Cirrus@Austlit

This editorial contains a reply to Ian McFarlane's letter published in the Weekend Australian, 24-25 March, 2007, on '... creative writing courses encouraging a cult of authorship fuelled by ego rather than talent.'

The editorial also includes a summary of the contents of the issue.

Discusses the challenges of the Research Quality Framework (RQF) ' to place the creative arts, and design and the built environment, inside a national research framework...' .

Debbra Adelaide uses Australian and overseas critical and creative works to discuss the narrative voice.

'In this paper I examine creative practice ... when plied by the honours or postgraduate student writing an exegesis to accompany a creative artefact.' (Author's abstract.)

'The creative PhD thesis, that emerging beast, however, is not always a happy creation. It is still a product and process being shaped by conflicting forces, confused ideas and ongoing debates. Whether it will be the qualities of arguments or the demands of a market that determine the future of the creative PhD, we must wait to see.' (The Author.)

The experience of playwrighting including the influence of Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud and other writers on the author.

'There is a strong relationship between history and fiction. The characters created by writers, either in historical novels and literary fiction, reflect that relationship. Many of the characteristics of fictional characters can also be ascribed to characters depicted in historical fiction and biographical writing.' (Author's abstract.)

Keri Glastonbury calls this article 'an experiment in mixing personal and professional trajectories'. It tells 'a few dislocated stories' about her experience of moving from Sydney to Newcastle, New South Wales, to lecture in creative writing at Newcastle University and to take the role of Director of the This Is Not Art (TINA) festival's creative research symposium, Critical Animals.