Cirrus@Austlit

Written in response to Abdul-Rahman Abdullah's sculptural exhibition Everything is True at John Curtin Gallery 2021.

'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)

'Hearing Maud begins and ends with the notion that the narrator’s life has been defined by a pharmakon, an ancient Greek term denoting something that is both poison and cure. This subtle and more complex version of the ‘gift or loss’ dilemma common in disability memoirs avoids oppositional thinking and embraces instead paradox and nuance. This is typical of Jessica White’s remarkable work of creative non-fiction, which is a sophisticated hybrid of memoir, biography, and critical disability studies.'  (Introduction)

'‘Tesserae’ enacts its own content, being a lyric essay about memory, brokenness and how lyric essays can both tell a partial story and open up questions about this story. The mosaic is metaphor and subject, as the narrator remembers moments from her childhood and intimates their effects on her later life, and on her writing. The work aims to demonstrate how the lyric essay form can support life writing that embraces narratorial subjectivity that is complex, fluid, contingent and relational whilst still adhering to Lejeune’s (1989) ‘autobiographical pact’.' (Publication abstract)

'The future isn’t what it used to be, that’s for sure. Eminent futurist Ziauddin Sardar summed up the situation under the banner of postnormal times. Here, in true Dickensian manner, he lays out the crisis for us:

'Welcome to postnormal times. It’s a time when little out there can be trusted or gives us confidence. The espiritu del tiempo, the spirit of our age, is characterised by uncertainty, rapid change, realignment of power, upheaval and chaotic behaviour. We live in an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense. Ours is a transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future. It is a time when all choices seem perilous, likely to lead to ruin, if not entirely over the edge of the abyss. In our time it is possible to dream all dreams of visionary futures but almost impossible to believe we have the capability or commitment to make any of them a reality. We live in a state of flux beset by indecision: what is for the best, which is worse? We are disempowered by the risks, cowed into timidity by fear of the choices we might be inclined or persuaded to contemplate (2010 p. 435).'  (Introduction)

'The requirement for separate creative and exegetical components by universities offering creative doctoral programmes is a largely accepted model in Australia. The Research Question Model adopted by Curtin University in Western Australia is an example of this. The parallel, ‘independent’ articulation of creative and academic responses is explored in this article by a supervisor and three PhD candidates all writing in the genre of creative non-fiction. We suggest that the boundaries between the scholarly and creative in creative non-fiction works are far from clear and that this reflects both contemporary non-fiction publishing and new movements in scholarly writing. We propose that Barthes’s ‘ambiguous genre’, the essay, may be one useful way of conceptualising the non-fiction creative doctorate.'  (Publication abstract)

'The lyric essay is a protean form that allows writers to evoke and explore aspects of personal memory and individual subjective experience with great immediacy, while also addressing more general and abstract ideas. The use of the term ‘lyric essay’ has been questioned but still successfully serves the purpose of suggesting the kind of work that proceeds not as a conventional essay does – through logical argument – but rather through the juxtaposition of sometimes contradictory tropes, often presented as fragmentary, suggestive and even ‘poetic’. Such essays render an impression of the happenstance and provisionality of lived experience. They raise questions about the coherence (or otherwise) of the multiple perspectives informing an individual’s subjectivity.

'The authors’ practice-led Mosaics project examines the lyric essay’s multiplicity of viewpoints, fragmentation and faceted nature through investigating the mosaic-like nature of its form and content, along with the extent to which such mosaic-like patterning may make the lyric essay especially well suited to the rendering of particularised subjective experience. In doing so the project references the example of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí in his work on the Palau Guell and Parc Guell (with Joseph Jujol), where he incorporated fragmented and broken tile and stone pieces into his mosaics. Such mosaics, in creating extensive and ever-evolving patterns, may be seen as closely analogous to the lyric essay’s own expressive patternings and techniques.'(Introduction)