'Recently, in the Runaway Bay newsagency (north of Surfers Paradise), my eye was attracted by a sign on one of the shelves: it said ‘Women’s Interest’. Below it, six magazines – all of them to do with creative writing: The Writer (US), The Writer’s Chronicle (US), Writer’s Digest (US), Writers’ Forum (UK), Writing Magazine (UK) and Literary Review (UK). They cost me a total of $92.16 . ' (Nigel Krauth, Editorial introduction)
Includes reviews not within AustLit's scope.
- Paul Williams & Shelley Davidow, Playing With Words: An Introduction to Creative Writing Craft review by Alyson Miller
- Stephanie Vanderslice (ed), Studying Creative Writing Successfully review by Sally Breen
- Anna Leahy (ed), What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing review by Jeremy Fisher
- Roslyn Petelin How Writing Works: A field guide to effective writing review by Rosemary Williamson
- Toby Litt, Mutants: Selected Essays review by Maria Tumarkin
- Jen Webb, Sentences from the Archive review by Ioana Petrescu
- Sarah Corbett, And She Was: A Verse-Novel review by Linda Weste
- Jeremy Fisher, Faith, Hope and Stubborn Pride: Searching for heaven in Aotearoa and Australia review by Noeline Kyle
'Recently, in the Runaway Bay newsagency (north of Surfers Paradise), my eye was attracted by a sign on one of the shelves: it said ‘Women’s Interest’. Below it, six magazines – all of them to do with creative writing: The Writer (US), The Writer’s Chronicle (US), Writer’s Digest (US), Writers’ Forum (UK), Writing Magazine (UK) and Literary Review (UK). They cost me a total of $92.16 [1].
'These are genuine creative writing magazines aimed at the developing writer (with the exception of Literary Review which is equivalent to the Australian Book Review, relevant as it says, ‘For people who devour books’). They are magazines with pedigrees: The Writer has been published for 130 years; Writer’s Digest for more than 90 years; The Writer’s Chronicle represents the vast network of the American Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and Literary Review was founded 40 years ago at Edinburgh University and features reviewers who are ‘usually authors themselves, not just critics’. Each magazine has its own lively and informative website.' (Introduction)
'This essay looks at my own learning as a writer in order to ask what constitutes creative practice and then takes particular examples to create a paradigm for examining practice-as-research in the academy: risk + constraint + play = change. I use creative readings of particular cultural encounters I have had during my own writing life – with Cornelia Parker, and Kathleen Jamie and Bridget Collins, for instance – to illustrate these ideas. Practitioners working in academia are increasingly required to defend practice-based-research and in this essay I use one of practice-research’s key facets – reflective practice - to provide one answer to a pressing concern. I set out to ask how higher education institutions might best support practice-research, with the aim of developing it, increasing outputs, and deepening its investigations. Throughout I ask the question: how can we resist essentialist positions and reductive structures that do not fit the authentic, process-led version of practice?' (Publication abstract)
'In her contribution to Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman’s collection, Rebellious Daughters: True Stories from Australia’s Finest Female Writers (2016), Krissy Kneen cites fairy-tale scholar Marina Warner, who notes that the original term for the fairy tale was Wundermärchen, the wonder tale. ‘To wonder’, writes Warner, ‘communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire’ (40). In the same way, Kneen observes, the (often horrific) fairy tales told to her by her grandmother, stories which did not at all adhere to the philosophy of characters who lived ‘happily ever after’, filled the young girl ‘with a powerful and dangerous curiosity’ (40). It is that desire to know, that epistemophilia, which not only drives the women and girls of the stories collected here, but those about whom they read, and whom we now, in this collection, voraciously follow, hungry for knowledge, for endings happy or otherwise.' (Introduction)