Cirrus@Austlit

'This article situates the writing of a novel and its relationship to place within a practice-
led vantage point that draws on concepts of writing about the city, ranging from the
figure of the flâneur to the field of psychogeography. I explore how the physical act of
moving through a city on foot and my close reading of two short stories – which both
leverage the contrast between pedestrian and vehicle – helped me to approach and
define the city in which my novel is set and, through this, offered specific opportunities
and imaginative possibilities for the narrative rendering of place. I also unpack the
potentiality of the car, particularly the way it shapes an unequal power dynamic in
which the pedestrian may be observed, interpreted and threatened by someone who can
remain protected within the enclosure of a vehicle.' 

(Publication abstract)

'Since 2014, the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program has sought to invite genuine trans-cultural encounters and dialogue among peer creative writers from
different nations, cultural backgrounds, interests and life experiences across Asia and
Australia. These have been enacted through in-person collaborative residencies, designed and staged based on a set of five compositional principles. In 2020, these principles were challenged, tested and elaborated in new ways through a new WrICE residency conducted entirely online: a move made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic and its conditions of physical separation. Our findings from this digital residency experience offer insights into future directions for approaching transnational collaboration and dialogue among writers, artists, scholars, activists and others in a more constrained world, during and after the pandemic.' (Publication abstract)
 

'This paper considers an evolving project about climate change that will explore
using collaborative creative writing strategies to emotionally support and engage
writers, primarily focusing on how narratives of hope and optimism might counter
affective responses of anxiety, and the resultant solipsistic inertia or surrender. We
ask: what role could collaborative fiction play in helping to create positive futures
that emotionally strengthen us to manage what may come and what already is? We
outline the inspiration and background to our project and begin to theorise
justification for applying posthuman approaches to the question of reimagining
climate fiction. We review a number of collaborative climate change projects
located outside of traditional writing but still drawing on narrative storytelling, and
consider how our project – which focuses on genre fictions – might add to the
horizon point; one that is not delusional, but also does not lead to dystopian despair.'

(Publication abstract)

'The following is a joint review written by two poets concerned with many of the same ideas, who over the months they discussed The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry were separated by borders that shifted and changed. The ideas we formed through reading this book appeared vague at first, then clear and distinct, but ultimately by the time it came to write the review, were blurred once again. Something that one of us wrote in correspondence to the other returned under some other subheading in a later draft, unknowingly subsumed into one of our consciousnesses as an idea for its own sake.' 

(Publication abstract)

'We expect that leading research in the creative writing discipline will keep us abreast of
exploration and innovation across a broad spectrum of writing practices. This collection of
essays, focused on the contentious Speculative Biography sub-genre, does just that.' 

 (Introduction)

'Australian critics have lamented Patrick White’s disappearance from our literary culture in recent years. While the legend of the man remains – the man who refused a knighthood, the man who used his Australian of the Year speech to declare that Australia Day is for ‘self- searching rather than trumpet-blowing’, the man whose prose, a chapter from The Eye of the Storm (1973), submitted under the anagrammatic name ‘Wraith Picket’, was rejected by agents and publishers in a 2006 literary hoax by The Australian – so does the question of his legacy: does anybody still read White? Christos Tsiolkas (2018) admits feeling ‘ashamed’ for not engaging with ‘arguably the most eminent of Australian writers’ earlier in his life. Describing how his ornate style bewildered our nation of ‘plain-speaking larrikins,’ Madeleine Watts (2019) concludes ‘it would seem, in the end, that nobody could be bothered with Patrick White.’ Cultural cringe, identity politics, impenetrable style – many ponder why White, who felt Australia ‘in my blood’ but also acknowledged ‘at heart I am a Londoner’, has struggled for survival among our nation’s readership (Marr, 1994, p. 419). Despite offering different reasons, critics appear to have reached at least one in Martin Thomas’s (2021) words, ‘a Great Unread’. And this is to say nothing of his drama.' (Introduction)

'With a painter’s deft touch inseparable from an awareness that every brush stroke matters, Rose Lucas’s This Shuttered Eye is a masterclass in the use of telling detail. The eye in the title of the collection looks ‘into the texture of the seen’ (p. 13), seeking ‘deep shades’ and how these are in turn captured by the looker’s ‘shuttered’ gaze, creating a haze between the visible and the invisible. Here the eye is akin to a camera that reveals both studium and punctum in a picture [1]. But here the eye also unshutters the outer and inner worlds as these are filtered through experience and in the process of writing.'

 (Introduction)