Panel #9 Session 4
Friday 1 November - 9:00
Building 25, Teal Room
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​Chair: Miriam Wei Wei Lo
Talking back to archival silence
- Louise Falconer
La Trobe University, Melbourne
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In crafting my novel about the experiences of women diagnosed with disseminated sclerosis in the late nineteenth century, I’ve drawn on dispersed archival sources including hospital records, physicians’ case notes, medical texts and artefacts. Using my researching process as an illustrative example, in this presentation I argue that the archive has its own agential force that writers of history must contend with. Drawing on feminist materialist theory, with its emphasis on materiality and agentic forces, Marika Cifor examines the vigorousness and changeability of the archive, asserting its inherent ‘liveliness’ (Cifor, 2017). Using Cifor’s concept of liveliness as a framework, I can listen more attentively to the records, creating space for archival gaps and absences to become more visible, for the silences to become more obvious. I demonstrate the ways in which these women and I, the present and the past, the writer/historian and the history have been in a dynamic conversation throughout my archival encounters. In talking back to archival silences, my understanding of the past has been disturbed and unsettled, highlighting the urgent need for dialogic encounters with the archive.
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Louise is a PhD candidate in the Department of Languages and Culture at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Louise’s research looks at the experiences of female patients in London hospitals in the late nineteenth century, with a focus on those diagnosed with disseminated sclerosis (multiple sclerosis). She has written a novel about women’s experiences, while her exegesis surveys the materiality of the archive. Louise has published short stories in Verge and with Underground Writers. She’s also written book reviews for Good Reading Magazine and published non-fiction pieces for the Scottish Anti-Poverty Review and the journal Law/Text/Culture.
Stephanie Dale has been moved to session 9.2 in room 2
Caring for the Author When Writing from the Heart
- Melinda Tognini
Curtin University & Sheridan Institute of Higher Education
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There is already an established body of research about the ethics of life writing, which centres around writing about others, whether that be who Couser refers to as “vulnerable subjects” or simply those we are connected to and whose stories invariably intersect with our own. But what about when the author is also the subject? How do we extend care to, and better support, the author through the writing and publishing process, especially when it includes delving into deeply personal experiences. To explore this question, I will draw on existing scholarship about the ethics of life writing, the ethics approval process in higher education, emerging discussions within the writing community and the book industry about the mental health of authors, and my own practice-led research as I write a memoir about mothering a child born with a life-threatening heart condition. Using the heart as a metaphorical framework, I will identify some of the ways in which writing about the self requires both emotional vulnerability and becoming a vulnerable subject. I will then suggest several ways to more effectively care for writers (including the self) who are creating from the heart.
Melinda Tognini’s creative work has been published in magazines and anthologies in Australia and the US. Her first book, Many Hearts, One Voice: the story of the War Widows’ Guild in Western Australia emerged out of a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and was published by Fremantle Press in 2015. She teaches life writing and family history at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, is a PhD candidate at Curtin University, and is actively involved in the broader writing community.
Facing the Facts by Avoiding the Issue: Anything but Therapeutic Writing
- Oz Hardwick
Leeds Trinity University
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Writing, as I’m sure we all agree, is good for you. Consequently, a number of years ago, as a passionate and widely-published poet and Creative Writing academic, I thought that journalling as a prescribed element of treatment during a serious mental health crisis would have been ideally suited to me. That it wasn’t – and that, indeed, it negated all the benefits of my regular writing practices – underpins this paper.
In the light of research on the therapeutic potential of creative activity, particularly writing poetry, and on perception and cognition in neurodiverse individuals, I will explore why I think a proven beneficial technique which could have been designed with me in mind was so unsuccessful. I will then describe the positive effects of a very similar daily writing practice. In looking at prompts, processes, and explicit purposes, I shall suggest that, at least for some individuals, the key pivot between positive and negative outcomes of therapeutic writing exercises may – appropriately enough – just be down to a matter of words.
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Oz Hardwick is a York-based writer, photographer and musician, who has been published extensively worldwide, and has read everywhere from Glastonbury Festival to New York, via countless back rooms of pubs. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (IPSI/Recent Work, 2018) was the winning poetry collection in the 2019 Rubery International Book Awards. His latest collections are the full collection A Census of Preconceptions (SurVision Books, 2022) and the chapbook My Life as a Time Traveller: A memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2023) .
A keen collaborator with other artists, Oz has had work performed by classical musicians in UK concert halls, by flamenco musicians in Italian villas, and with experimental sound and film artists in an Australian cinema. He is one third of The Forgotten Works (with Amina Alyal and Karl Baxter), an experimental word/sound/music/light collective based between Leeds and the Dark Side of the Moon. By day he is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. In his spare time, Oz is a respected music journalist.