Cirrus@Austlit

This contribution will focus on creativecritical citational devices. We will position creativecritical writing in relation to scholarly research and the academic writing it typically results in, as well as performative writing and autotheory (a performative form in itself). Following Katherine McKittrick’s provocation “What if the practice of referencing, sourcing, and crediting … takes us outside ourselves?” (2021, p. 16), we understand creativecritical citational works as ecstatic: they stand outside themselves.

'At the same time, performative writing’s citationality creates an “affective alliance with writing itself” (Pollock, 1998, p. 94) – “affective alliance” being key in autotheory too. Ecstatic citations, then, allow text and voice to transcend themselves while opening up to these alliances, becoming other-like in the process. McKittrick names this as an unknowing and unhinging of the self (2021, p. 16). Similarly, Amy Hollywood describes “the self-shattering that occurs through identification with the lacerated textual other” (2002, p. 59). These creativecritical citational gestures imply an ecstatic merging with textualities and subjectivities that are radically different: historically (the anachronistic), existentially (the non-human) and even ontologically (the fictional).

Putting all of this together, in this creativecritical contribution we will examine writing that becomes ecstatic, both in form and content, more self-expanding than self- reflective – luminous, slippery, weird.'  (Publication abstract)

'“Asterism” is written in the form of a verse letter to friend and fellow poet, John Watson, partly in response to one of his own poetry pamphlets, Brief notes on Brahms. It represents a work of autoethnography that proceeds from a consideration of my relatively new experience of living in an apartment in an area of Sydney which long ago housed both sides of my family, mixing up that history with asides on music in a series of autobiographical reflections on the nature of home, and the question of how to be at home in the world – especially if that part of the world you inhabit constitutes stolen land. These elements are held in suspension within the metaphor of the constellation or asterism: the self as an inferential shape picked out of a galaxy of memories. Drawing on the baroque image of the Harmonia macrocosmica, the seventeenth-century star charts of Andreas Cellarius, as well as the map of Sydney Trains, the poem concludes by wondering how to make, in the sense of manufacture, a home in the world out of the random and scattered parts of one’s being, while dancing in the sky.' 

(Publication abstract)

'Scholarly conventions allow us to say certain things within certain forms and shapes. Yet, how can something be “research” if you know where you are going on the page before the writing begins? In this braided case study, scholars Peta Murray (AUS) and Ames Hawkins (USA) consider how the paradox of surrender and the awe of not- knowing may hold space for the inchoate and the formlessness that precedes form. Through reflections upon respective projects they consider the place of the epiphanic, the erotic and the ecstatic as preconditions for radical transformations within new exegetical casings. Murray revisits her first foray into wrighting towards the creativecritical via Things That Fall Over: an anti-musical of a novel inside a reading of a play, with footnotes, and oratorio-as-coda. Hawkins considers their creativecritical composing processes as they emerge/d while drafting “Feeling through Numbness, Healing with Awe”, a chapter for a forthcoming volume on sensory rhetorics. In three parts, each bounded by broken things – interstices, gaps, fissures between images and words – this paper asks: how might alchemical and material transformations occurring within liminal spaces – before, during and as a result of the writing process – be shared as an ethics of aesthetics, now and then?' (Publication abstract) 

'This creativecritical essay investigates the author’s object-oriented mania and her anticipatory relationship to “happy objects” (Ahmed, 2010) through the lens of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, shadowed by memories around inheritance, a family propensity toward hoarding and the empty promise of capitalism under a “regime of crisis ordinariness” (Berlant, 2011). The chaos of the hoard, in which objects congeal rather than circulate, suspends the hoard in a time outside of time, similar to Kristeva’s (1982) chora (Lepselter, 2011). While the hoarder as artist manifests a “poetics of accumulation” (Falkoff, 2021), a writer as hoarder amasses a citational hoard via reference manager. This essay applies Zinman and Reese’s “critical-mess theory” (qtd. in Singer, 2001) to creative writing, arguing that critical mess literature demands a collaged form where one might draw conclusions from patterns made evident by the accumulated, intertextual, polyvocal hoard. It poses citations managers as a modern tool of Lévi-Strauss’s (2021) bricoleur. In “stringing up a narrative” of things (Juckes, 2017), the author puts word-things into place through object recollection, curation and citation, forming an interweb of narrative objects to demonstrate the application of critical mess theory with and through life writing.' (Publication abstract) 

'“Unleashed” is a creativecritical piece which focuses on my relationship with Artaud, a rescue Kelpie I taught to bark, and in particular on transference love which, for Jacques Lacan, is predicated upon knowledge. “Unleashed” questions The Law, and therefore language as communication, entering as it does into perpetual forms of dialogue and questioning through queer(y)ing the notion of interspecies kinship: Who is training whom in this story? Who is rescuing whom? What is knowledge? What is love? It crosses boundaries between autobiography, poetry and theory, with forays into psychoanalysis, philosophy and behavioural psychology because Antonin Artaud, after whom I named my dog, was a writer of and at the limit. Limit of aesthetic form. Limit of language. Limit of subjectivity. His philosophy is best described as an anti- philosophy. “Unleashed” displays epistemological solidarity with Antonin Artaud at the level of stylistics and performance across divergent discourses, testifying to a poetics of openness and excursiveness in the making. It highlights the shifting, indeed interrupted and illusory, temporal nature of subjectivity, dispelling any sense of certainty utterance such as I Am.' (Publication abstract) 

'The “Thinking Writing: Theory and Creativity” postgraduate course at the University of Melbourne asks creative writing students to consider, and practice, the critical- creative nexus. The core questions of the syllabus are: what is the relationship between ideas and practice, between critical and creative, between thinking and writing? Running since 2009, the course sits among many Australian university creative writing programs that aim to equip their students with knowledge of cultural and literary theory. But why is this necessary? And why do many creative writers still find their encounter with capital ‘t’, Theory, so challenging? Our paper explores some of these encounters through a polyvocal enactment, using the experiences of three instructors of “Thinking Writing” to unpack the problematics, inadequacies and fears raised by attempting to be critical theorists and creative writers at the same time. Focussing on historical and personal anecdote as its primary site of elucidation, we map different moments when clarity struck as we find models for how creativity should interact with theory neither singular nor linear.' (Publication abstract) 

'“We are making a boat, love” is a bookish multimodal experiment-in-the-making that works with/into/because Ania Walwicz’s Boat (1989) and as an exemplar of Eades’s écriture matière (2015). In this work we boat build a corpus of experimental reflective and material writing that makes visible an extended and always present but often forgotten archive of creativecritical writing in this place named Australia. Following on from methods developed during their longitudinal blackout poetry project Sending Love, Eades and Rendle-Short tore out and sent (by post) a page of Boat to each writer. Writers worked with this page in any way they chose over the course of two weeks, then sent them back to return to the book, to be stitched and glued together, to make a love object, a vessel, a boat. Each writer was invited to write from/with/against these pages and these texts were cut up and rearranged into a series of paste poems that appear throughout the artists’ book. ‘We are making a boat, love’ offers a we-world (Jean Luc- Nancy), a collective, a communitas (Rendle-Short), a many voiced and irreverent conflagration.' (Publication abstract)