Panel #2 Session 3
Wednesday 29 November - 14:00
Building 25, Main Room
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Self-chairing
What’s the story? Is this even a poem? The role of taxonomies, principles and operations on the production and reception of creative writing.
- Katharine Coles, Julia Prendergast & Jen Webb
University of Utah, Swinburne University & University of Canberra
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The organisation of creative production into classes or genres has a very long history, emerging (at least) as early as Aristotle’s classifications in the Poetics. In the centuries that followed, the concept of genre shaped the construction of canons, markets, schools of practice, curriculum and literary analysis. By the mid-twentieth century, confidence in the logic of generic organisation began to tremble. Many of us have colleagues who regularly remind us what we’ve all known since the eighties that genre doesn’t exist, though these colleagues shape their—usually his—publishing, teaching, and writing within genre classifications.
Might the refusal to put genre aside be due to convenience, laziness, or capitalist coercion? Do we create quarrels, or actual problems, when we call things arranged in sentences “poems”, or use strategies typically deployed in poetry to keep or fracture time in stories and essays? If genre no longer provides helpful distinctions and descriptions of our work, what alternatives can we offer?
We will begin by setting aside such questions in favor of a flexibility that provides useful ways of talking about what we actually do: not asking how we might define or refuse to define a piece of writing as poem or story, but talking about how certain kinds of operations (which we may assign to lyric or narrative) work separately and/or together to create literary experiences. These three writers and scholars extend their ongoing discussion of lyric and narrative process through new hybrid works that engage both creative and theoretical thinking.
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Katharine Coles' ninth collection of poems, Ghost Apples, is just out from Red Hen Press. Her prose books include The Stranger I Become: on Walking, Looking, and Writing (essays), Look Both Ways (memoir), and two novels. She served as Poet-in-Residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Salt Lake City Public Library for the Poets House FIELD WORK program, and has received awards from the US National Endowments for Arts and the Humanities, the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.
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Julia Prendergast lives in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her novel, The Earth Does Not Get Fat (2018) was longlisted for the Indie Book Awards (debut fiction). Her short story collection: Bloodrust and other stories was published in 2022. Julia is a practice-led researcher—an enthusiastic supporter of transdisciplinary, collaborative research practices, with a particular interest in neuro/psychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity. Julia is Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing (Australasia). She is Associate Professor and Discipline Leader (Creative Writing and Publishing) at Swinburne University.
Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice, and Dean of Graduate Research, at the University of Canberra. Recent books include Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (Manchester UP, 2016); Gender and the Creative Labour Market (Palgrave 2022), and the poetry collections Moving Targets (Recent Work Press, 2018) and Flight Mode (with Shé Hawke; RWP, 2020). She is co-editor of the literary journal Meniscus and the scholarly journal Axon: Creative Explorations. Her scholarly work focuses on representation, and the field of creative production; her poetry focuses on material poetics and questions of seeing and being.