Cirrus@Austlit

'This article describes how a practice-led research methodology used to produce a creative writing artefact, a short play aimed at a high school audience, had a transformative impact on a number of levels: on the artefact, on the writing practice itself and on the author’s own self-knowledge in terms of gender identity and subjectivity. The creative writing artefact in question is a short stage play entitled Ghosts of Leigh, an exploration of the gender-bending club culture of the 1980s. The play is set in regional Queensland, Australia, which, at that time, was a strongly homosocial and homophobic environment. The script and this article explore the notion of effeminacy as a monstrous masculinity of considerable discursive potency that simultaneously disrupts both masculinity and femininity. The article also discusses how the practice-led research methodology itself facilitated the development of fresh understandings around effeminacy and how these new understandings interacted with the author’s lived gender and embodied subjectivity.' (Abstract)

'In an arts-based inquiry, an exegesis is that dissertation or thesis that accompanies a creative production (artefact) that may be a novel, a memoir, a computer game, poetry, sculpting, paintings … The examinable outcome for the scholarly artist comprises both the creative work and the thesis. To substantiate the production of knowledge and find recognition as a scholar, the artist must document. As a method of inquiry an exegesis is core documentation. It is the written component that speaks to the production of knowledge. It is the record that makes visible the scholarly artist’s knowing. This paper examines the impulse to write, looks at the memoir and, with self-examples, reveals the exegesis as a type of memoir that gives insight to creative production. In it the researcher describes the process of creating, articulates and searches answers to a research question refined across stages of the study. The exegesis is both a product and a process that involves inward reflection and discernment. As the researcher shapes, substantiates, makes connections between creating art and showing research gains, the emergent exegesis is also a decisive memoir that an examiner must use to determine the logic or illogic of new knowledge through creative art.' (Abstract)

'This article addresses some critical issues in the research environment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander candidates at Australian universities. It will be useful to non-Indigenous supervisors of Indigenous students, as well as Indigenous students considering the different kinds of creative practice projects possible at postgraduate level. The article examines the nexus between Indigenous knowledge and creative practice research. The significance of this relationship becomes more apparent with increasing participation of Indigenous creative practitioners in postgraduate education. By drawing on our experience as supervisors of PhD- and MA-level higher degrees with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander candidates, we discuss some of the issues that may arise for supervisors and Indigenous researchers in creative practice research environments. Through Indigenous candidates’ creative projects, we argue these works provide insights into the existing conventions of practice, knowledge and research in Western education. Thus, we demonstrate how Indigenous knowledge has contributed to creative practice research, and broadened its horizons and methods of inquiry.' (Abstract)

'A mosaic of lyric fragments, ‘First Cake Method’ is a short piece of experimental memoir working within the lyric essay form to explore the complexity of a father/daughter relationship. Shifting between first and third person narrative, from the child narrator to adult, it sketches a story that is both personal and universal, exploring the human need for love and acceptance while hinting at the specifics of this family’s dysfunction. Relating moments of intimacy and distance, at different stages of life, cooking and food is the central motif for an exploration of the narrator’s determination to master the ‘recipe’ for connection. Thus the structure and content of the essay work to embody the complexity of familial relationships. The use of fragmentation and repetition also mimics memory’s tendency to ‘snapshots’, thematic grouping and revision.' (Abstract)

'Academic writing in higher education research is commonly perceived as the process of ‘writing up’ knowledge rather than exploring ideas. As a result, the potential to use creative writing approaches to develop and relay meaning has often been overlooked. This article investigates creative writing as a rich and meaningful mode of representation in academia. It argues how dominant institutional discourses inhibit personal voice by favouring objectivity, and further affirms that researchers need to oppose the pressures of academic writing by ‘coming into’ one’s creative writing voice and consciousness. It is anticipated that using literary and poetic devices to relay the writer’s personal and creative voice can generate research that encompasses the full richness of human experience.' (Abstract)

'This paper examines the literary interview as a form, and as a source of research material for creative writing and literary studies. In the article, I discuss theoretical and methodological approaches to conversations with writers and the usefulness of the interview for creative writing scholars. Novelist Charlotte Wood published The Writer’s Room: Conversations about Writing (2016) soon after her award-winning fifth novel, The Natural Way of Things (2015), appeared; the two books were constructed at around the same time. Through an interview I conducted with Wood about The Writer’s Room and her reasons for speaking to contemporary writers, I assess the statements Wood makes in the introduction to her collection and explore the texture of literary interviews. The article examines what information interviews provide about an individual writer’s working methods and looks at the emotions or affect around authors’ writing lives as a means of gauging the utility of the interview for scholars and writers. I argue that while the apparent aim of the interview is to obtain insights into an author’s praxis, related objectives may be to build connections between authors and their readers, and to augment communities of writers.' (Abstract)