Panel #4 Session 2
Wednesday 29 November - 16:30
Building 25, Room 2
​
Chair: Jennie Hollamby
Writing a Transformative Postmodern Memoir: The Metamorphosis of Clio
- Megan Anning
Griffith University
​
This paper delves into ways postmodern writing techniques offer the potential for personal transformation in the realm of life writing. I will present aspects of my Creative Writing PhD research, submitted for examination in April 2023, which explores these possibilities both in the Exegesis, ‘Writing a Transformative Postmodern Memoir’, and in my creative artefact, titled The Metamorphosis of Clio. Helene Cixous claims that writing offers women a chance to reclaim an understanding of themselves by illuminating aspects of their lives which remain obscured due to the internalisation of phallocentric discourse. For Cixous, Écriture feminine invites women to look directly at the Medusa to see her monstrous mask is an illusion designed to constrict female power. My PhD thesis accepts Cixous’ invitation by embracing a subversively poetic, erogenous and heterogeneous writing style that speaks the language of a thousand tongues, purposely rejecting historico-cultural automatisms, including traditional memoirist boundaries between truth and fiction as memory, imagination, desire, fact and text knit together to create a hypertextual kaleidoscopic dream that nonetheless manages to capture, or unearth, an imprint of the ‘real image’ of its author, who is very much alive. I will read excerpts of my creative work to demonstrate how devices such as metafiction, montage, and palimpsest, along with experiments in characterisation, time and point of view open up a plethora of nonlinear narrative pathways and spiralling intertexts that map new and uncharted personal territory. Subconscious attitudes and wounds are transformed during the process of their discovery and reconstruction through writing.
Megan Anning is a writer and teacher whose stories and poetry have appeared in Sudo Journal, Burningwood Literary Journal, Text Journal, October Hill Magazine, The Citron Review, and The Closed Eye Open among others. She has a keen interest in Bohemianism, a term described as a literary phenomenon that originated in Paris in the 1800s with the publication of Henry Murger’s humorous semi-autobiographical sketches set in the Latin Quarter which crystalised the glamorous myth of the ‘starving artist’. In April this year, Megan submitted her Creative Writing PhD thesis for examination at Griffith University.
Talking about food in times of hardship
- Gail Pittaway
Waikato Institute of Technology
​
Bee Nilson is a little-known food writer outside of cookery circles, though her Penguin Cookery Book (1972 and reprinted many times) was a mainstay of households throughout the English-speaking world. What is less well known is that she started life in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1908, trained in Domestic Science in her home town, but by 1940 had achieved the position of Advisor to The Ministry of Food in Britain, during war time. Nilson wrote columns and pamphlets about cooking under fire, enduring hardships and food shortages, while living with her husband who worked for M15, through the Blitz in London.
​
This presentation will discuss Nilsons’ diaries, books and personal papers (deposited in the Hocken Library at Otago University) and share some of her food insights of shopping and life in London under fire. Above all the aim of her writing was to talk about food, to encourage households to make the best of meals in hard times and she made it her career.
​
​
​
Gail Pittaway is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Media, and Storytelling in the School of Media Arts at Wintec, Hamilton. She has published both creative work and academic papers, and has edited an anthology of writing on gardens, co-edited journal special issues, conference proceedings and a book of academic essays. She is one of the co-editors of Meniscus (International Journal of Creative Writing) and is a regular reviewer of books for Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme. She is currently a PhD candidate, enrolled at Central Queensland University, in the field of Creative nonfiction, writing a food memoir.
Our story: Seeking relational autonomy through intergenerational storytelling
- Helena Kadmos
University of Notre Dame
​
In Alice Pung’s novel, One Hundred Days (2021, 7), sixteen-year-old Karuna says that ‘Until the summer I turned thirteen, I hadn't realised that [my mother] had been narrating the story of my life, including the dialogue.’ This hit a note with me. I recall feeling my life narrated by my mother, myself speaking words previously uttered in her voice. In early adulthood I closed close myself off from my mother’s stories to make room for my own. But as an older woman, my reflections on the entanglement of her story and mine are less flavoured with resentment and more imbued with contemplation. As her needs for care overshadow that of my children, I sense my primary relational identity shifting away from mother, and back to daughter, triggering a related renewal of self-awareness. As my mother and I move into our last years together, I find myself focused less on her story or mine, and more on our story. As Daniel Nayeri (Everything Sad is Untrue 2020) says, ‘every story is nestled somewhere within another story.’
William Randall (2014, 7) writes that ‘if it is meaningful to speak of life as story, it is meaningful to speak of living as art, for a story is an art form.’ Drawing on this notion of story-ing one’s life as self-creation, and the feminist concept of relational autonomy, this paper engages critical-reflective practice to explore storytelling in the mother-daughter relationship as a process of empowerment.
Helena Kadmos is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, on the Fremantle campus on Wadjuk country. She works with traditional scholarship, and storytelling and creative writing, to research women’s relational identity, precarity and motherhood. She is currently working on a collection of essays around these themes.