When she refuses to settle: reading adolescent female sexuality and sexual abuse in the poetry of Genna Gardini and Kate Lilley

This essay compares the representations of adolescent sexual abuse and female sexuality in the poetry of South African poet Genna Gardini and Australian poet Kate Lilley. It explores Sabine Sielke's contention that differences in sexuality have predominantly constructed female sexuality as victimisation. In contrast, contemporary poets like Gardini and Lilley unsettle such alignment, demonstrating not only its constitutive limits but also providing a counter-discourse of radicalised agency.

Reading and performing abjection: Staging Joyce, A professional reflection

As one who has mounted theatrical Bloomsdays since 1994,' I well understand that the issue of Joyces radicalism on the subject of the body is a recurring crux for dramaturg, director and actors, not so much on moral grounds, as on the grounds of playability and sometimes taste. It is one thing to read with a startled chuckle a febrile passage which transgresses norms, or to enjoy hyperbole in context, but embodied enactment is an entirely different matter, because the limits of what Joyce was prepared to essay in fiction are so extreme, so strangely and transgressively unfamiliar, despite the passing of close to a century since publication. It is the difference between reading in private and reading a staged and necessarily embodied and visual event that is the focus of this article. What performing Joyces bodies has revealed to me is his particular, unsentimental and secular take on bodies as both comic and sublime, even sacred - concepts that are rarely yoked together. Resisting the impulse to sanitise Joyce and censor him takes one into the territory of outrageous, often non-naturalistic, comedy, but also into a paradoxical notion of the body as sacred, and the gendered body as potentially subversive, via the by-ways of theatricality, censorship and taste.

What reading and writing trauma fiction illuminates about post-traumatic growth.

Angelina Mirabito's PhD in Creative Writing investigated the therapeutic value of reading and writing trauma fiction. Her findings show that it is possible for adult survivors of complex trauma to experience post-traumatic growth from writing an adult survivor of childhood trauma coming of age story.