Panel #10 Session 4
Friday 1 December - 11:00
Building 25, Teal Room
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​Chair: Amelia Walker
We Need to Talk: Writing is Dead and Getting Deader
- Paul Shields
Griffith University
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This paper is a creative fiction response to the ‘stuckness’ evident in Australian literary practice as it remains glued to the protagonist-author axis in its generation of meaning. This ‘stuckness’ is in part as a result of the ‘engineering’ or ‘anti-bricolage’ approach commonly taken to literary production. An approach which ensures each part is ‘made’ so it fits ‘just right’ as it flattens fiction into the relationally contingent parts otherwise known as a story arc. This denies a playful exchange with the world which the other arts have long embraced and evident in everything from Ai Wei Wei’s Waterlilies #1 which reimagines Monet into Lego to Tiger Yaltangki and Jeremy Whiskey’s Rock N Roll as it creates a shared space for AC/DC iconography and mamut (spirit beings). Creators which see no difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures and embrace their intersection or ‘collapse’, as they willingly and openly, as Deleuze and Guattari urge us to do, subtract from the world in their production.
In addressing the above, this creative response takes its lead from the combinatorial approaches put forward by Kenneth Goldsmith and David Shields in their efforts to push writing practice through the post-modern and into the 21st century. This creative response can also be seen as confronting creator anxiety that experimental literary works, can collapse into an unreadable mess. Instead this paper leans into this ‘problem’ as another rhizomic spring from which new possibilities of ‘telling’ may emerge, framed by Deleuze and Guattari’s central pillar of the refrain.
Paul Shields is a writer and creative researcher working on unceded Gullibal Land. Paul is the current Creative Director of the Kyogle Readers and Writers Festival, and Convenor of the Kyogle Readers and Writers. His experimental writing has been published widely in Australia and overseas and he is currently undertaking a PhD at Griffith University looking at the intersection of place and experimental fiction.
This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine¹
- Nicholas Flanagan & Sue Joseph
University of South Australia
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This paper is co-authored by a PhD candidate and one of his supervisors who ‘needed to talk’. While the narrative belongs to the candidate, the co-authorship is an exercise in understanding the extent of this work towards further healing – or re-traumatisation – through narrative inquiry. It examines the conscious and unconscious processes that informed the creation of the screenplay, Burning Time, and the candidate’s PhD TV series, Say When, and investigates and evaluates their therapeutic properties and power. It charts the journey of the play Burning Time – a personal story of child abuse and parental neglect – from its inception as a play, and then its evolving incarnation into a screenplay on its way to production across a thirty-year period.
It also examines the analogous drivers that went into the candidate’s PhD journey and the writing of the TV series Say When, set in Alcoholics Anonymous which tells of a coterie of recovering alcoholics, drug addicts and sex addicts.
These works are the nexus of rendering trauma to create and writing to heal, framed by autoethnography. Through narrative inquiry of 12 semi-structured questions, the supervisor explores with the candidate the effect the undertaking of his PhD and professional writing has had on his sense of self and mental wellness.
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1 The Tempest, William Shakespeare
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Nicholas Flanagan is a graduate of NIDA, a VCA Postgraduate of Film and TV, a Master of Sydney University, and currently completing a creative-practice research PhD at University of South Australia. He has acted in Film Television and Theatre; has written for TV; is a published playwright with multiple produced works, including books for musicals he has also composed. He is a performing arts director, screen director, and mentor of professional actors and writers, having directed actors in mainstream NIDA, and taught writing at Melbourne University VCA. Nicholas, an avid promoter of diversity in the performing arts, was also deputy head for three years at the inaugural Indigenous Performing Arts course held at WAAPA, the first of its kind in Australia. Nicholas, while working on the logistics of producing his Burning Time film, is putting the finishing touches to Say When, a six-part TV series about recovering Alcoholics, which is the creative component of his PhD.
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A journalist for more than forty years, working in Australia and the UK, Sue Joseph (PhD) began working as an academic, teaching print journalism at the University of Technology Sydney in 1997. As a Senior Lecturer, she taught in journalism and creative writing, particularly creative non-fiction writing. Now as Associate Professor, she holds an Adjunct position at Avondale University, is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of South Australia and is a doctoral supervisor at the University of Sydney, Central Queensland University and the University of Technology Sydney. She is currently Joint Editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and co-editor with Willa McDonald and Matthew Ricketson of the Literary Journalism Palgrave book series. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4978-6633
In between and together with – Inquiring into the screenplay’s sensuous silences
- Carina Böhm
University of South Australia
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Words written on a page. They tell of action, scene setting and all sorts of drama, speak loudly with dialogue, and literary description. In between all the verbal human fuss, calm, a wordlessness:
The flight of the wind
whispers of trees
the sand’s fatigue
bird phobias.
Inextricably intertwined with its human making, nature has always been an active contributor to our storytelling - from thousand-year-old traditions of orality to the screenwriting of today. And yet, the otherwise so collaborative practices of screenwriting often struggle to not just write about the (nonhuman) but to tell together. Inquiring into the sensuous silences of a more-than-human storytelling, I ask how “invitations to collaborate on a work of art” (Schrader in Hamilton 1990: ix), as set by screenwriting, can be extended to those that tell without words: How does the nonverbal speak through and with the screenplay’s longing as “a structure that wants to be another structure” (Pasolini 1986: 53)?
Writing with the synaesthesia of words that transpose into evocations of movement, image and sound, I invite you to join the polyphonic assemblage of a collaborative imagining and making of a story as possible conversation in a storytelling together with our kinship of selves and others, human and nonhuman.
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References:
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Hamilton, L. (1990), Writers in Hollywood, New York: Carroll & Graf.
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Pasolini, P. P. (1986), ‘The Screenplay as a “structure that wants to be another structure”’, American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 53–72.
Carina Böhm is the name of the body that tells the realities of many different stories. She is PhD candidate at the University of South Australia on Kaurna country. She is a screenwriter who has worked across in story departments, casting and development across German daytime television. A collector of perspectives her nomadic feet have taken her to explore the many walks of life and the tales they have to tell - from the greens of forests to the sands of beaches and deserts, from writers’ rooms and community spaces to the meanderings of freelancing.