Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper explores the process and outcome of a collaborative life writing project about the death of a parent. Aiming to discover whether collaborative creative nonfiction writing can broaden the representation of experiences of grief and address some of the ethical challenges of writing about vulnerable others, we draw on the scholarship on memoir writing and collaboration and analyse our own process and challenges against this literature. We also identify some of the benefits of collaboratively writing about a recent and personal grief.' (Publication abstract)

'The discovery of human bones is an intriguing narrative opening that rarely disappoints and seems an adaptable vehicle for the Australian gothic and representations of the impacts of colonisation on people and country. Perhaps this is because the image of curved, white mineral shapes (and the hint of stories fossilised within) contrast equally vividly with sandy coastal plains, central red dust, bleak mountain scarps, and dense green forest.'   (Publication summary)

'In 1998 Michelle Grossman’s overview of Indigenous women’s writing explored the significant contribution that life writing had made to the country’s literatures and pondered where younger authors might take Indigenous writing in the twenty-first century. This essay examines the work of one such writer, Ellen van Neerven, whose award-winning collection of stories, Heat and Light (2014), is a work of fiction that draws in part on personal and family stories to offer heterogeneous representations of individuals and families, lovers and friends. Part short story cycle, part long story, part story collection, the text resists easy categorisation. Within its tripartite structure, the sixteen stories are narrated in radically different ways to draw on themes explored before in Australian Aboriginal literature, such as the importance of extended family and belonging, in sometimes new ways, such as through a futuristic vision of Australia. Through a close reading of the text, and discussion that incorporates comments made by Neerven herself, this article suggests that through its varied structures, genres and styles, Heat and Light re-imagines and celebrates the fluid and diverse nature of contemporary Indigeneity.'

Source: Abstract.

'Stacy clenched buttered toast between her teeth, pulled her hair back into a ponytail and stooped to refresh her Facebook page. A string of random shares appeared from her sister Emma, back in Perth. The was also a post from her mum, a photo of a gorilla nursing a snow white kitten.The caption read : Keep you f#%*ing paws off! To encourage her, Stacy liked it.' (Introduction)

'The short story cycle is a collection of independent yet interrelated stories. This thesis is interested in the potential of the short story cycle form to tell stories about women’s ordinary lives and, within such stories, to explore the importance to women of continuing relationships of interdependence and care. This discussion is grounded in feminist critical discourses of relational autonomy. It rests on the claim that the short story cycle is a particularly productive form for writers interested in stories exploring the complexity of apparently mundane moments in women’s relational lives and imagining how particular relationships transform women over the longer course of their lives. The thesis is the product of a practice- and theory-based approach to research. The first part comprises an original work of fiction, which tells five, interconnected stories about individual women from three generations of one family in Australia, spanning the period between the 1980s and the 2010s. The stories focus on moments that linger, where action is limited, and where change is often nuanced or even imperceptible. The work consciously draws on structural and thematic elements of the short story cycle form uncovered through research into short story cycle theory and existing cycles written about women. The dissertation comprising the second part of the thesis reflects on the distinguishing features of the short story cycle, its diverse rendering in North America, and its critical treatment by key theorists, highlighting how this mode of storytelling helps make salient women’s relational lives. This thesis also aims to increase awareness of the form in Australian literary scholarship. Therefore, the dissertation offers a close reading of one contemporary Australian short story cycle, Purple Threads, by Jeanine Leane, in order to demonstrate the imaginative significance and effects produced in an Aboriginal inflection of the form.'

'Purple Threads, by Jeanine Leane, embodies country. Images of the land are physically and emotionally evoked in the individual stories that make up this short story cycle, running through the stories as delicately as strands of purple wisteria and as powerfully as the Murrumbidgee River flows and then surges through the countryside where they are set. In this article I aim to demonstrate how two features of the short story cycle - the independence and interrelatedness of the stories in the cycle, and the longer story within the cycle - help to convey the multifarious connections people can have to their country, family and the places they call home.

Leane draws on her own experiences to articulate formative incidents in a young girl’s life that explore what it meant to be an Aboriginal girl growing up in central NSW in the 1960s and ’70s. The development of Sunny’s cultural and ethnic identity is inseparable from her relationship with country, nurtured by her Nan and Aunties’ love and respect for the land, and challenged by a Dorothy-esque journey that carries her far away to a foreign country in search of family, and back again to the place she feels most loved and secure.

'This article thus explores the importance of country in Sunny’s growing awareness of her identity, and forms part of a broader project on the representations of women’s lives in the short story cycle.' (Publication abstract)