Weaving textual tapestries: weaving the 'Italian woman-writer' into the social fabric

A tapestry is a fabric in which multicoloured threads are interwoven to produce a pictorial design. The design of a tapestry often seems three-dimensional with layers of interwoven images of people and events from various times past and present. I use the tapastry as a motif or metaphor to describe the bordering and interweaving of my 'multiple lifeworlds' (Cope & Kalantzis 8) as an Italian Australian woman, academic, writer and social activist. Within and between each .of these worlds are points of tension and confluence, questions and emotions that motivate my own research and writing, and motivate my work with young people to articulate their own 'multiple lifeworlds' through writing
and art.

Relocating the writer's voice - from voice to story and beyond

Voice has been a persistent and recurring metaphor in English teaching. Conceptually, it took centre stage in Australia in the 1980s through writing process pedagogies, where students were advised to find their own voices in writing, teachers were advised to listen to student voices, and a 'clear personal voice' in writing was regarded as the mark of an effective writer (Gilbert 1990, p. 61). Voice has also played a central role in a variety of critical and emancipatory pedagogies where it has been used as a motivation to write, as a mode of politicisation, and as a way to understand and disrupt patriarchy and other oppressive social formations.

Sleepwalking into the mirror : panic and the thin skin of a writer

This text interwoven with artworks by Elizabeth McQueen explores the act of writing and this writer’s search for a narrative form which, after Kafka, fuses dream and reality. Escaping from the back door of my PhD research, which has entered such liminal realities as sleepwalking and autism as a way of challenging familiar boundaries of western normative thought, this text explores a slightly different boundary transgression: a terrifying fusion of reality and writing when late one dark (but not stormy) night a character from my novel appeared at my back window.

7 questions with award-winning writer and poet Maria Takolander

 Maria Takolander is interviewed by Danielle Williams.

Like a volcano waiting to erupt : The Australian Yiddish writer Pinchas Goldhar (1901-1947)

 Biographical essay outlining the tragic career of the Australian Yiddish writer Pinchas Goldhar.