Cirrus@Austlit

'This article discusses two recent essays published by the memoirists Amani Haydar (The Mother Wound) and Lucia Crowley-Osborne (I Choose Elena; My Body Keeps Your Secrets) during 2020–2022. By conceptualising these essays as paratext, drawing on Gillian Whitlock’s consideration of the paratext as a critical apparatus in an ethics of reading memoir, this article argues that Haydar and Crowley-Osborne are amplifying a broader call for care from Australian authors who write about trauma, illness and disability in autobiographical genres. Negotiating with some of the formal, cultural and generic limits for memoir as social justice, these essays emphasise the cultural value of narrating life stories as well as potential personal and community benefits. In their essays, Haydar and Crowley-Osborne offer exegetical insights on process and craft, but they also draw attention to trauma memoirs’ afterlives: to the evolving impact of circulation, reception and promotion on autobiographical life writing and in the context of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson name the unstable “futurity” of this genre. In doing so, these writers make visible ongoing wellbeing and other challenges for the author of trauma memoir after the work is published.' (Publication abstract)

'Anna Spargo-Ryan has been managing multiple mental health conditions since childhood, a lifetime of surviving an unwell brain. A recent diagnosis of ADHD, however, comes with fresh (though not unexpected) anguish.'  (Introduction)

'In November 2020, I am on my couch in Adelaide while Helen Garner, from an airy study in her home city of Melbourne, adjusts her camera. In the Adelaide Hills, from Matilda Bookshop, Molly Murn leans in and asks, "Can you hear me, Helen?"

'This is 2020. This is how we book launch.' (Introduction) 

'This book showcases a unique, innovative form for contemporary life narrative scholarship. Life Narrative is a dynamic and interdisciplinary field defined through attention to diverse styles of personal and auto/biographical narration and to subjectivity and ethics in acts of self-representation. The essay is a uniquely sympathetic mode for such scholarship, responsive to diverse methods, genres, and concepts and enabling a flexible, hybrid critical and creative approach. Many of the essays curated for this volume are by the authors of creative works of life writing who are seeking to reflect critically on disciplinary issues connected to practice, ethics, audience, or genre. Others show academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds engaged in creative critical self-reflection, using methods of cultural analysis, ethnography, or embodied scholarship to address foundational and emerging issues and concepts in relation to identity, experience, or subjectivity.

'Essays in Life Writing positions the essay as a unique nexus of creative and critical practice, available to academics publishing peer-reviewed scholarly work from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and a form of scholarship that is contributing in exciting and vigorous ways to the development of new knowledge in Life Narrative as a field.

'The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Life Writing.' (Publication summary)

'Between 2 September and 7 November 2017, a non-binding, voluntary postal survey of attitudes to legalising marriage equality was distributed to all Australians on the electoral roll. Various literatures responded to this event both directly and indirectly. This chapter considers Hannah Gadsby’s global hit stand-up comedy performance Nanette, published as a Netflix documentary in 2017; the 2018 anthology Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, a monograph collection of creative and critical responses by LGTBQISA+ writers to the Australian marriage equality survey; and Magda Szubanski’s year-long cross-platform and performative deployment of her personal autobiographical story. These texts respond to urgent social justice issues that narrate and testify to experiences of ideologically based and personally experienced conflict. These publications and performances of self and experience exist within an increasingly diverse spectrum of contemporary Australian literature and they offer a particular insight and constitute a distinctive mechanism by which individuals resist, reconcile, and articulate experiences of conflict in their everyday life.'

Source: Abstract

'We teach English at university. Our weekly engagements include navigating unnerving plot twists, falling in and out of love with iconic characters, and evaluating the complexities of language and genre.' (Introduction)

'Enabled by the speed and ease of mobile technologies, and by the ubiquity of camera phone photography, first-person and visual forms of travel narration have become a significant mode of travel writing in the twenty-first century. Such narratives offer an almost limitless (albeit fragile) archive of travel information with a very broad reach. Numerous practices, including simple photo sharing or photo diaries or the serialised “selfie”, locate and show the author-self moving, locating, living, and playing in everyday and extraordinary spaces. This essay argues that “the selfie” is a new mode of travel narrative practice that deserves further attention in terms of how it functions within the travel writing genre. In our analysis, we return to long-standing debates over conventional definitions of “tourist” and “traveller” (Thompson 2011; Youngs 2013) and we engage in post-colonial and trauma scholarship as well as theories of life writing to discuss the ANZAC Cove selfie as it illuminates some of the complex issues and contexts that surround and characterise the selfie as travel writing.' (Publication abstract)

'Life writing such as autobiography, biography and memoir continues to be popular with readers while new genres, for instance, on-line or in other public, performative iterations, also shift and grow. Both historically and in the current moment, life writing emerges to address issues of individual experience in relation to public record. Very often, such works also seek to engage with issues of justice or redress, particularly in relation to expressions of trauma or conflict. What role do life narrative texts play in troubled times? This special issue presents scholarly and creative work that seek sot respond to this question in particular. The writing and research here explores troubling subjects such as political injustice, moral panics, and family and interpersonal relationships. These works ‘trouble’ prevalent ideas, for instance about minority or marginal cultures to offer new ways of seeing the cultural work that diverse life narrative texts can perform.'  (Publication abstract)

'But, what is an essay? In his introduction to the 2014 volume of The Best Australian Essays, Robert Manne tackles the question of definition (intriguingly, one nearly every editor in the series has also foregrounded) and hopes, given this is his ‘second innings’, that it is a problem he now has a clearer view of:

I had thought of an essay as any brief piece of non-fiction prose. I no longer do […] For me at least, an essay is a reasonably short piece of prose in which we hear a distinctive voice attempting to recollect or illuminate or explain one or another aspect of the world. It follows from this that no essay could be jointly authored. It also follows, that, with an essay, we trust that the distinctive voice we hear is truthful or authentic, even when perhaps it is not. (ix)

That Manne drops ‘non-fiction’ from his definition seems significant. As does his emphasis on a distinctive voice, authentic and truthful, even when perhaps it is not.'

(Introduction)