(2021). Masked. New Writing. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This paper explores teachers’ experiences of professional development in a creative writing group. The data was collected in a teachers’ creative writing group and consist of semi-structured interviews and creative writing assignments. Reflexive thematic analysis and narrative analysis were applied to compose a nonfiction piece that describes the teachers’ experiences of a ‘year of creative

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on issues of permission and the space for creative writing practice which emerged from a day-long poetry writing workshop with UK English Literature students aged 16–18 funded by the University of Hull’s Bridges to Everywhere project. Drawing on critical frameworks from Hall and Thomson (2017. “Creativity in Teaching: What Can Teachers Learn from Artists?” Research Papers

ABSTRACT In this article I explore the nature of the expert presenter character, in particular the relationship between that character and the person playing the role, and also between that character and the narrative structure of the episodes they present. I use Robert McKee's separation of ‘character’ and ‘characterization’ to explore how the presenter character can perform the same actions in different

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the humanist commitment in pedagogical ideas circulating around the act of creating character and the related judgements which underlie workshop criticism. It considers how many pedagogical texts, and much practice, reinforce the centrality of an individual subject who is separate not only from objects and environment, but from other subjects: technological, human and

ABSTRACT The characteristics and aims of undergraduate literary magazines have received little scholarly attention in recent years. They often function independently, leading to missed opportunities for literary magazine clubs and practicums to operate equitably, effectively, and sustainably in a rapidly changing publishing world. To help bridge this urgent gap in research, the author conducted a survey

ABSTRACT The paper considers the personal determinants of quality in writing, by exploring poet Ted Hughes's proposition that ‘psychological crises' are necessary ‘to awaken genius in an otherwise ordinary mind.' Inspiration for this exploration is provided by the author's work as a creative writing mentor on a rehabilitation programme for injured and ill servicepeople. The experience of that programme

ABSTRACT We present here an account of the way we employ the reading of poetry in engaging participants of an intensive four-week creative arts programme known as ARRTS (Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills) for wounded, ill or injured serving military personnel people with injury or illness, to prepare and assist them in writing their own stories. Poetry can deal with experience and

ABSTRACT The traditional romantic myth of poetry involves the poet refusing to accept mundane titles in favour of being authentic and autonomous. Taking Korean poets as an example and drawing on interview data, this study investigates whether the binary of the poet without a title and the non-poet with a title persists. Korea has a strong certification system called deungdan, through which aspirants

ABSTRACT Folktales inspire me, as a reader, an academic and as a novelist. That the story has come from an aural tradition makes me wonder about its hidden truths. My creative practice is concerned with the question of how to balance supernaturalism with realism in the contemporary thriller, when adapting a folktale, in this case, ‘The Mermaid Wife’, a Selkie tale from the isle of Unst. My artistic

ABSTRACT This paper reports on the use of four poetry writing exercises in the Creative Writing stream of the four-week intensive residential programme, Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills (ARRTS), with Australian Defence Force participants diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or anxiety disorders. The programme is hosted twice annually by the University of Canberra.

ABSTRACT This collaborative sequence of short prose or prose poems was written using the paintings of Jānis Avotiņš (as reproduced in a 2005 catalogue) as visual prompts. The writing process used interpretation, ekphrasis and disjunction to construct a non-linear narrative which attempts to create momentary experiences and reflective interiority through characterisation.

ABSTRACT The ‘lyric’ is a celebrated mode of expression and a catch-all term used to describe a great deal of admired poetry, including ancient works, Romantic poetry and contemporary poetry. However, no-one agrees on exactly how ‘the lyric’ might be defined or how the lyric ‘I’ might be understood – some see this as an autobiographical ‘I’ and others interpret it as a persona enabling lyric poets

ABSTRACT Historical fiction is frequently judged solely on its historical accuracy, often leading authors of the genre to internalise this expectation and pre-emptively defend themselves with ‘author’s notes’. This narrow emphasis on accuracy leaves unexamined the importance of the fictional element the author has chosen to include. In this paper, I propose approaching historical fiction as a playful

(2021). Creative writing on other planets. New Writing: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 1-1.

ABSTRACT As creative writers we produce dialogue between others, first-person narratives representing others, and in various ways the voices of characters not ourselves. Problems can arise when we feign other-culture, other-gender, other-era or other-aged voices. In this context, the case of Frederick Kohner and his character Gidget, based on his daughter Kathy, provides insights. This article suggests

ABSTRACT Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries ‘collapsed’ on her three times during the writing process and she had to throw away substantial drafts. In a Paris Review interview (1997) she states: ‘You really have to have faith the – and it is a question of faith – and you do have to believe, because there is no other way … There is nothing to say that because you have covered pages in the past that

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the scenes of writing present in Empty Words (2019), a novel by Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero. In particular, it analyses scenes in which the protagonist writes about the very act of writing, either as a therapeutic process—with a certain ironic distance, since he tries to correct aspects of his personality while improving his calligraphy—or as a way of confirming

ABSTRACT Would-be writers of fiction face choices as soon as they start thinking about how to get published: What sort of a work is this? Where will the book sit on the shelf? What does the publisher tell the reader about what to expect? And then, where does it sit in company of other works, and where do you sit in the company of other writers? This paper examines three such questions of category choice:

ABSTRACT This article analyses the new challenges faced by US Latinx literature in the Trump era by focusing on the complex ways in which different representations of the borderlands in US Latinx literature negotiate and are placed into a dialogue with exclusionary understandings of nationhood. In order to carry out this task, I will explore the dialectics between Latinx representations of transnational

ABSTRACT In my essay, ‘Paying Close Attention, Thinking To Some Purpose’, published in New Writing Volume 17, 2020, Issue 3, I considered the part played by purposeful thought in a fiction writer’s creative process. Sanchia Page, 1983 is a chapter from The Former Boy Wonder, the novel-in-progress at the heart of this essay. Seen together, chapter and essay represent a continuous narrative of theory

ABSTRACT Teresa Dovey once advocated that writers inhabit genres and forms and ideological positions as hermit crabs inhabit shells. In this paper, I position the writer as ‘hermit crab’ suggesting a position of displacement that is generative. From this position, a palimpsestic approach to writing can work as a liberating force, enabling an author to move between genres, forms and ideological positions

(2020). 80 in the frame. New Writing. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This study problematizes the global spread of English and its status as the default language of the Academy. I ask if English has been appropriated, created anew and pressed into the service of the Global South, or if the demand for the language and burgeoning English Literatures of the world reinforce the divide between speakers of English and those of ‘other-ed’ languages, and even between

(2020). Behind the words: Patrick Gale on history, form, and fiction in A Place Called Winter and Man in an Orange Shirt. New Writing. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT A great many successful poets earn their living as members of the university community. While teaching, research and administration can provide a reasonable and a reliable income, it has an impact not only on how much time is available for writing, but also what sorts of thinking emerge; on the ways in which relationships and responsibilities intertwine, and how to find ways to balance competing

(2020). My Father as a Giant Koi. New Writing. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Even novice creative writing students know the maxim Write What You Know, but understanding and applying it to their work can be challenging. Admonitions to ignore this canonical advice abound, leaving students even more unsure. To address this and other issues in the introductory writing workshop, including confusion about fiction and nonfiction as well as imitation of film and television

ABSTRACT This article argues that we need to ‘descend into the crypt’ of creative writing, and use rigorous, academic research methods and methodologies to examine it. The communities that writing arises from, processes of writing, the unique psychologies of writers, the ways in which writing is used in different settings and eras all need to be researched using well-established modes of research.

(2020). Extract from the novel ‘Restoration’. New Writing. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how creative writing links to mobile media ethnographic practices. Through my digital ethnographies, I have found empirical evidence that socialising, art-making, and wayfaring can and do occur simultaneously in online and offline worlds. The more than textual, more than representational, material and corporeal experiences, and everyday processes are important to

ABSTRACT In 2019, Dan Mallory, book editor turned author of the enormously successful thriller, The Woman in the Window, was exposed as a pathological dissembler. Faking cancer, an Oxford PhD, a prestigious career, and tragic family deaths, Mallory constructed a distressing history in order to gain authority and influence. Examining the complexities of the fraud in relation to other contemporary fakes

ABSTRACT The creative writing curriculum has historically focussed on discipline-specific skills, developing students’ proficiency in literary forms, craft and techniques. However, contemporary writers are increasingly expected to participate in the economy of ideas through festival appearances, debates, and other forms of public speaking – skills that the creative writing curriculum has yet to fully

ABSTRACT How should creative writers, including HIV-negative writers, think through HIV as a livable illness? What is the potential for writing gay fiction in an era of ‘post-crisis’? This creative writing research draws links between literary modernism’s roots in crisis and the roots of contemporary gay realist fiction in the AIDS crisis. It suggests these origins place similar demands on writers

ABSTRACT Traditionally studied as a dichotomised theoretical issue in the field of translation studies, translation is alternatively considered, in this essay, to be a generic term which highlights its practical purposes and effects as a literary practice in creative writing. This essay extends the concept of literary translation to incorporate a range of rewriting practices, which range from strict

ABSTRACT Literary texts reveal aspects of lived experience, historical reality and subjectivity. In Uses of Literature, Rita Felski (2008) argues that they therefore take part in practices of knowing. In the following paper, writers’ recognition of moments of discovery as described in The Paris Review Interviews is contrasted with biomedical scientists’ discussions of their salient discoveries in interviews

ABSTRACT This paper explores the connection between the mask and fiction writing. Freud has theorised the identifications of writers and readers with the masks of literary personae, but my interest in this essay is with how the mask of a narrator or character can function uncannily to impede identification. I am also interested in research emerging from neuroscience, socobiology and robotics, the last

(2021). I love to hear the nature speak. New Writing: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 118-121.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to redress the silence imposed on the character of Marilyn Dawn, wife of the protagonist in the first novella of J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Her husband Eugene is a military analyst who suffers a nervous breakdown while researching how to advance US involvement in the war in Vietnam. Marilyn is rendered voiceless through his intensive, first-person narration

(2020). Shadow play. New Writing. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT The tension between the artist finding their own unique voice and the use of other artists as exemplars which, effectively, negates the notion of unique-ness and relies on rules and general tenets, is highly evident in the teaching of emerging writers in university creative writing programmes. This paper seeks to unpack elements of this tension by considering the ways in which teaching identities

ABSTRACT A contemporary writer choosing to set a narrative in a different country might find themselves desirous to represent multilingualism (or ‘heterolingualism’, the term preferred by Rainier Grutman) on the page. Bringing a different language into the main language of the text, however, can be a complicated process. Using terminology introduced by Meir Sternberg in 1981, this article looks at

What follows is my first ever extended New Writing Editorial, composed here during the COVID-19 pandemic that swept across the world as we entered 2020. I had hoped to publish this Editorial earlier, in a different form (my thoughts more abstract, the propositions more contingent, the pieces included from other creative writers and colleagues simply to illustrate a hypothesis), but current circumstances

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a possible path to overcoming the knowledge/experience dualism that TS Eliot famously labelled the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ and my related desire to write what I define as an ‘omnivorous lyric’ – a poem in which a wide range of non-experiential knowledge is integrated convincingly. Drawing on Lyn Hejinian’s essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’, I explore the opportunities

ABSTRACT New methodological approaches in creative writing are making significant contributions to the field, particularly those that take risks, such as essaying through acupuncture, the notion of ‘essayesque dismemoir', or ‘transautobiography of the becoming-body'. This essay, with working examples, explores another methodological approach or experiment, that of the affordances of prepositions in

(2021). Population Explosion. New Writing: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 97-97.

ABSTRACT This paper examines creative writing in academia through writing as a form of inquiry. Writing about lived experiences is a creative and empathetic form of ontology that unravels the flickers of ‘truth’ and beauty that elude the rational mind. Writing creatively requires letting go of the rigid structures of dominant academic discourse to write the unknown into being. To experience writing’s

(2021). The Fetch. New Writing: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 66-73.

ABSTRACT Emerging writers often struggle with fictional time, beginning their stories too early, ending them too late, summarising key events, or putting inconsequential moments in scene. The result is frequently the same: there’s no apparent central theme. Usually, the theme is buried within the story, the writer having, sometimes unconsciously, built it into the piece, but it’s lost to readers through

ABSTRACT This article builds upon prior research, focusing ideasthetic imagining in acts of narrative making. The concept of ideasthesia is drawn from neuroscience and the term captures the interchange between idea and sensation. I am interested in ideasthesia as it relates to the way writers ‘sense ideas’ in creative writing practice. In previous articles I take an interest in the text as a metaphorical

ABSTRACT Jane Smiley’s novel Horse Heaven (2000) presents a diversity of human and equine characters related to the world of American thoroughbred racing. The text, which gives equal weight to each species, emphasising their co-dependent nature, delineates human characters primarily by their treatment of horses, revealing moral strengths and weaknesses. Actions related to ‘touching’ and ‘breathing’

ABSTRACT The publishing contract is the central legal feature of any publishing professional's life, whether creator, literary agent, or publisher. And with small press becoming an ever more important part of the Australian publishing scene, the contracts landscape has diversified and become more complex. There's a wealth of information on what you should and shouldn't do, and what the perfect contract

We stroll, pretend we’re aimless, but really know we have to hug the shore or we’d be lost. We skirt reeds, splash through pools with rocks that nip our soles, while whispering flies on the water’s skin unsettle conversation. Then we take a risk, flail through tunnels of thistle and ash. Beneath our feet, the rhododendrons bleed. We stagger, letting branches whip back. All we can do now is apologise

ABSTRACT In We Need To Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry (2018), Michael Theune and Bob Broad present a study that uses a version of their ‘Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping’ (PDCM) methodology to empirically and inductively investigate the implicit criteria in the selection of poems in creative arts journals. I employ a version of PDCM in my study. I coded and analysed 752 poems from the past

ABSTRACT In this paper, the writing teacher is a teacher who writes and thinks of writing in a verbal sense, as a performance and not the object that is the written. The paper explores differences between writing as a rhetorical function and writing as an act of creativity, questioning pedagogical practices and assessment of student work based on literary models that is common in educational structures

ABSTRACT In a sea of endless stories of corporate ethical scandals, many of which are attributed to ‘failed leadership', this article examines how creative writing research is being used as a way of inspiring – or suggesting – new forms of leadership behaviour. In the processual nature of being in our lives, if experience is valued as primary to consciousness as a way of active belonging, then it will

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how plot-advancement routines, i.e. ‘what-if’, ‘if-do’, and forking-path story alternatives, are generated in narrative composition and dramatic writing by exploring cognitive representations such as schemata and problem-solving mechanisms. The complexity of narrative synthesis and problem-solving involves the integration, organisation and recall of data relations in

This is a review of the collection of essays, edited by Janelle Adsit, titled Critical Creative Writing. This collection approaches various aspects of creative writing pedagogy regarding how to eng...

ABSTRACT One day a few years ago, I decided finally to realise my fantasy and to teach the first grade. I was then a high school teacher and I was involved in teacher training, but I had no experience or preparation to teach very young children. I thought that it would be both fun and interesting. It turned to be a very complex, challenging and difficult educational experience. I didn’t succeed in

ABSTRACT This is an essay about two key ways in which writers produce fiction: a consideration of the discipline of paying close attention and thinking to some purpose, of concentrating on the ideas for a piece of creative writing that arise during its composition and reflecting on them in a focused way.