Cirrus@Austlit

'We present here an account of the way we employ the reading of poetry in engaging participants of an intensive four-week creative arts programme known as ARRTS (Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills) for wounded, ill or injured serving military personnel people with injury or illness, to prepare and assist them in writing their own stories. Poetry can deal with experience and perception in unique ways, as can haiku, which are invaluable for their accessibility and depth. The open qualities of our reading matter invite discussion and models the fact that poetry gives us permission to feel and to express ourselves. This discussion and engagement with readings is a key aspect of any prospective writer’s development, and, supplemented by the identification of specific techniques such as enjambment, creates awareness of ways in which it is possible to ‘re-author’ experience for healing effect.' (Publication abstract)

'The paper considers the personal determinants of quality in writing, by exploring poet Ted Hughes's proposition that ‘psychological crises' are necessary ‘to awaken genius in an otherwise ordinary mind.' Inspiration for this exploration is provided by the author's work as a creative writing mentor on a rehabilitation programme for injured and ill servicepeople. The experience of that programme is that participants will often produce compelling writing on the topics that have scarred them. Hughes's book Poetry in the Making provides some insights into why this might be the case, by suggesting that poetic composition is not a matter of close and professional consideration of the right words for any given topic, but rather emerges through an intensely-embodied imagining of one's subject matter. Hughes argues that when one acts out some subject matter vividly in one’s mind, the words emerge as if of their own accord, and with far more mimetic aptness. My argument is that the traumatized engage in such intense imagining as their very condition, and so end up doing the very thing Hughes recommends, when taking their trauma as their topic.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper interrogates the humanist commitment in pedagogical ideas circulating around the act of creating character and the related judgements which underlie workshop criticism. It considers how many pedagogical texts, and much practice, reinforce the centrality of an individual subject who is separate not only from objects and environment, but from other subjects: technological, human and nonhuman. Whilst acknowledging the challenge to these notions already arising from the textuality of postmodernism it questions the theory of character these challenges have produced and considers what a posthuman theory of character might look like, drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of humanity as ‘compost’ and utilising The Overstory by Richard Powers as an example. The paper considers how student writers could be encouraged to move beyond humanist notions of the individual and to write into the connected realm of the posthuman.' (Publication abstract)

'We are on Ulleungdo, famed for its wild mountains that jut from the Eastern Sea more than one hundred kilometres from the Korean east coast, shockingly, like a stone fist smashing wetly into the echelons. This is the closest sovereign territory to the contested landmass, 독도 (Dokdo), some ninety kilometres further east and otherwise known as ‘the Liancourt Rocks’ (this moniker derived from a French whaling ship, Le Liancourt, which foundered on the islands in 1849), or ‘Takeshima’ (Japan). I am here with more than a dozen Korean artists – painters, composers, art directors, musicians – awaiting tomorrow’s ferry to 독도. This year’s group assembles, as groups of creative producers have done so annually under the auspices of the para-political lobby group, La Mer et l’Île, to make pilgrimage to 독도 and refocus a global conversation: our brief is to simply sit on the islands, reflectively, and allow art to materialise. Perhaps this is partly how soft power can operate, non-dogmatically, through casting into representational modes (language, etc.) in order to explore for something beyond the merely descriptive but perhaps, even, essential: a newer way of seeing, arising through coming to terms with newer ways of saying and stating. The historical documents do not need to be reframed, and have long referred to these islands. One of the earliest, the 세종실록 (or ‘Chronicle of King Sejong’ [1432]), mentions a sole rocky outcrop being visible from the top of Ulleungdo’s mountains ‘only during fine weather’. Despite the existence of this and a great many other documents that form the canon of Korean sovereignty, neighbouring states continue to contest and claim 독도 as their own, for their own politically complex reasons. How to act as a poet, then, and make a non-propagandistic suite that will speak clearly and without bias.' (Introduction)

'Most creative writers strive to produce finished versions of their works, whether these are poems, short stories, plays or novels. Drafts are often discarded, and ‘final’ versions are, as it were, authorised by publication. However, in some cases, individual works, or parts of works, even those considered ‘finished’, are able to be repurposed and rewritten for inclusion in new works or contexts – as poets such as Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare demonstrate. Such revision and recontextualisation shifts the meanings of works, sometimes significantly, and suggests that literature may be more fluid than is often assumed. But what does the redrafting and recontextualising of work tell us about creative writing? Are there sometimes other works embedded in the fabric of those that appear to be completed; and how does one understand and approach the process of (re-)making new writing from existing work? The consideration of such issues emphasises the protean nature of creative writing, suggesting that writers may sometimes make of their writing more than they anticipate. In the case of poems and prose poems, in particular, where works are often brief, the re-use and re-configuring of existing works may be part of the opening up of creative horizons.' (Publication abstract)

'What is the stimulus for creative writing at a primary moment of narrative composition, and beyond? Can we distinguish between stimulus-for and stimulus-in creative writing and, if so, what is the relationship between those states? I am prompted to write by an affect-driven response to an unresolved idea or experience – this is the impetus-for writing. It triggers the activity of writing at a primary moment of narrative composition. Plotting fictional possibilities is an act of deep, sensory imagining – bringing feeling to thinking, asking what ideas ‘feel like’. I refer to this as a process of ideasthetic imagining, springboarding from Neuroscientist Danko Nikolić’s concepts of ‘qualia’ or feeling and ideasthesia or ‘sensing concepts’ (The generative evolution of narrative detail is a forward-moving and yet backscattering, iterative and overdetermined way of working – a pattern of practice that is underpinned by psychodynamic processes where past and actual stimulus–rest interactions facilitate deep, sensory engagement with narrative material. Exploring stimulus in creative writing practice, in physiological and psychological terms, reveals that stimulus-for becomes stimulus-in, as primary affective immersion generates deep, sensory imagining – bringing (past) feeling to (present) thinking.' (Publication abstract)