Cirrus@Austlit

'When authors publish under their own names they make a social contract with readers, declaring that the work is original. That work possesses economic and cultural value in the marketplace (Foucault 1977; Bourdieu 1996; Sawyer 2006; Sennett 2008). Various ways exist for authors to claim ownership, but this does not preclude others from violating their moral or legal rights. As creators and consumers, they cannot but be aware of a continuum inhering in the literary process that begins with unattainable originality and ends with intentional theft. Along this continuum exist varying degrees of unconscious and conscious borrowing of another’s words or ideas. The terms original, plagiarised and self-plagiarised can be descriptive and emotive. Impacting upon them are terms such as moral rights and copyright. Definitions of plagiarism, in particular, reflect who chooses to define it and why. This article defines key terms for authors – moral rights, copyright, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and double-dipping – in order to clarify the dangers of intellectual and creative theft. It also offers a variety of examples. The manner in which writers integrate literary and critical influences has become more challenging in the twenty-first century where so much of the past and the present exist online. Creative writing teachers and students must learn to negotiate this mercurial educational and cultural environment. '  (Publication abstract)

'For creative writers, transmedia storytelling represents the opportunity to craft stories across a diverse narrative ecology often made up of print and digital elements. Increasingly, this requires writers to move beyond linguistic narrative renderings, and embrace the semiotic affordances and limitations of numerous media. While contemporary research highlights the importance of multimodality as a facet of transmedia storytelling, little research has focussed on the ways creative writers might approach such an undertaking. This paper examines several transmedia texts characterised by the role multimodality plays in establishing a narrative that, while dispersed across media, maintains narrative cohesion despite the different modal capacities of the media used. Through considering the factors required in continuing narrative consonance, including character and representation, the paper examines iterative multimodality as a framework for understanding how creative writers leverage narrative modes and interaction within and across media.' (Publication abstract)

'‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

• Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
• We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
• There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known. 
• Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
• History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
• Story transmits narrative responsibility.  Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.

This two-part paper will discuss each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra.'  (Publication abstract)

'The synergies between creative writing instruction and stylistic analysis have been noted for more than a decade in the Stylistics literature – see for example Michael Burke (2010: 7; 2013), Jeremy Scott (2013a; 2013b: 99), et al – but there remain very few case studies of the implementation of such an approach. The undergraduate unit KWB211: Stylistics, taught at the Queensland University of Technology, takes a Stylistics approach to the teaching of creative writing to an undergraduate cohort, and furthermore uses the Freirean notion of problem posing as a methodological and philosophical basis for its pedagogic approach. This paper presents a case study of the content and approaches of KWB211: Stylistics. It argues that the natural synergies between the field of Stylistics and the field of Creative Writing can inform the teaching of literary technique to a cohort of undergraduate writers, and that Stylistics can be made to be a practitioner-facing example of literary theory especially when using a problem posing approach to instruction.'  (Publication abstract)

The contrasting practices of planning or ‘pantsing’ are regular topics of discussion within fiction writing circles. In a field where each writer’s practice can differ so greatly, these approaches to writing offer a rare opportunity for categorisation and insight. Australian novelist Valerie Parv states that ‘pantsers’ are known as such ‘from flying by the seat of their pants, because they like to discover the story as they write. Their opposite, plotters, prefer to work out every twist and character development before starting’ (Parv 2014). I knew little of these choices when I began writing my debut novel Carousel (2015). The decision to ‘pants’, for me, was subconscious, driven by anxiety, naivety and an obsession with daily word counts. What I discovered, both during the writing of Carousel, and the subsequent research for my PhD, was a process steeped in popularity, complexity and risk. This paper considers the definition, methodology and application of ‘pantsing’, and the reverberations of this practice within both Carousel and sequel Beyond Carousel (2016). ‘Pantsing’ not only emerges as a viable writing strategy, but a practice eliciting valuable creative outcomes.'  (Publication abstract)

'The sociocultural narratives available to mothers of children with disabilities exhort them to resist the impacts of their exclusion from mainstream discourses of motherhood, perform resilience, and re-interpret their marginalisation as a ‘different kind’ of mothering: a re-location. Such narratives function to suppress the complex emotions associated with the profound sense of dislocation experienced by these mothers. Two short pieces of writing are discussed, both of which use geographical metaphors to represent the competing themes of emotional containment versus disruption; the first is a tale widely circulated among families of children with disabilities, and the second is a memoir piece by the author. This discussion draws on the emergent literature by mothers of children with disability and academic research on families of children with disabilities, as well as on insights from Friedman’s work on the geographics of identity. The mother who seeks to write about her own dislocation must be prepared to speak against the dominant scripts that work to deny her emotional responses, while her own entitlement to self-represent is challenged by the compounded impacts of the discourses surrounding motherhood and disability. '  (Publication abstract) 

Traditionally, authors of memoir, life writing, and autoethnography have used prose to tell their stories, with the occasional image to supplement their narratives. In the multimedia age some life writers are turning to art, photography, design and technology to in­crease the scope of their research and writing. In turn, such authors have created new authorial identities and become graphic-authors, artist-scholars, or even bricoleurs. Writing for artist-authors takes on a more Derridean fla­vour, and comes to incorporate all manner of meaning-making inscriptions, including images, design, and non-verbal elements. Readers, too, become active rather than passive, challenged to read against traditional left-to-right reading gravity and to navigate between different textual elements (as they do online). Readers become viewers and participants, and the text shifts from ‘readerly’ to ‘writerly’ in the Barthesian sense. Consequently, authors are designing new hy­brid forms of life narrative for on-screen viewing rather than on-page reading; in other words, for digital rather than paper forms of dissemination and authorship. As screen-based visual-verbal constructions, art(e)facts combine art, virtuality and facts to create evocative critical-creative bricolages. ' (Publication abstract)

'Autoethnographic memoirs as a genre form part of the experience economy, and as an art form are also spiritually anchored to storytelling’s role in forming community. In the contemporary university and elsewhere, however, accounting systems for productivity do not always nurture or are able to calculate the value of abstract forms of mentorship afforded by the simple act of sharing story. Shared reflexivity about practice – such as storytelling – is essential to Creative Writing pedagogy because it allows congenial opportunities for formative development of emerging writers. This essay argues for the simple importance of mentorship through shared, spoken stories – micro-memoirs – of ‘the writing life’ to the work of fostering systems of belief in emerging writers. Such sharing develops trust and conviction which in turn promotes a professional commitment to the Creative Industries. Autoethnographic revelations of the practitioner-teacher in the creative workshop – through acts of disclosure exploring the complex ways of ‘becoming a writer’ – thus constitute a significant form of knowledge transfer. '  (Publication abstract)
 

'Philip Roth once quipped that ‘Memoirs lie and fiction tells the truth’ (quoted by Drabble 2010: 110). Life-writing is bedeviled with issues of truth-telling, not to mention problems with ‘narcissism, the confessional impulse, sincerity, the hubris of assessing oneself with finality’ (Powers 2016: 323). Far from being a simple act of remembering and reclaiming the personal past self in words, writing memoir needs careful negotiation with notions of truth / fiction, reader accountability and how history and the ‘self’ is constructed. Life writing, Margaret Drabble goes as far to say, is a ‘dangerous game’ (Drabble 2010: 111).'  (Introduction)

'Indigenous non-fiction poetry brings forward questions of readers’ expectations that most often are thoroughly formed and bound by Euro-western genre expectations. It is probably a bit late to challenge the nomenclature and the claim that this is ‘a journal for nonfiction poetry’, but I do find it an oxymoron – since poetry, however diverse, often offers a personal narrative that is clearly non-fiction.'  (Introduction)

'As a lover of poetry, family history, rivers and archives, it is not easy to stay afloat when immersed in the torrent imaginings of Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane’s latest book, Walk Back Over; best to surrender, ride with the undercurrents and open up to savour it all. This work extends her first chapbook, Dark Secrets After Dreaming (AD) 1887-1961, which ‘moves from campfire to captivity to confinement and through colonialism’ (2010). Over time Leane has fine-tuned a poetic rage juxtaposed with love from her sovereign Wiradjuri woman standpoint, as deep and layered as the rich sediment of her ancestral Murrumbidgee River – grounded, yet never still.'  (Introduction)

'Identity is central to Rallying, a collection of poetry from a trans writer so candid about his journey from mother of two to identifying as a male. The introductory ‘How to disappear in your name’ is a fourteen-page stream of consciousness prose poem introducing nine of Eades’ former personas. ' (Introduction)

'Hush: A Fugue is Dominique Hecq’s sixth book of poetry. Her poetry – like her other creative and scholarly work – is informed by the wealth of her personal and intellectual experience, reflecting issues of physical and linguistic dislocation as well as the influence of a psychoanalytic and post-structural literature on loss, grief and subjectivity. This collection clusters explicitly around the theme of loss; in particular, it retraces a very personal narrative of the loss of a child to cot death. Years may have passed, other children arrived and grown – but the shocking ‘white wax’ of the beloved baby’s face remains a potent presence in his mother’s life. Almost twenty-five years later, this powerful and disturbing collection both marks the enduring presence of the lost child and traces the almost unbearable experiences of grief and mourning, finally possible to articulate within the flexibility of the poetic voice.' (Introduction)

'It is instructive to compare Michelle Cahill’s third collection, The Herring Lass, with her rather different second one, Vishvarupa. The latter was primarily concerned with Hindu religion and mythology, written from an ‘outsider’s’, if slightly privileged, angle. Cahill (with Indian ancestry) was born in Kenya, grew up in England and moved to Sydney in her teens.'  (Introduction)

'Gayelene Carbis’ Anecdotal Evidence allows poetry to highlight and create contradictions within the binaristic understanding of ‘public’ and ‘personal’. To do so is essential for generating space for tender and vulnerable expressions we’re still unaccustomed to or discouraged from observing. One of the most daring features of Carbis’ poetry is her persistent emphasis on the lyrical ‘I’ in relation to memory. The ‘I’ or the persona within each poem expresses perspectives in such concentrated ways that there are no nostalgic curtains to hide behind. This is important because nostalgia – through its idealisation and longing – has the propensity to conceal and therefore silence.' (Introduction)

We. Are. Family. The punctuation immediately calls to mind the Sister Sledge hit of 1979. Those full stops syncopate the disco rhythm. The song, composed by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, features the lyrics:

no we don’t get depressed
Here’s what we call our golden rule
Have faith in you and the things you do
You won’t go wrong
This is our family Jewel

  (Introduction)