The culture of contemporary writers' festivals

This thesis examines the culture of contemporary writers’ festivals in an international context. In the last five decades writers’ festivals have emerged in cities across the world, and during this time they have expanded their literary discussions and debates to include numerous other topics of broad interest to society. To examine the expanded popularity and function of writers’ festivals, this thesis establishes a new vantage point for theorising the content now typically generated by these events using concepts in urban festivals and public culture research. Importantly, the new vantage point addresses the limitations of current commentary on writers’ festivals which routinely claim they trivialize literature, and more generally, contribute to the decline of public culture. The thesis presents two case studies: one on the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia and the other on the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, Canada. The first case study, which focuses on the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival, illustrates the many overlapping and often conflicting discourses as well as opinions productively discussed and debated at writers’ festivals. Key topic discussed and debated at the Festival include local topics about the host city—its history, literature and politics, as well as broader literary, political and celebrity culture topics. The diversity of topics discussed at the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival is typical of the majority of writers’ festivals similarly located outside the largest geographic centres of global literary production and circulation, and designated as ‘peripheral’ festivals in this research. The second case study on Toronto’s International Festival of Authors examines the ways in which the 2006 Festival almost exclusively focussed on literary and celebrity culture discourses, and promoted itself on these terms. The 2006 International Festival of Authors’ discussion and debate of a narrow range of topics is typical of the few writers’ festivals located in global centres of literary production and circulation, and unlike ‘peripheral’ festivals they are not experiencing the same growth in number or popularity. The aim of these ‘international’ Festivals is not to democratise their elite literary beginnings, but rather to promote ‘literature’ as a niche brand for quality writing that is valid on a global scale. This thesis will assert that while all writers’ festivals are influenced by the marketing desires of publishing companies, the aim of international writers’ festivals in marketing to a virtually and globally connected elite literary audience makes them more susceptible to experiencing declines in audience and author participation.

Two voices : the marginalised body as a voice & Imperfect Offerings a novel

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of self-harm as a form of political protest using two different, but complementary, methods of inquiry: a theoretical research project and a novel. Through these two approaches, to the same research problem, I examine how we can re-position the body that self-harms in political protest from weapon to voice; and in doing so find a path towards ethical and equitable dialogue between marginalised and mainstream communities. The theoretical, or academic, portion of the thesis examines self-harm as protest, positing these acts as a form of tactical selfharm, and acknowledge its emergence as a voice for the otherwise silenced in the public sphere. Through the use of phenomenology and feminist theory I examine the body as site for political agency, the circumstances which surround the use of the body for protest, and the reaction to tactical self-harm by the individual and the state. Using Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, and the dialogic space I propose that by ‘hearing’ the body engaged in tactical selfharm we come closer to entering into an ethical dialogue with the otherwise silenced in our communities (locally, nationally and globally). The novel, Imperfect Offerings, explores these ideas in a fictional world, and allows me to put faces, names and lives to those who are compelled to harm their bodies to be heard. Also using Bakhtin’s framework I encourage a dialogue between the critical and creative parts of the thesis, challenging the traditional paradigm of creative PhD projects as creative work and exegesis.

Critique groups : a technique for the author’s toolbox?

With a lack of places to gain an education in the craft of romance writing, novelists have few places to turn to gain real feedback. This paper investigates an alternative to textbooks, conferences, and workshops through an examination of the role provided to the writer by critique groups. How these groups work, how they benefit an author, and the critique groups as a whole are discussed. This work studies the form of Peer Assessment and Learning (PAL) and compares the technique used by educational institutions all over the world with the practice of author groups critiquing their own work. The research shows how a critique group can assist a writer to learn, grow and develop, helping to enhance the writer’s skills through constructive feedback, which gives them confidence to sell their work.

Trace, a novel and exegesis

Trace concerns writing-walking and walking-writing. The multiple voices of both novel and exegesis assemble a rhizomic map of a walk and create a never-entirely-certain wandering look upon a woman walking, rather than a single cocksure gaze. Trace explores the aesthetics of Western walking literature and the various nostalgias inherent in that tradition. Trace wonders how lost a character can become on a walk and whether a walk is itself a kind of becoming. In the undefined liminal space where the urban bleeds into the rural, Trace challenges the singular perspective of the dominating gaze with a wandering look, which aims to make an original contribution to both the walk in literature and to exegetical form.

Skydweller and representations of the adolescent crisis : group identity versus alienation

This document contains a creative work – the text of a young adult novel, Skydweller – and an exegesis discussing the ways in which identity and the adolescent crisis of group identity versus alienation are represented in young adult science fiction/fantasy novels.

Colours Unknown

Colours Unknown was originally published online by Bradt Travel Guides in July, 2009. On February 7th, 2010, it was published nationally in the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Mail Brisbane, the Sunday Mail Adelaide, the Sunday Tasmanian and the Sunday Herald Sun. The piece won the unpublished section of the 2009 Independent on Sunday and Bradt Travel Guides Travel Writing Competition - an international writing prize based in London.

Isaac's Numbers

Short story published in the Queensland University of Technology Student Anthology, Isaac’s Numbers: New Writing from QUT, 2008.

Chasing Grace

Chasing Grace won the 2009 Perilous Adventures Short Story Competition and was subsequently published online by the Perilous Adventures Magazine in October, 2009.

In Bed with Autobiography: Unravelling the Fabric of Gender and Genre in Women’s Bed(room) Confessions

This thesis consists of a confessional narrative, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, and an accompanying exegesis, And Why I Should (Maybe) Tell Her. The creative piece employs the confessional mode as a subversive device in three separate narratives, each of which situates the bed as a site of resistance. The exegesis investigates how this self-disclosure in a domestic space flouts the governing rules of self-representation, specifically: telling the truth, respecting privacy and displaying normalcy. The female confession, I argue, creates an alternative space in women’s autobiography where notions of truth-telling can be undermined, the political dimensions of personal experience can be uncovered and the discourse of normality can be negotiated. In particular, women’s confessions told in, on or about the bed, dismantle the genre’s illusion of self and confirm the representative aspects of women’s experience. Framed within these parameters of power and powerlessness, the exegesis includes textual analyses of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1999) and Lauren Slater’s Lying (2000), each of which exposes in a bedroom space, the author’s most obscure, intimate and traumatic experiences. Situated firmly within and against the genre’s traditional masculine domain, the exegesis also includes mediations on the creative work that validate the bed as my fabric for confession.

Spaces of hybridity : creating a sense of belonging through spatial awareness

When the colonisers first came to Australia there was an urgent desire to map, name and settle. This desire, in part, stemmed from a fear of the unknown. Once these tasks were completed it was thought that a sense of identity and belonging would automatically come. In Anglo-Australian geography the map of Australia was always perceived in relationship to the larger map of Europe and Britain. The quicker Australia could be mapped the quicker its connection with the ‘civilised’ world could be established. Official maps could be taken up in official history books and a detailed monumental history could begin. Australians would feel secure in where they were placed in the world. However, this was not the case and anxieties about identity and belonging remained. One of the biggest hurdles was the fear of the open spaces and not knowing how to move across the land. Attempts to transpose colonisers’ use of space onto the Australian landscape did not work and led to confusion. Using authors who are often perceived as writers of national fictions (Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton, Patrick White, David Malouf and Peter Carey) I will reveal how writing about space becomes a way to create a sense of belonging. It is through spatial knowledge and its application that we begin to gain a sense of closeness and identity. I will also look at how one of the greatest fears for the colonisers was the Aboriginal spatial command of the country. Aborigines already had a strongly developed awareness of spatial belonging and their stories reveal this authority (seen in the work of Lorna Little, Mick McLean) Colonisers attempted to discredit this knowledge but the stories and the land continue to recognise its legitimacy. From its beginning Australian spaces have been spaces of hybridity and the more the colonisers attempted to force predetermined structures onto these spaces the more hybrid they became.

The coming

Through an exploration of representations of metamorphosis and the creation of a body of written work, this thesis uses a critical examination of theoretical approaches to metamorphosis in combination with textual analysis of representations of metamorphosis and creative practice as research to arrive at the beginnings of an ethic of writing. The creative work, The Coming, consists of a collection of short fiction, The Coming, and two collections of poetry, Orison and Milagros. The exegesis, Transhuman Change: towards an ethic of writing, explores theories about metamorphosis as a figure for writing, as a trope, and as a motif for exploring identity to contextualise the analysis of representations of metamorphosis from which the ethic is developed. With reference to the psychosexual development theory of Jacques Lacan and Elaine Scarry’s philosophy of the body, pain, language and creativity, the exegesis examines existing approaches to metamorphosis and uses supplementary textual analysis of influential representations of metamorphosis from Ovid to Pygmalion, X-Men and Extreme Makeover to explore assumptions about the body, language, the self, gender in western culture. The limitations of the performance of representations of metamorphosis as a figure for the self’s survival of death are considered in the light of voice as metonym for self to propose an ethic which valorises life. The experience of sex and the construction of gender in representations of metamorphosis are considered in the light of Lacan’s theory of desire and Scarry’s theory of the body and language to propose an ethic of representing gender ironically. The motif of the faithless lover and the Pygmalion myth are considered in the light of the (m)other’s role in language to propose an ethic in which indeterminacy constitutes the condition for being aware of oneself among selves. Each of the three proposals is discussed in relation to the short fiction, memoir and poems produced in the course of this research to test their limits and possibilities as the foundation of an emerging ethic of writing.

The candidate : a novella and examination of Australian Gothic crime fiction

Australia is a land without haunted castles or subterranean corridors, without ancient graveyards or decaying monasteries, a land whose climate is rarely gloomy. Yet, the literary landscape is splattered with shades of the Gothic genre. This Gothic heritage is especially evident within elements of nineteenth century Australian sensation fiction. Australian crime fiction in the twentieth century, in keeping with this lineage, repeatedly employs elements of the Gothic, adapting and appropriating these conventions for literary effect. I believe that a ‘mélange’ of historical Gothic crime traditions could produce an exciting new mode of Gothic crime writing in the Australian context. As such, I have written a contemporary literary experiment in a Gothic crime ‘hybrid’ style: this novella forms my creative practice. The accompanying exegesis is a critical study of a selection of Australian literary works that exhibit the characteristics of both Gothic and crime genres. Through an analysis of these creative works, this study argues that the interlacing of Gothic traditions with crime writing conventions has been a noteworthy practice in Australian fiction during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and these literary tropes are interwoven in the writing of ‘The Candidate’, a Gothic crime novella.