Cirrus@Austlit

'This special issue of TEXT explores issues related to identity, politics and creative writing from the perspective of creative writers and creative writing academics. The question of who can speak and what stories can be told is central to any discussion of contemporary writing and writers, and to the literary industry including publishing, reviewing, awards and education.'  (Introduction)

'This is the story of a creative reading-writing workshop that I piloted in 2009 with three students on responding to a text and a life from an/other culture through the poem ‘The Story I would Have Wanted To Tell you You Had I Met You Yesterday’ (Reyes, 1990), which embedded ‘an aesth-ethics’ in meeting the other’s story. I reference philosopher George Steiner’s concept of aesthetic engagement as ‘the meeting of freedoms’ in artistic production and reception (1989) in conversation with my past and ongoing formulations on aesthetics and ethics that take off from Philippine indigenous beliefs.'  (Introduction)

'This article considers the violences of identity-based privilege in university teaching. Pedagogical practice bears both possibilities for undoing privilege and risks for reperpetuating it – even when the educator intends otherwise, for privilege is often invisible, and educators may not always recognise its operations in their classrooms. Creative writing research can usefully make invisible privileges visible, which creates scope for questioning privilege and realising (making real) more livable ways of being. Following previous creative writing-based research into privilege and/or marginalisation (Kon-yu 2010; Bellette 2013; Williams 2013; Gandolfo 2016b), this article engages knowledge-generation practices of writing and self re-reading: I present and discuss Meeting Ms. Logos, a narrative penned five years ago, about teaching offshore in Singapore for an Australian university. At the time, the piece disturbed me, so I shelved it. But now, heeding privilege scholar Peggy McIntosh’s call for academics to ‘map our experiences’ of both privilege and marginalisation (2012: 197, 203-4), I re-confront Ms. Logos in order to avoid becoming Ms. Logos. This process is one I share because the exchange of narratives about coming-toawareness of privilege ‘allows us to know ourselves better, know others better, and recognise the matrices of power we are all in’ (McIntosh 2012: 203).' (Publication abstract)

'Videogames commonly represent dominant identities as a default: white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, and able-bodied. But with greater acceptance of game texts as artefacts worthy of analysis, and increased accessibility of game-tools so that marginalised creators can use the medium to tell their story, diversity in games has been increasing. Discussions around this resulting diversity often highlight whether a depiction is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, which does not allow creators or consumers to consider identity in a nuanced way. This paper proposes six categories that can be used as lenses for examining representations when writing and analysing videogame texts: central and incidental; explicit and implicit; and fixed and player-centric. By using examples of the ways my creative output represents queerness within games, and comparing these to other existing texts, this paper demonstrates how nuanced narratives can be produced at the intersections of these categories, and how this framework can be used across multiple mediums to increase and diversify representation.'  (Publication abstract)

'When I think about it, I first took a side on creative writing politics in a forum at the University of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s, at an event leading up to the country’s Independence. The issue at stake: the influence of Western-style education on the locals. A lecture theatre full of energised white educators debated vigorously and, in the mix, decided to bag my English department boss Ulli Beier on account of the activist publishing he encouraged among students. He erred, apparently, in facilitating the publication of radical works by undergraduates and Masters candidates. We did not know at the time that four of those young writers were destined for leadership: two would become prime ministers, one the governor-general, and another, premier of a province.' (Introduction)

'There has been increasing criticism of mainstream writers who create characters from marginalised cultural backgrounds different to their own, especially when those characters are written from the first-person perspective. This can be seen as a kind of ventriloquism (Couser 1998), stereotypical and racist characterisation (Leane 2016), and lead to further oppression since the privileged person is the one who speaks rather than the group represented (Alcoff 1991). At the same time, writing that explores the migration story of people from refugee backgrounds, written by writers from those backgrounds as well as writers who have not had those experiences, has become increasingly more common (see Menchu 1984; Nazer & Lewis 2003; Eggers 2006; Cleave 2008; de Kretser 2012; Al Muderis & Weaver 2014). But there is little work on the difference between stories that have been constructed with consultation of the people represented and those that have not. A look into how novels of this kind are written can contribute to the debate of writing the other. In order to explore this concept, I wrote a novel manuscript about the everyday lives of four characters from refugee backgrounds in three drafts. The first was produced through fieldwork and observation, the second after interviews and the third through feedback. This paper compares the first two drafts of the manuscript. It suggests that prior to interviews and self-reflection, the writing followed the dominant narrative told about refugees, referred to here as ‘the national story’ (Birch 2013), which played up victimhood and played down racism. Interviews and reflection on instances of cultural misappropriation produced a story that began to counter to this narrative. This suggests that when the people represented are not involved in the writing process, the national story dramatically influences the ways in which the characters are written.'  (Publication abstract)

'This essay is concerned with the lack of diversity in the Australian publishing industry, especially in relation to race and ethnicity. It traces the limitations I faced in creating and administering the 2016 Stella Diversity Survey and discusses my own fraught position in this role, given my racial and ethnic background as well as my privileged position within academia. Because of the lack of statistics on the race/ethnicity of writers and others working in the Australian publishing industry, the essay will draw on work that has been done in the US around issues of diversity within their publishing industry. While there are differences between the two countries some comparisons than can be made. This essay postulates that due to a lack of racial and ethnic diversity within the decision-making bodies in the Australian literary industry, canonical ideas about ‘great’ writing continue to be aligned with the work of white male writers. This leads to a situation in which writing by writers of colour must be deemed to be suitably exotic to be considered for publication, let alone be reviewed, win literary prizes or be included in other canon-forming processes. This continues to marginalise and exoticise writers of colour in Australia and leads to a lack of diversity within the Australian literary industry.' (Publication abstract)