Panel #6 Session 3
Thursday 30 November - 11:00
Building 25, Main Room
​
Chair: Helena Kadmos
Writing Lacunae – Object writing as collaboration with loss in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses
- Johanna Ellersdorfer
University of Sydney
​
Classified as both fiction and essay collection, Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (2018) is an experiment in writing with lost things – missing paintings, demolished buildings, fragmented texts. Switching between multiple perspectives and writing styles, each piece hinges around a missing ‘thing’ that is introduced through brief inventory notes presenting its material and cultural history, and how it was lost. Schalansky’s essays/fictions could be read as another phase of material change in the ‘life’ of the object – a stable moment in its continual formation shaped by human perception and imagination.
This paper will consider Schalansky’s text as object writing rooted in material loss. Drawing on Karen Barad’s writing on hauntology and erasure, as well as Marylin M Cooper’s writing on correspondence in the process and materiality of writing, it will consider the ways human and nonhuman objects continually co-constitute each other, even in absence. Schalansky’s essays/fictions creatively engage with and build on the lingering material and immaterial presence of each of the lost ‘things’ through traces in archives and cultural memory demonstrating how “erasure is a material practice that leaves its traces in the very worlding of the world” (Barad, 2017). It will also draw on archaeologist Phillip Stockhammer’s ‘changeabilities’ (2020), to consider how perception, time and practice are implicated in the material traces of erasure, and form part of the relational entanglement between humans and things that can manifest in generative, creative processes such as writing.
I am a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Sydney where my research sits at the intersection of materiality, object writing, and contemporary art writing. I have an academic background in art theory, painting conservation and creative writing.
Objects and Life Writing: What We Learned from Failing
- Marina Deller, Gemma Nisbet & Daniel Juckes
Flinders University & University of Western Australia
​
This paper presents findings from an ongoing research project investigating the ways life writers can use objects in their creative and critical practice. It is the result of conversation, creative challenge, and failure; it tries to articulate the necessity of these three components towards creative practice (and creative practice research).
At the recent IABA Asia-Pacific Annual Conference, we presented our attempts to challenge each other with prompts related to objects which are in-progress, failing, failed, absent, or transitional. We hoped this would allow investigation into the creative spark which objects provide. Our aim was to produce a paper which functions as a meta-commentary—or as a kind of braided essay—on the process we each engage in. And one which considers failure critically in response to the context in which we work.
Here at AAWP, we offer takeaways from that earlier conversation, alongside thoughts on failure more broadly. Failure is worth talking about within the academy (and within a system which seems only to reward success). It is so often a silence, or disguised, even dirty—something we are conditioned to ‘reframe’. As life writers with interest in the essay form, attempting, trying, reaching, and missing are the locus of our practice; learning from failure is how we make and write. We hope to contribute a way to think about the usefulness of failing and the possibilities of creative collaboration as a response to it, and in doing so offer ways to consider the object, and the role of writing within the academy. A truer story of creative practice research (and just research!) is one which includes missteps and disappointments.
​
​
Marina Deller is a writer, researcher, critic, and creative with a PhD in Creative Writing from Flinders University of South Australia. Their research concerns grief and trauma life narratives and material storytelling. They write about identity, bodies, grief, and public/private spheres. Marina also teaches Creative Writing, English Literature, academic skills, and is affiliated with the Flinders Life Narrative Lab.
Gemma Nisbet is a Western Australian writer who recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing at UWA enquiring into objects, memory and the personal essay. Her creative and critical work has appeared in publications including Australian Book Review, Axon, Meniscus, TEXT and Westerly. She writes a weekly book reviews and interviews column for The West Australian and teaches Creative Writing and Literary Studies as a sessional academic. Her first book, The Things We Live With, will be published by Upswell in October.
​
Daniel Juckes is a writer from Perth, Western Australia. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing at UWA, Editor at Westerly Magazine, Deputy Chair of the AAWP, and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Curtin University. His creative and critical work has been published in journals such as Axon, Kalliope X, Life Writing, M/C Journal, Meanjin, TEXT, and Westerly. His work was highly commended in the 2021 Fogarty Literary Award, and he recently recorded a talk at TEDxYouth@KingsPark.