AustLit

'Despite a sustained interest in the ethical issues around writing narratives that are 'based on true stories', much of the public discourse around this matter has fallen into a repetitive and non-productive rut. This begins when a published work, usually a memoir or work of investigative, biographically focused journalism, is exposed to contain some obvious untruth. Outraged media commentary fans a firestorm of literary scandal, which often increases book sales and then dies out. While these conflagrations could prompt significant investigation around both the complexity of attempting to represent reality in writing as well as what contemporary readers' demands for authenticity reveals about them, too often public discussion as well as more scholarly discourse stalls either at the same stage of backward-looking moral superiority or post-modernist explanations that all truth is relative. This paper uses a detailed case study approach, focusing on a series of factually based works by Australian playwright Nick Enright to illuminate some of the practical and ethical challenges writers face when they draw on the power of real stories to create cultural product.'

'This paper details results from the author's interviews with 14 contemporary Australian poets, which he conducted as part of a pilot project investigating art's relation to knowledge. The interviews focussed on the research practices, if any, which these 14 poets engaged in the process of composition. Beginning with an account of responses to the question 'What research do you do?' the article proceeds to investigate how that research manifests at the moment of composition. Questions as to the cognitive processes enacted at the precise moment the words / researches hit the page cast light on a number of distinctive factors including the speed of composition, the relative absence of conscious control at that moment, and the relation this process bears to stage acting.'

Historians and the writers of historical fiction appear constantly at odds with each other. It would be more fitting if the way in which they complement each other was given due recognition. Historians seek to produce an interpretative account of the past bounded by a strict adherence to certain types of source material. This necessarily places a limitation on what they might write about the past. Writers of historical fiction, while using and doing justice to historical research, are not subject to the same limitations. They have more licence to use imaginative narrative to complement and extend the historical account. It must be recognised, however, that both disciplines are dealing with the human condition. As a result historians make use not only of primary sources, but also of imaginative writing from the era that they are studying. Writers of historical fiction, in turn, make use of the perceptive accounts of historians. Fundamentally, the limits placed on both disciplines are those derived from rationality. While members of the same rational family, they may have a different view of what counts as reasonable and this is not a cause for concern or contumely.

'Through the telling of stories and interaction with listener or audience, we give structure to our experience and create order and meaning. Written narrative is, therefore, a medium well suited to exploring the experience of death and bereavement. 'We live in stories, not statistics,' Gilbert says (2002: 223). Parents' stories of their children's deaths serve the same purpose as parents' stories of their living children's ongoing lives. Writing about the death of one's child is a way not only to continue bonds and help other bereaved parents, but also a way to allow the 'wounded storyteller' to give voice to the dead and facilitate catharsis in the teller. Utilising the techniques of creative nonfiction to write such a story, the writer can create a compelling narrative that allows writer and reader to enter 'the space of the story for the other'. This paper discusses the human affinity with story telling and the reasons the bereaved write their stories. It also defines the genre of creative nonfiction and outlines the history of its development. Finally it examines four creative nonfiction texts that have influenced my own writing on the topic of parental bereavement.'

'In this paper I argue that the short story is a unique fictional form, with its own specific conventions, knowledge of which could usefully inform the teaching of short story writing. There has been very little attempt to explain how a short story means (as opposed to what it means) and it is only by articulating and analyzing specific short story conventions that we can move towards such an explanation. The main 'convention', I argue, concerns the reader's response to the short story: a response that occurs in a context of brief intensity and heightened involvement (due to the aesthetics of brevity), with the story acquired and retained whole' in the reader's memory. This in turn encourages readers to appropriate the fictive world as rendered through one or more represented subjectivities inscribed in the narrative. I have termed this appropriation the 'narratorial presence' of the short story, and I argue that it is the enabling effect of the tale's telling. It occurs in different ways in different stories, predominantly in response to the mix of specific devices used to render different narrative perspectives. Performing analyses of Joyce's 'The dead' and Hemingway's 'The killers', and also briefly examining what I see as a Hemingway-esque Australian short story, 'Tap' by Garry Disher, I demonstrate how each story's structure 'manages' all other aspects of the narrative, facilitating the effect of 'narratorial presence'. A recognition of this effect could, I suggest, renew discussion of, or perhaps even initiate the construction of a new framework for the teaching of short story writing.'

'Where does a book of fiction begin? William Faulkner says a writer has three sources: autobiography, observation, and imagination. If observation includes research, i.e., other people's observations, then all three sources contributed much to the making of my novel, Eyemouth.'