Cirrus@Austlit

'Spatial psychology, a multidisciplinary field combining psychology, neuroscience, and environmental studies, investigates the relationship between individuals and their spatial surroundings (Montello 1998, pg. 143). Grounded in the fundamental notion that cognition is not solely confined to the mind but is intricately intertwined with the spatial environments in which individuals operate, spatial psychology and the psychology of place seek to unravel the cognitive processes, behavioural patterns, and emotional responses that unfold within specific spatial contexts (Poshansky, Fabian, Kaminoff 1983, pg.57). Spatial psychology addresses questions related to how humans perceive, process, and navigate space, encompassing both physical and virtual realms.' (Introduction)

'In this paper, three women writers offer a personal and critical consideration of the utopian ideal of a place to write – Woolf’s pervasive ‘room of one’s own’ (1977) – as both a physical location and a psychological and cultural ‘space’. In doing so, we draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on (queer) utopia, particularly his observations about hope and disappointment as critical methodologies through which “a backward glance … enacts a future vision” (p. 4).

'We glance backwards to utopian ideals of a place in which to write and consider how and why such ideal places – solitary, uninterrupted, even beautiful – slip through the writer’s fingers. Again drawing from Muñoz, we consider the tension between hoping for a utopian writing place and disappointment at failing to construct, access, or regularly inhabit them. According to Muñoz, although hope is always eventually disappointed, “disappointment … is not a reason to forsake [hope] as a critical thought process” (p. 10).

'Crucially, then, while we consider the reasons for writerly disappointment with/in writing utopias, we return to hope as a powerful methodology for imagining utopian writing places – enacting future visions – and as a productive and enabling aspect of the writing process.'  (Publication abstract)

'The article analyses my interviews with a number of poets whose works seem to subvert space in various ways. I report my surprise in discovering, within those interviews, a tendency for the poets nonetheless to describe themselves and even their actual poems in national terms. C.D. Wright, for instance, referred in her interview to her having “an American ear,” in spite of her work’s seeming deconstruction of any such broad identities. This leads me to a discussion of the interpellative devices of the nation-state that serve to draw poets into ascribing a national identity to themselves and their work in a range of forums, up to and including the international research interview. But even granting the pervasive ideological mechanisms of the nation-state, it seems clear that the poets interviewed are genuinely reporting back on their experience of compositional work and its drivers, when according a role to the nation and/or geographic space they inhabit. The paper draws on developments in contemporary linguistics to suggest that what they are in fact naming is a localised idiom. It is that which serves to launch them into the kinds of spaces Emily Dickinson evoked, when avowing “I dwell in possibility / a fairer house than prose.” That fairer house – poetic possibility itself – is rooted in idiom.' 

 (Publication abstract)

'In June 2021, as research for a novel about humans and forests, I undertook a commitment to walk in the forests of Gebhurr (Mount Macedon) every day for one year, and to document the thoughts arising from each day’s encounter as an in-situ drafting exercise; in essence, to attempt to write the forest–or my experience of it. Out of this structured entanglement with the poetic possibilities of place, a novel arose. Poststructuralists have long queried the idea of the author as a text’s single originating point, just as ecologists and environmental philosophers have questioned the unique status of human subjectivity in relation to wider notions of ecological thoughtfulness. In this article, I will briefly consider what is meant by the term ‘forest’ and its history as a metaphoric terrain, before describing my own year-long in situ forest writing project. In interpreting this, I draw on existing frameworks that explore the blurred boundaries between environment and human thinking, including Freya Matthew’s ontopoetics, Vicki Kirby’s grammared biologies, and Australian Indigenous notions of narratively-patterned environments, as well as thinkers of European forests such as Bachelard and Heidegger. I draw widely from the existing research into the relationship between forests and human creativity, in order to argue that the forest may hold a legitimate claim to authorial acknowledgement of works developed within its realm.' (Publication abstract)

'What happens when a place writes itself into our bodies, and when broken bodies write from fractured places? I have been immersed in a sick body after being born into the “kingdom of the sick” (Sontag 2013, p.1) when I was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis at nine weeks of age. Consequently, I have spent a substantial amount of time in hospital—a place we go to ‘get better’. My hospital bed is a place I have always written—often with friends dying around me and in the face of immense physical and existential suffering. Being creative in an institutionalised setting has allowed me to resist the feeling of confinement, where I’m able to establish routine and agency to try and create some order among the disorder. The concept of place became especially significant when I was placed in isolation due to being immunosuppressed following a double lung transplant in 1998. The landscape changed from one of community to one that was more solitary and dystopian. A liminality of place exists between home and hospital, and this creative work contemplates how a multidimensionality of creativity can exist, and indeed thrive, within an institutionalised setting.' 

 (Publication abstract)

'This creative writing research experiments with and examines perception, orientation, and queer phenomenology to suggest that the writer’s place (my desk) is not instrumental to my creative output. The creative component encompasses three brief writing experiments to produce data that is then analysed through theoretical frameworks in order to make the conclusion on my experience of the writer’s place.' (Publication abstract)