'This paper interrogates the concept of ‘sensitivity’ in creative writing. While the term appears to be relatively straightforward, the methods writers use to write sensitively differ: some may simply consider the feelings of the group represented, while others may engage with interviews or employ the use of a sensitivity reader. This paper uses complexity theory and critical race and whiteness scholarship to define and theorise how sensitivity is used within the current publishing landscape. It argues that, while writing sensitivity can offer greater opportunities for representation on the page, it can also further reinforce racial hierarchies already present within the publishing industry.' (Publication abstract)
'As digital photography proliferates in the contemporary world, theorists and creative writers continue to debate what photographs signify and how the poetic ekphrasis of photographs should be understood. This has become a pressing issue in an age when new technologies allow the easy manipulation of digital images – which, depending on the context in which they are viewed, are increasingly being characterised as creative, imaginative, unreliable or deceptive. Yet nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century theorists tended to assume that photographs had a direct, if complex, relationship to observable, external reality, something reiterated by Susan Sontag as late as 1977. This paper discusses how ekphrastic poems by Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin enshrine assumptions about photography that are now shifting, and how contemporary ekphrastic poems about photographs increasingly challenge, sometimes subversively, photography’s link to the ‘real’. Such poetry continues to emphasise the way photographs connote a ‘chasm’ or ‘thickening’ of time but are more troubled than earlier authors by the idea that photographs may not represent anything clear or knowable. Eve Joseph’s and Leslie Scalapino’s poetry demonstrates ways in which photographs tend to juxtapose a sense of transience with a new sense of photography’s sometimes obdurate problematics.' (Publication abstract)
