Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From Real Life To Story – And Back Again: Using Autobiographical Fiction Writing To Understand Self, Others And Family Generations, Alberta N. Adji

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Writing autobiographically includes complicated responsibilities to the subjects involved: to family members, friends, colleagues, and even cultural communities. This article explores creative developments occurring during the process of writing an autobiographical novel called ‘The longing’, which is drawn from a recollection of intergenerational lived experiences of a middle-class Chinese Indonesian family from 1956 to 2018. I reflect on my strategies and approaches on tackling challenges that arose while using autobiographical material and autofictional techniques to write fiction and communicating cultural complexities for it allows agreeable distance between the author and her writing subject. In the article, I also argue that …

The Fragmentation Of The Writing Self: Using Dialogic Reflection To Explore The Writing Process Of An Autobiographical Novel, Alberta Natasia Adji

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

In this article, the author-researcher presents three intertwined texts: excerpts from an autobiographical novel, extracts from a reflexive journal written during the writing of that novel, as well as a theorized account and analysis of the overarching creative process. These texts talk to each other as a form of intertextuality in the similar way that the three generations of a Chinese Indonesian family depicted in the novel interact with one another and present differing perspectives and fresh insights. The issues of the writer’s inner voices and multiplicity of the self feature prominently in this work, the result of a deep …

Bully Me, Bruce Roberts Mutard

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

What price bullying? Is it as simple as saying: ‘hit back’ or, ‘toughen up’? Or, is it to be endured, because it won’t last forever? But what if it does last? What if the bullies finally go away, but you’re left with the worst bully of all: yourself? Your inner voice telling you you’re no good, you’re ugly, you’re the worst in the world and it would be better off without you?

How do you escape the bully that lives inside your head, all day, every day, every night?

This is the story of how I managed to escape that …

Leadbetter, Bruce Roberts Mutard

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

A satirical comic about the rogue, right-wing, gun-loving US Senator Leadbetter, who wins the presidency and installs a dictatorship, which solves all social problems with extreme prejudice.

The Weave Of Youth Writing: Refiguring Authorship And Self-Representation In Michaela Deprince’S Collaborative Archive Of Life Narrative Texts, Alberta Natasia Adji

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Young people have to struggle in navigating the complex cultural and socio-political frameworks of production if they would like to reclaim agency and legitimacy to voice their aspirations. This article focuses on questions of authorship and self-representation in both the traditional and digital life writing texts created by and produced for Sierra-Leonean-American ballet dancer Michaela DePrince, which turns out to be highly mediated by her Jewish Caucasian adoptive mother Elaine DePrince. I argue that the manners of Michaela’s collaborative archive of life narrative projects–which bring about issues of authorship–have conformed her self-representation to particular identity frames in terms of race, …

The Return, Bruce Roberts Mutard

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

1943: Robert Wells has returned home from the war, having spent months in hospitals recovering from combat wounds. While being rehabilitated at Heidelberg Military Hospital, a series of visitors come to see him and, in the process, old wounds open, some close. What does seeing and doing the worst acts a human being can do to one another, do to a person?

Thirteen years after The Sacrifice, the follow-up story of Robert Wells concludes in this elegiac story of how the impact of war is felt, even far from the front lines.

Youth Matters: Shedding Light On Displacement In Syrian Girls' Memoirs, Alberta Natasia Adji

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

In the face of war and political crisis, fleeing a country seems to be the best choice to get on with life. Among many refugee memoirs, so far young adult refugee texts have received little attention. This article analyses two young Syrian girls’ memoirs by Nujeen Mustafa and Yusra Mardini to investigate their experience of displacement. I argue that both Nujeen and Butterfly are prime specimens of young displacement memoir phenomena which act as a venue for identity negotiation. This point has much to do with their navigating the tensions between personal and collective selves to disclose their trauma and …

The State Of Dancingness: Staying With Leaving, Jo Pollitt

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Borrowing from Cixous’ ‘State of Drawingness’ (1993), this article proposes a ‘State of Dancingness’ as method of inhabiting the practice of writing as dancing. Understanding the dancing body as a place of virtuosic attention, the practice of writing is activated as a ‘continuation’ of dancing; neither as creative response or description but as frame for housing (staging) emergent content. The work proposes that the dancer begin on the page from the vantage and experience of entering the stage as solo improvising performer. These words come with this body tucked and pressing inside them. Pressing. The State of Dancingness …

An Unapologetic Feminist Response, Bidisha Banerjee, Mindy Blaise

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

In the spirit of reformulating notions of critique, this response builds on the creative research experimentation that the authors enacted to consider air differently. The authors continue to be lured by generosity, curiosity, surprise, and wonder and suggest two feminist responses that relate to and generate knowledge in alternative ways. Two experimentations (collective experimental story writing and erasure poetry) are offered to readers with the aim of activating new thinkings, doings, and relations with air.

Laundry, Bruce Roberts Mutard

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

A minicomic that features no comics and no action. Instead, it relies upon the knowledge and cultural memory of beholders to induce the narrative from the pictures. A story about a different kind of money laundering.

Aurora Leigh And Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Most Convenient Cousin, Jill F. Durey

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The article examines the possibility that the fictional cousin marriage in Aurora Leigh was either a token of gratitude by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning for her real-life philanthropic cousin’s generosity to her or was a masked promise of immortality to him as he lay dying.

Stories Of Snow And Fire: The Importance Of Narrative To A Critically Pluralistic Environmental Aesthetic, John C. Ryan

Research outputs 2013

Written narratives enable humans to appreciate the natural world in aesthetic terms. Firstly, narratives can galvanize for the reader a sense for another person’s experience of nature through the aesthetic representation of that experience in language. Secondly, narratives can encode and document for the human appreciator as writer an experience of nature in aesthetic terms. Through different narrative lenses, the compelling qualities of environments can be crystallized for both the reader (who vicariously experiences nature through language) and the human appreciator (who directly experiences nature through the senses). However, according to philosopher Allen Carlson’s “natural environmental model” of landscape aesthetics, …

Articulating Everyday Catastrophes: Reflections On The Research Literacies Of Lorri Neilsen, Lesley M. Hopkins

Research outputs 2013

Lorri Neilsen, whose feature article appears in this edition of M/C Journal, is Professor of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Neilsen has been teaching and researching in literacy studies for more than four decades. She is internationally recognised as a poet and as an arts-based research methodologist specialising in lyric inquiry. In the latter half of this last decade she was appointed for a five year term to be the Poet Laureate for Nova Scotia. As an academic, she has published widely under the name of Lorri Neilsen; as a poet, she uses Lorri …

Recalling Walden: Thoreau's Embodied Aesthetics And Australian Writings On Place, John Charles Ryan

Research outputs 2011

This essay argues that the works of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, poet, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have moulded Australian place writings of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the foundational work into Australian literature done by the American critics C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), A. Grove Day (1904-1994), and Joseph Jones (1908-1999), the article goes on to contextualize the discussion in the contemporary transhemispherical scholarship of Australian literary historian Harry Heseltine and American ecocritic Robert Zeller. Both syncretic and embodied, Thoreau’s literary approach to place draws from a fusion of multi-sensory experience, ethnographic inquiry, and bodily participation in …

Plants, Processes, Places: Sensory Intimacy And Poetic Enquiry, John Ryan

Research outputs 2011

As an arts-based research approach, poetic enquiry has been theorised and applied recently in the social sciences and in education. In this article, I extend its usage to eco-critical studies of Australian flora and fauna. The Southwest corner of Western Australia affords opportunities to deploy arts-based methodologies, including field poetry, for celebrating the natural heritage of a region of distinguished biodiversity. I suggest that lyric practices in places such as Lesueur National Park and Anstey-Keane Damplands in southern Perth can catalyse embodied engagements with flora. The outcome of these practices is the invocation of the multiple senses— including the proximities …

Trading In Freedoms: Creating Value And Seeking Coalition In Western Australian Arts And Culture, Duncan Robert Mckay

Research outputs pre 2011

In this brief paper it is my intention to interrogate the idea of “coalition” in relation to the evidence provided in the DCA’s Policy Framework, Creating Value, in order to examine the extent to which this State’s involvement in culture and arts may indeed be considered coalitional.

The Use Of Narrative Fiction To Spread Hiv Information In Papua New Guinea, Trevor Cullen, Ruth Callaghan

Research outputs pre 2011

The nature of media coverage of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) needs to vary in order to be sustained by newspapers—writing the same message, however worthy, loses impact over time. So an interesting innovation in the 2010 cover­age of HIV in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is the publication of a serialised fiction story in the Post-Courier . It is the story of Vavine, a young girl infected with HIV , who is forced to leave her village after her parents' deaths from AIDS . She keeps her infection secret but because of her circumstances, she is forced to work in a …

Shanghai Suite And Other Poems, Glen Phillips

Research outputs pre 2011

The Shanghai Suite was written during a two month period in early 2004 while I was a visiting professor teaching a course in 'Western' Culture' at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. This was also part of the research for my PhD in Creative Writing. During and after those months, I composed most of the poems about Shanghai and that region of China...

Rome: A Poem In Three Parts, Andrew Taylor

Research outputs pre 2011

This poem was written during a six month period, in 2004 and early 2005, as Writer in Residence at the EB Whiting Library in Rome, and in Perth during the weeks preparatory to going to Italy.

Active Imagination, Janeen Cameron

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

This is the first of a series of four active imagination sessions

Flying Crocodiles, Valentina Piacenza

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

No abstract provided.

Inscape, Marilyn Davis-Moore

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

No abstract provided.

My Rice Bowl, Joanna Tan

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

No abstract provided.

Liam Creates Ding Duck, Mary Anne Taylor

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

No abstract provided.

I Moved House : An Inscape, Rose Williams

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

No abstract provided.

Moon Silver, Lynette Beekwilder Reid

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

No abstract provided.

On Having Good Intentions, Lyndal Jones

'INSCAPE' - ARTCAP November 13-16, 2003

No abstract provided.

Paper Boat, Chao

Research outputs pre 2011

No abstract provided.

Who Thought Birds Sang, Brian Lever

Research outputs pre 2011

This is the first publication of poetry written by students at the College. A majority of the poems were produced by members of an elective group who at times wrote on similar topics. Some of the poems in this category have overtones of the 'set piece', although the approaches employed are quite different. Fortunately, this reservation applies to very few of the poems selected for inclusion by the group...