Cirrus@Austlit

'This has been a challenging and illuminating issue to edit, and we hope it will be similarly challenging and illuminating to read. The contributions in this issue have been gathered together from various sources including a number of events addressing the themes of this issue. Primarily, these were the Turning Point: Creative Arts and Trauma symposium (University of Canberra, 7 June 2017), and the Narratives of Health and Wellbeing Research Conference (CQUniversity, Noosa campus, 26–27 October 2017). In addition, a series of interviews generated from the ARC-funded project, Understanding Creative Excellence: A Case Study in Poetry (DP130100402) sparked the idea of recruiting more conversations between creative practitioners working in a range of art practices: poetry, prose fiction, film and visual art in particular. Together, these contributions comprise a fascinating, revealing and sometimes provocative collection.'  (Introduction)

'Today, perhaps more than ever, there is a concerted focus on trauma and overcoming it. From the early acknowledgement of war-induced trauma, once known as ‘shell shock’, to the nuanced understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder we have today, understanding and overcoming trauma has never been more part of the zeitgeist.'  (Introduction)

'While we can’t change the past, we can change the way we view the past and the story we tell about it, which can transform identity. This is the premise of narrative therapy. However, some writers choose to work with fictionalised traumatic experience because of the difficulty of exposing hidden subject matter in an autobiographical work. Creating a fictional work may allow reflection on traumatic experiences with similar emotional aftereffects, but with the emotional distance to be able to write with a deeper exploration of the subjects writers are reluctant to confront autobiographically. This article proposes that writing a fictional account of traumatic experiences might achieve similar benefits as the personal accounts relied upon in narrative therapy. It further deduces that the hero-journey model could provide a metaphor for writers to become the hero in their own post-traumatic growth journey through creative writing. The culmination of this article is a mapping of the commonalities between White’s maps of narrative therapy steps and Campbell’s Hero’s Journey stages, and a case study of how this framed my post-traumatic journey through creative writing. This framework may be useful for other creative writers embarking on a similar writing journey for post-traumatic recovery.'  (Publication abstract)

'In 1994, Lucy Grealy published Autobiography of a Face (Grealy 2003: 3; First Perennial edition), her memoir about childhood cancer and the resulting facial disfigurement she endured for the rest of her life. Her intention in writing it, stated her friend and fellow writer Anne Patchett, was not to be an inspiration to others who had suffered terrible illness but to have produced something of literary merit (Patchett 2003: 230). Nonetheless, Autobiography of a Face was received with much acclaim not only for its lyricism, but also for the in-depth way it explored notions of identity and self within the illness experience (DasGupta 2007; Mojtabai 1994; Zbar 1995).' (Introduction)

'This paper explores body mapping through the lens of general and personal provenance. The word provenance means the place of origin or earliest known history of something. Provenance is ‘a reflective practice tool that scaffolds a practitioner to recognise the elements and experiences that have contributed to their knowledge and acquisition of a practice’ (Hill & Lloyd 2015: 3). Body mapping is a creative tool of inquiry that enables the producer of the body map to explore and articulate their personal or professional story in an embodied and visual way. Body mapping is a way of exploring identity and helps create meaning in relation to life circumstances that shape our lives (Gastaldo, Magalhaes, Carrasco & Davy 2012).'  (Introduction)

'In recent years we have seen an explosion of resilience research, but relatively few of these include the personal narratives of nurses thriving in their work. This paper will explore the creative-based qualitative methodology known as ‘Portraiture’, created by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983), where written portraits rather than painted canvasses are presented for viewing. This discussion considers why this approach is a vibrant and powerful way to communicate messages about people’s experiences: in this case, nurses’ experiences of resilience in contemporary healthcare settings.'  (Publication abstract)

'On returning to live in Australia in 2012, I found that my world had gone on without me and I no longer knew what my place and purpose could be. My immediate contact with the deep issues of children in war zones and post-conflict areas was suddenly severed on the arrival in my ‘home’ country.'  (Introduction)

'Australia and many other countries around the world face a significant population shift. With a fast-growing ageing population, increasingly new issues of varied complexities arise that will require new perspectives to solve them. In this paper, art and design approaches have been presented into aged care to address issues of elderly people’s social isolation in the long-term residential care facilities. A design solution — ‘Wearable Memory’ — has been developed to raise awareness of the value of reminiscence, and to provide intervention to reduce traumatic memory. The co-design process allowed key stakeholders to be involved from the beginning of the project. Wearable Memory can play a vital role in digital storytelling and social bonding within the senior citizens’ culture and community, while providing integrated support and intervention towards their reminiscence.'  (Publication abstract)

'In this article, the authors propose that in order to learn how to act effectively within, and after, dynamic situations (including distressing or traumatic situations), one can profitably receive training in narration. Prior to writing this essay together, the authors have worked separately with narrative modes of sense-making and leadership for emergency-situations in business studies (Gibson), medicine (Crea) and military conflict (Chambers). Combining their insights, they have a sharpened focus on the general field of narrative and emergency-training, with a particular emphasis on the military context. Developing ideas from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The art of the storyteller’ we observe that stories convey strongly-felt, vicarious experiences such that they are a means of accelerating the acquisition of wisdom and resilience among the community that attends to the stories. We propose a narrative training system that expedites the acquisition and transfer of wisdom and resilience in military contexts and in other emergency situations.' (Publication abstract)

'The inclusion of memoir in an experienced author’s oeuvre is interesting although not uncommon. Memoir often reveals much about a writer: their childhood, their memories, their motivations to pursue their chosen career pathway. Interestingly, in the case of two prominent Australian authors, the memoir allows for a passionate investigation of landscape and how it permeates through their lives and their writing. In this article, I explore two examples of writers who have been inspired — openly and explicitly — by the beach: Tim Winton and Robert Drewe. Both are from Western Australia and both are fascinated and influenced by the coastal landscape. This is also apparent in their fiction in which characters use the beach as a touchstone or comfort. Winton and Drewe have written five memoirs between them, ranging from 1993 to 2016. Both authors make clear that these works are inspired by their relationship with landscape — particularly coastal landscapes on the western coast of Australia. By investigating these two authors’ works of memoir — both bound by their ongoing appreciation and inspiration of Australian landscape — this article examines how these coastal memoirs reveal how landscape can represent notions of national identity. The Australian coast acts as both a space of awe and solace in Winton’s work while being inevitably intertwined in ‘memories and murder’ in the memoirs of Drewe.'   (Publication abstract)

'Inherited trauma is passed down through generations in a variety of ways. My biographical memoir, Whisperings in the Blood (2016), demonstrates through practice-led research how turning life into art and using metaphor as the vehicle to transmit emotional truth can result in emotional healing across generations. Using a fiction writer’s techniques, I explore the idea of employing intergenerational motifs as extended metaphor in order to grapple with the concept that ancestral wounds can be passed down as ‘whisperings in the blood’, or what I call ‘soul dispositions’. The effect of this practice-led research, which required that I had in-depth discussions with my dying father, my uncle and my dying great-uncle, resulted in the emotional healing of some of these relationships, as well as prompting a new level of empathy and understanding of my relatives, their stories, their parents’ stories. This led to profound insights on the role of shared nonfiction narratives in connecting a writer of memoir to both living and deceased ancestors and effecting degrees of emotional healing across the generations.' (Publication abstract)

'The ‘wounded woman’ in fiction has always been a troublesome concept. From the glamorisation of nineteenth-century asylum inmates to the belittling of the contemporary memoirist, the ‘woman who cried pain’ is viewed as either enticing and prophetic or narcissistic and dishonest. For the female writer with a mental disorder, the implication that she should not write of her suffering for fear of cliché is overtly damaging. In ‘A grand unified theory of female pain’, Leslie Jamison discusses the importance of the creative expression of pain, and questions whether it is possible to do so while eluding stigma. I will build on Jamison’s considerations by establishing a fictocritical dialogue between writer and critic, suggesting an avoidance of diagnostic discourse and the shifting of narrative focus towards characterisation that encourages resilience, yet refuses to apologise for or suppress pain.'  (Publication abstract)