Cirrus@Austlit

'Story Ground is a place of story, of attentiveness and support. A place where stories are held  safely and dearly, and are shared bravely—the very foundation of Community and Culture.

'Story Ground: The anthology is a collection of prose writing, poetry and storytelling deriving from a series of workshops based on traditional Indigenous practices of storytelling and knowledge. The authors come from far flung places. Their writings here are breathtakingly powerful. This anthology is for the keeping and for returning to—a collection that you will find yourself reading and embracing, time and again.'

‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

1. Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
2. We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
3. There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
4. Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
5. History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
6. Story transmits narrative responsibility. Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.

'This two-part paper discusses each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra. Part 1 discussed the first three groundings and was published in TEXT Vol 21, No 2, October 2017. Part 2 discusses the remaining three groundings.'  (Publication abstract)

'It’s funny how much a book of poetry can carry what one feels to be the essence of a person in text form – at least, I’m often struck by that. And I guess the lovely thing about that is that sometimes you can have the book where you might not have the person. This book is a great example. I feel like this is a kind of portable Owen – it has all his gentleness, the good humour and the vaudevillean variety, the honesty that has both a lightness of touch and a resonant depth.' (Introduction)

'Ten contemporary women poets from Japan translated by a group of poets and translators.
'The aim of this project has been to translate or transform poems originally written in Japanese into poems that live and breathe as poems in English.'(Publication summary)

'‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

• Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
• We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
• There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known. 
• Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
• History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
• Story transmits narrative responsibility.  Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.

This two-part paper will discuss each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra.'  (Publication abstract)