercultural and Intermedial Spaces, at La Trobe University, 7-9 July 2020.' 

'This special issue includes traditional articles and creative works that explore the fission between the arena of the mind and the concrete, tangible things of the world around us.'  (Publication abstract)

'Poetry, it seems to me, raises the questions of margins and marginality in obvious ways … and yet poetry is central in terms of its contribution to language and thought. (Hecq 2005)

'Liminality indicates a border, a line, and thus some style of crisis – some turn, or act of turning, of crossing from one place or state to another (Meads 2019: 5). It is the discovery of a limit, and simultaneously, realisation that the limit is not the end. There is always some further into and through which to step. What seems a wall is a skin is an interstice is warping, stretching, porous. Like the ‘/’ in the ‘im/possible’ and ‘both/and’, such lines are zones, spaces, gaps for opening and unfolding, sites for play and experimentation, for testing, dreaming, discovering. The liminal is thus imbued with potential: hitherto-unthought thoughts become articulable, letting new knowledges and ways of knowing come to be (Meads 2019: 5-6).' (Jaydeep Sarangi and Amelia Walker, (Introduction)

'Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public. (Morrison 1993)

'These lines, drawn from novelist, essayist, and teacher Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture, offer a vivid description of the kinds of rhetoric dominating our public, professional, and even our cultural spaces today, although the cracks are beginning to show, and we would be hard pressed to claim that ‘harmony’ prevails.' (Deborah Hunn, Ffion Murphy, Catherine Noske and Anne Surma, Introduction)

'This special issue of TEXT explores issues related to identity, politics and creative writing from the perspective of creative writers and creative writing academics. The question of who can speak and what stories can be told is central to any discussion of contemporary writing and writers, and to the literary industry including publishing, reviewing, awards and education.' (Natalie Kon-yu and Enza Gandolfo : Introduction)

'This special issue is interested in the language possibilities inherent to this reframing and proposes that there are multiple languages or frames through which we can envisage and understand possible futures. It presents expert knowledge alongside creative expression to stimulate a range of dialogical possibilities that expert and creative expression, on their own, cannot achieve. We, the editors, argue that any engagement with our present, in the light of the future, calls upon an anticipatory aesthetic (Bussey 2017a, 2017b) in which the imagination is a key producer of foresight, hope and a range of possibilities.' (Marcus Bussey, Lisa Chandler, Gary Crew, and Rachel Robertson : Introduction)

'As we were proofreading this introduction, the new(ish) Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, responded to the warnings of a special report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by defending the Australian coal industry (Hannam & Latimer 2018). In reference to the Green Climate Fund, set up by the nations that make up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in support of developing nations responding to climate change, Morrison added, ‘Nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund. We’re not going to do that either. I’m not going to spend money on global climate conferences and all that nonsense’ (Karp 2018).' (Patrick Allington, Piri Eddy and Melanie Pryor : Introduction)

'This special issue brings together a diverse collection of studies that show the different ways that contemporary life narrative practices and texts seek to trouble the genres of life narrative – expanding the genres’ boundaries and unveiling new possibilities for the form, or showing the ranges of ways that life narrative texts and practices trouble socio-political or cultural contexts, representations and conditions.' (Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas and Donna Lee Brien : Life narrative in troubled times)

'This special issue of TEXT considers the new forms of writers and writing practices that are emerging in our digital age, paying specific attention to the various convergences of writing practices with cultures of gaming.' (Source : Introduction)

'Here the authors discuss the role of fiction in screenwriting practice research. The screenplays included in the ‘Screenplays as Research Artefacts’ special issue of TEXT present a range of stories, worlds, characters, visual scenarios and dialogue exchanges that function as vessels for theories and ideas. These eleven screenplays all use creative practice approaches to research across a wide variety of discourses. All of the works embrace fiction as an important method to convey their respective critical concerns, which, the authors argue, evidences an emerging hallmark of screenwriting (as) research when compared with associated forms in the creative writing and screen production disciplines: fiction as a staple of its storytelling, creative practice and research methodology. The authors suggest that the use of fiction to perform research and present findings illuminates the ways that knowledge can be affective, not merely textual or verbal, something that is exemplified in the selected screenplays.' ( Craig Batty and Dallas John Baker : introduction) 

'At the turn of the last century, writers like Atha Westbury and Hume Cook were asking whether Australia had its own fairies, its own fairy tale lore. They attempted to fill the perceived lack of traditional fairy-tale narratives with their own published works of fairy tale. The titles authors chose for their collections – for instance, Olga Ernst’s Fairy tales from the land of the wattle and Annette Kellermann’s Fairy tales of the south seas and other stories – often revealed an overt wish to build a fairy-tale tradition that was distinctly and uniquely Australian. While some of these tales simply relocated existing European tales to the Australian context, most used classic fairy-tale tropes and themes to create new adventures. Other writers and collectors, like K Langloh-Parker, Sister Agnes and Andrew Lang, sought to present Indigenous tales as examples of local folk and fairy tales – a project of flawed good intentions grounded in colonial appropriation. These early Australian publications are largely forgotten and, in many ways, the erasure or forgetting of narratives that were often infused with colonial attitudes to gender, class, race, is far from regrettable. And yet there was a burgeoning local tradition of magical storytelling spearheaded by the delicate fairies of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s brush and the gumnut babies of May Gibbs that celebrated the Australian environment, its flora and fauna, populating and decorating new tales for the nation’s children.' (Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, Nike Sulway and Belinda Calderone : Introduction)

'This special edition of TEXT draws from the pool of participants from the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators’ (APWT) 9 th annual gathering in Guangzhou, China in November 2016. The issue compiles a selection of essays about the craft, pedagogy of creative writing and translation, alongside creative outputs in the form of fiction and personal essay. Inspired by the theme ‘Ideas and Realities: Creative Writing in Asia Today’, the conference brought together over 120 established and emerging practitioners and creative writing academics from the Asia Pacific region and beyond.' (Sanaz Fotouhi and Sally Breen)

'Just a couple of decades ago, prose poetry occupied a very minor corner of the poetry spectrum, although many major poets have published works in that form. As early as the mid-1970s, anthologies of prose poems were emerging in the USA, but they were preceded by work produced in Europe: the nineteenth-century Romantic Fragment (which was quickly adopted by British Romantics), and then the early twentieth-century experiments, and particularly the poetic avant garde in France. Now it is becoming (almost) a staple; across Australia and internationally, major poets are adding the prose poem form to their oeuvre, and though few dedicated publications yet exist, prose poems are salting the competitions, collections, anthologies and literary journals. International poets too are extending into the prose poem, exploring its affordances.' (Monica Carroll, Shane Strange and Jen Webb: Introduction)