Cirrus@Austlit

'Recent literature on the activities of creative practitioners within the academy has focused on their roles as cultural workers within the higher education sector – contributing to the so-called ‘creative economy’ as skills-based practitioners with ‘real world’ experience – or it has considered the role of the academic teacher in shaping the creative life and careers of their students. Relatively little has been done, however, to specifically examine the lived experience of creative writers in the Australian academy as they attend to the professional requirements of their work as teaching and research academics on the one hand, and their linked professional activities as creative writers, on the other. This paper reports on the findings from a preliminary survey conducted between July and August 2013 which aimed to explore the career trajectories, expectations and experiences of work at the nexus of creative and academic labour. It identifies a number of key tensions between academic and creative aspirations of academics who are creative writers, along with institutional benefits that in some cases aided the production of their creative work.' (Publication abstract)

'My paper reflects on an archive of in-depth interviews I and my colleagues have recorded with Anglophone poets, from a variety of countries, North and South. In particular, I reflect on responses to a question that split that field into two opposing camps. It concerned the function of spontaneity in poetic composition. The majority of poets interviewed said yes, often quite enthusiastically, to Auden’s proposition that when we ‘genuinely speak’ we are unaware of what we are about to say; many also seemed happy to affirm his implication that this is a key source of poetic value. Those who rejected these ideas were often passionate on the matter as well.' (Publication abstract)

' Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange programme, or WrICE, is a research project proposing and trialling a model for cultural exchange based on collaborative residencies for writers. At the heart of this programme is the proposition that there is value in creating opportunities for writers to step outside their writing studios and cultural environs to connect and share ideas with other writers, from different cultures and across generations. Perspectives and networks are enlarged and transformed, and this in turn acts, however subtly, to stir and shift national and transnational cultures. Written at the midpoint of the first phase of WrICE, this essay discusses five compositional principles implicit in how this proposition has been developed and enacted. If Ross Gibson is right when he suggests that to find the rhythm of narrative knowledge you roam inside ‘but also outside – but also inside – but also outside – but also inside’, then the cataloguing of these principles is a test of this idea. The experiment developed and enacted through WrICE points towards new ways to generate networks of authentic cultural exchange that draw upon techniques of gift exchange, what we have called here, ‘acrossness’, and the potential of writing in the company of.' (Publication abstract)