Panel #5 Session 4
Thursday 30 November - 9:00
Building 25, Teal Room
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Climate Fiction Posthuman Artist Laboratory
- Rachel Hennessy, Alex Cothren & Amy Matthews
Flinders University & University of Melbourne
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Please note: This laboratory will be a hands-on, thinking-through practice session. Please bring a laptop or other writing device that can connect online.
As a research team, we consider posthuman theory and climate change fiction, exploring the artistic and emotionally supportive possibilities of collaborative storytelling. Our research considers how collaborative narratives of more hopeful optimism might counter affective responses of solastalgic anxiety. In this session we will facilitate a Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory, utilising innovative creative writing strategies to consider how the coming together of professional writers might produce writing that challenges the current plethora of dystopian imaginings. The laboratory is a unique iteration of research-in-practice, focussed on the posthuman possibilities of collaborative storytelling. The participating writers will write “in place” in response to posthuman writing prompts and envision a new form of climate story. ‘To live in the Anthropocene,’ Dan Sherell argues in Warmth: coming of age at the end of our world, ‘is to realize that your attention must be broadened far beyond the bounds of your individual circumstance—expanded to encompass people, species, objects, and eras with which you are both utterly unfamiliar and inextricably bound’ (2021). Here we wish to consider the ways in which re-thinking the givens of creativity might challenge the ongoing focus of late capitalism on production of fictional texts born from a singular author’s voice, disconnected from political intent.
This research is supported by the Flinders University Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts Research Grant Scheme.
Dr Rachel Hennessy is the award-winning author of four novels: The Quakers (2008), The Heaven I Swallowed (2013), River Stone (2019) and Mountain Arrow (2020). She also publishes short fiction and creative nonfiction. She was a Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Rachel’s research interests include creative writing pedagogy, posthumanism, and climate fiction.
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Dr Alex Cothren is a winner of the Carmel Bird, William van Dyke and Peter Carey Awards for short fiction, and he has writing published in Meanjin, Island, Overland, The Griffith Review, Ruminate and Australian Book Review. He is an Associate Lecturer and Research Associate at Flinders University, where his research interests include ethics of satire, climate fiction, and arts and health policy.
Dr Amy Matthews is an award-winning author who publishes under the names Amy T Matthews, Amy Barry and Tess LeSue. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University and Deputy Director of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts. Amy has two books out in 2023: Amy T Matthews' Someone Else's Bucket List and Amy Barry's Marrying Off Morgan McBride. Amy's research interests are in genre fictions: popular romance, historical fiction, and fictions of climate change.