Cirrus@Austlit

'Recently it was suggested that my creative method (bowerbirding, bricolage, engaged observation) might properly be described as ‘perving’. Affronted, I rejected this accusation. But the idea wouldn’t go away, a question remained. How does observation that informs a story differ from perving or voyeurism? Creative writers lurk everywhere, observing and eavesdropping for quirks and foibles to bring life to their stories. I review my creative methodology against the current discourse about the eclectic methods of enquiry through which writers interrogate the world, including thievery, plagiarism, borrowing, voyeurism, perving, to assess the validity of this charge of perversion.' (Publication abstract)

'This article considers how creative writers use research to experiment with and expand the written form. Focussing on modes of storytelling for fiction and non-fiction, four current research degree candidates and a supervisor-mentor from RMIT University present snapshots of research works in progress, to reveal how they are negotiating the sticky yet rich relationship between theory and practice. Specifically, they offer innovative ways of expanding the written form to combine creative and critical modes of thought, resulting in distinctive contributions to knowledge and practice that are relevant to their genres, forms and subject matters. The candidates, who are working across the lyric essay, screenwriting, performance writing and radio, are also members of a peer-to-peer group facilitated by the supervisor-mentor, which over a four-year period has supported research training in creative writing and assisted in the formation of new research identities. This collaborative support structure has helped candidates to transform from creative writers to creative writing researchers, encouraging playfulness and experimentation yet underpinned by the needs of academic rigour. This article thus offers a collective, reflective approach to finding innovation in/through creative writing research – methodologically speaking.' (Publication abstract)

'We may associate the process of creative composition with spontaneity, yet it is inevitable that each artist applies an individual method in their approach to the creative space. Creative writing as a practice and a discovery presents an argument, a line of thinking, a means of ‘finding’, a ‘coming to know’. This paper conceives of writing as discovery and explores the practice of writing by others who had created or may create longer forms of writing that started as short fiction. In my quest to write a literary speculative novel using my strengths as an author of short stories, I sought to understand other people’s experience on converting short works into a novel or novella. I applied practice-led research, and mixed approaches – quantitative and qualitative – in a survey that supported two fundamentally different paradigms. The survey was a means of symbolically identifying with other short story writers and their ‘lived experience’, a way to explore my own model for crafting a novel story-by-story. This paper offers a practical solution in creative research by relating a scientific approach to an arts-based inquiry, and by offering a model that short story writers can productively adopt to write a novel within their strengths.' (Publication abstract) ­