Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Object Biography and Its Potential in Creative Writing
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'While biographies are generally understood to narrate the lives of people, the biographical form can also be used to write the life histories of objects of material culture. This article investigates the object biography (sometimes referred to as the ‘artefact biography’) and proposes that this is a form with rich potential for creative writing practitioners and researchers. As well as defining the object biography and its use in various disciplinary contexts, the article also profiles how this form of life writing has been utilised by creative writers, in order to consider its capacity to contribute to practice and research in the discipline of creative writing. Contemporary writers discussed include Edmund de Waal, Bambi Ward and Marele Day, with reference also made to the work of Hans Christian Andersen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliza Cook, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anna Sewell.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 17 no. 4 2020 20750654 2020 periodical issue

    'Responding through creative writing and to creative writing is largely what creative writers do. Let me repeat that, with a little more explanation. A creative writer responds to the world, to things from their imaginations, to their experiences, to ideas, to emotions, and so on, through the actions of doing creative writing. A creative writer also frequently shows an interest in both their own creative writing and in the creative writing of others, the actions and the results, and in that sense responds to creative writing. It is important to clearly acknowledge both these facts, because it is in this that is located much of what is meant by actively engaging in creative writing.' (Graeme Harper, Why Our Responses Matter, Introduction)

    2020
    pg. 377-390
Last amended 12 Nov 2020 12:32:17
377-390 Object Biography and Its Potential in Creative Writingsmall AustLit logo New Writing
X