Cirrus@Austlit

'The notion of a ‘community of practice’ offers fruitful ways to frame and assess literary activities for the producers of literature, creative writers. Referring to Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris (2011), the experiences of two Australian writers and the Australian Seven Writers’ community of practice, we discuss gaps that our research approach aims to fill through investigating the significance of specific writers’ literary relationships in developing their creative writing skills and work. Framing such relationships as professional ‘communities of practice’, we argue that studying the functions of contemporary writers’ relationships as working environments has the potential to inform both creative writing learning and arts policy-making. As such, advocating for a community-of-practice conceptual framework is the main aim.' (Publication summary)

'This paper discusses a new direction for research on creative writing: exploring the formative contexts within which writers develop, receive recognition and

are celebrated, our approach centres on literary networks and activities that characterise well-recognised literary communities. By studying the UNESCO Cities of Literature network, our research aims to identify and analyse key formative experiences for contemporary creative writers, although in this paper we simply refer to one of those cities—Melbourne.

'We hypothesise that the notion of a ‘community of practice’ has potential to be a

constructive way to interrogate writers’ practices within literary communities to inform arts policy making and university creative writing programs. In this discussion we try to show how our approach promises to deliver a variety of findings, such as showing the practical links between creative writing and literary studies, as well as between creative writing processes and products.'

Source: Abstract.

'International award winning Australian filmmaker Lawrence Johnston describes his new documentary, 'Once a Queen' and his work at the Australian Film Commission. He states that good filmmakers must have a vision to a degree and although the US is becoming more visually literate, much of the material is still incomprehensible and hence there is a need to be bring more rigour with story presentation in the US, irrespective of genre.'

Source: Abstract.

'The details of the 5th annual 'Picture This Film Festival', 6-10 February 2006 are reported. The short film, Mercury Stole My Fire (2005) drew its inspiration from a prolonged and unusual experience that many people urged her to write a book about, but she wanted to produce something more like a poem.'

Source: Article abstract.