Panel #8 Session 4
Thursday 30 November - 14:30
Building 25, Teal Room
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Chair: Kimberly Williams
Tacit: an invitation to discourse
- Bethany Evans
Central Queensland University
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This performance invites the audience to engage in a tacit colloquy with the poet-performer through the works presented. By applying Roland Barthes’ concept of intertextuality, outlined in ‘The death of the author’ (1977) and Jessica Benjamin’s theory of intersubjectivity (2004), we come to understand the dialogic nature of writing and the implicit invitation to discourse; the writing becomes a mediator between artist and audience, writer and reader.
Poetry writing, with its particular ways of using language, may be an effective means of communicating experiences that frequently defy expression through language – of saying the unsayable. Following experiences of trauma, conventional – spoken – methods of talking often fail, and creative writing may be especially useful in such instances. As a creative arts PhD student, I am interested in the use of poetry writing as a means of expression and communication, and as a transformative practice affecting the writer’s wellbeing.
The poems selected for this performance draw on a range of poetic techniques in order to communicate my experiences of childhood trauma and to elicit an emotional as well as an intellectual response from the audience. Using spoken word poetry performance techniques to provide an additional layer of communication, the written pieces are enhanced by the author’s performative slant. As audience members bring their own histories to this performance, I invite each person to immerse themselves fully in the presentation, engaging with the poetry and experiences presented, and to reflect on their responses and any meaning they find as a result of this performance.
Bethany Evans is currently enrolled in a PhD in creative writing at CQUniversity and has an MA in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Sydney. Her thesis will comprise a suite of poetry relating to her childhood trauma and an autoethnographic exegesis. Bethany has published a handful of poems in small publications, and has received several awards for her poetry. Her creative exploits extend beyond writing into playing classical music in community groups, and building tiny models. She works in libraries, and previously worked as an editor and proof-reader, an English tutor to school-age students, and a freelance journalist.
Recovering conversations from the archive
- Elizabeth Chappell
University of New England
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Dialogue is a prominent feature of creative non-fiction used to reveal character, anchor narratives in a context and present different perspectives. But how can conversation be recovered if your subject has passed from living memory? I faced this challenge in my creative biography of Catherine Helen Spence – Australia’s first female novelist and first woman political candidate. Her public and private lives were complex and many faceted, which became clear from a close reading of her archival record containing letters and recollections by friends and family, and her vast literary legacy. Building on Paul John Eakin's theory – that our lives become stories through our ‘relational others’ – I chose to tell Spence’s life from the perspectives of those around her. I imagined oral history interviews with them, listened for their speech patterns and applied the theory of heteroglossia (many meanings) to my investigation. Conversation is frequently cited as a signpost of fictionality, but it can also lend a sense of verisimilitude and empathy. Many works of biographical fiction draw on letters, diaries and contemporaneous novels to reinvent dialogue through responsible imagination, as I have done with Spence. The voices of women silenced by history can only be recovered through fiction, yet their ability to talk to us across time makes that conversation worthwhile. My depiction of Spence demonstrates how life writing at the confluence of history and fiction can illuminate archival evidence to reveal character and present different perspectives of a complex life.
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Elizabeth Chappell is a PhD (Creative Practice) candidate at the University of New England, Armidale. Her doctoral project reimagines the life of early Australian feminist and political activist, Catherine Helen Spence. Elizabeth holds a BA (Communication) from the University of Technology, Sydney; a MA (Writing) from the University of New England and has had a long career in journalism, working for women’s magazines and regional newspapers. She is the author of Celebrate the Seasons: Garden Memoirs of New England. Her scholarly articles have been published in TEXT Journal and Baptist Quarterly.
Image and Word: essaying in collaboration
- Danielle O'Leary & Rachel Robertson
Curtin University
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In this paper, we talk about images and words, about essaying in collaboration, and about collaboration as a process for teaching as well as creative production.
For three years, we have coordinated Curtin Writers Respond, a program in which writers develop original work in response to artworks at the John Curtin Gallery. This collaboration has resulted in more than 100 new works of poetry, essay and short fiction, which have been presented at spoken word performances, published in journals, in two anthologies, and as a podcast series.
Involving undergraduate and postgraduate students, alumni, scholars from a range of humanities areas and from other universities, we have trialled various collaborative processes and explored the pedagogical benefits of in-situ writing for our students’ learning.
In developing new forms of ekphrastic methodology, we begin to understand how image and word are linked in the creative process. We explore philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s belief that the capacity to ‘feel ourselves into things’ is ‘the basis of our understanding of and connectedness to the world’ (Currie 2011, p. 83), and, we would argue, our ability to speak personal and community truths. Our dialogic paper will embody how feeling, thinking and talking about art has become an important way to engage with the world beyond the academy.
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Reference:
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Currie, Gregory (2011) ‘Empathy for Objects’ in Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (eds) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: OUP, 82-95.
Danielle O’Leary is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Research in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. She is interested in creative nonfiction and innovative pedagogy.
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Rachel Robertson is Associate Professor in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. Her preferred genres are essay and narrative nonfiction and research interests include life writing, critical disability studies and creative writing pedagogy.