Cirrus@Austlit

''Solstice’ is a short story about personal healing. The piece forms part of my practice led research toward a PhD in creative writing, which looks at experiences of erotic ambivalence in feminist short fiction. Its healing narrative is unconventional in that it suggests that it is the process of sitting with ambivalence that allows the protagonist to heal—rather than a process of rejecting disgust and harm in favour of desire and acceptance. It speaks to the creation of new connections, rather than a repression of harmful memories. In this regard, it relies heavily on bodily metaphor and bodily experience. The piece rejects a linear narrative structure in favour of weaving both story and character from fragmented, sensuous micro-intensities, which are akin to the ways in which one experiences harm and healing.' (Publication abstract)

'Advicecomics.tumblr.com is a collaborative online comics project which repurposes the advice column formula. Anonymous users write in with their problems and comics artists create comics in response. In this paper I closely observe the dialogical and embodied thinking-and-feeling strat-egies that the comics artists employ in their responses to the letters, contextualising these strategies within Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival as a folk phenomena.' (Publication abstract)

'This reflection on practice paper explores the role of form and playfulness in the serious business of poetic narrative to create stories we can access and understand, in order to recoup and recuperate after times of hardship and change. It is a process of cutting fear and anxiety down to size. In the process of constructing this essay, the strictures of the poetic forms of the sonnet, villanelle and tanka are conflated with the restrictive, confining walls of the home during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the transgressive nature of change in the way we live during confinement within the lock-downs is interrogated through the playfulness, irony and wry resignation of content located within the confines of the predetermined formality of the sonnet, villanelle and tanka.' (Publication abstract)