Confessions of a Non-Emigrant

Confessions of a Non-Emigrant is innovative in combining two areas of investigation in creative writing and literature. I investigate both the idea of life writing as therapeutic for the author, and the (reflexive and enabling) blurred boundary between life writing and fiction. I set up a dynamic where the narrative of the story (fictionalised memoir) proposes the therapeutic advantage of utilising one’s life-story in fiction (increased sense of coherent identity and agency) and a perspective (through the device of multiple selves), on the constructedness and instability of identity. I mobilise and explore Pennebaker’s argument that making a narrative of one’s life enhances the writer’s sense of a connection with community and place (represented by Brisbane).

Practice as Method : The Ex/centric Fixations Project

In this chapter, I consider the efficacy of creative practice as a research method, concentrating specifically on its applications in the performing arts, using one of my own recent projects, The Ex/centric Fixations Project (2009), as an example.

A child's dreaming: Looking at illustrated Indigenous stories for children

The traditional teaching stories of Australia's ancient Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures can find a new telling in today's literature for children. Codifiers of wisdom, laden with metaphor, these narratives have already inspired wonder in the young for thousands of generations. Today such stories are represented by well over one hundred titles in children's illustrated books. Some demonstrate literary and ethical qualities showing sensitivity and respect for originating cultures. Others do not

5 examples of transmedia storytelling and activism

Transmedia storytelling and transmedia activism both afford and demand new approaches to telling our stories. Contemporary transmedia utilises multiple tools to engage audiences by creating stories that offer unique approaches to narrative, character, setting and innovative ways of looking at social issues. Here are 5 of the best recent examples.

Fresh Cuttings: A Celebration of Fiction and Poetry from UQP's Black Writing Series

As the first anthology of UQP's indigenous-authored books, Fresh Cuttings represents the very best of fiction and poetry publishing from UQP's Black Australian Writing series. An introduction by the editors and a biography of each author is included.

Green: Exploring the aestheticized use of chroma-key techniques and technologies in two intermedial productions

Peggy Shaw’s RUFF, (USA 2013) and Queensland Theatre Company’s collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, Total Dik!, (Australia 2013) overtly and evocatively draw on an aestheticized use of the cinematic techniques and technologies of Chroma Key to reveal the tensions in their production and add layers to their performances. In doing so they offer invaluable insight where the filmic and theatrical approaches overlap. This paper draws on Eckersall, Grehan and Scheer’s New Media Dramaturgy (2014) to reposition the frame as a contribution to intermedial theatre and performance practices in light of increasing convergence between seemingly disparate discourses. In RUFF, the scenic environment replicates a chroma-key ‘studio’ which facilitates the reconstruction of memory displaced after a stroke. RUFF uses the screen and projections to recall crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands, and an eclectic line of eccentric family members living inside Shaw. While the show pays tribute to those who have kept her company across decades of theatrical performance, use of non-composited chroma-key technique as a theatrical device and the work’s taciturn revelation of the production process during performance, play a central role in its exploration of the juxtaposition between its reconstructed form and content. In contrast Total Dik! uses real-time green screen compositing during performance as a scenic device. Actors manipulate scale models, refocus cameras and generate scenes within scenes in the construction of the work’s examination of an isolated Dictator. The ‘studio’ is again replicated as a site for (re)construction, only in this case Total Dik! actively seeks to reveal the process of production as the performance plays out. Building on RUFF, and other works such as By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, (2012) and Hotel Modern’s God’s Beard (2012), this work blends a convergence of mobile technologies, models, and green screen capture to explore aspects of transmedia storytelling in a theatrical environment (Jenkins, 2009, 2013). When a green screen is placed on stage, it reads at once as metaphor and challenge to the language of theatre. It becomes, or rather acts, as a ‘sign’ that alludes to the nature of the reconstructed, recomposited, manipulated and controlled. In RUFF and in Total Dik!, it is also a place where as a mode of production and subsequent reveal, it adds weight to performance. These works are informed by Auslander (1999) and Giesenkam (2007) and speak to and echo Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006). This paper’s consideration of the integration of studio technique and live performance as a dynamic approach to multi-layered theatrical production develops our understanding of their combinatory use in a live performance environment.

Transmedia as ‘Unmixed Media’ aesthetics

What is ‘transmedia’? This chapter attempts to understand what this phenomenon is from a transhistorical perspective. The transhistorical nature of media combinations is interrogated in light of media specificity and in relation to the key phenomena of Intermedia. Transmedia is argued to be a transhistorical urge towards unifying that which has been artificially estranged.

Butterfly: the dark fluidity of suburban life

The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) Annual Conference, Forth Worth, Texas, 9–11 April 2015. The dark fluidity of Melbourne suburbia in Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly (2009) is a fictional account of the suburban family life of the Coyles in 1980’s outer suburban Melbourne written from the perspective of teenager Plum Coyle. The Coyle family at first glance appear to be living a textbook example of the suburban lifestyle developed from the 19th century and sustained well into the twentieth century, in which housing design and gender roles were clearly defined and “connected with a normative heterosexuality” (Johnson 2000: 94). The Australian suburban space is also well documented as a place where people often have to contend with oppressive rigid social and cultural ideals (ie Rowse 1978, Johnson 1993, Turnbull 2008, and Flew 2011). There is a tendency to group “suburb” as one monolithic space but this paper will argue that Hartnett exposes the dark fluidity and the complexity of the term, just as she reveals that despite or perhaps because of the planned nature of suburbia, the lives that people live are often just as complex.

Gentlemen Songsters

This project was initially envisaged as a compare and contrast proposition between two performances in music venues, a year apart, at the Melbourne Ukulele Festivals 2013 and 2014. The covert intermedial incorporation of scripted, theatrical elements into an ostensibly musical performance was the initial focus. However, the opportunity arose to continue the creative practice towards a performance outcome at the Queensland Cabaret Festival at the Brisbane Powerhouse in June of 2014. This expanded project was titled ‘Gentlemen Songsters’ and enabled a refinement and honing of the event beyond what was initially planned. In addition to the composition, recording and curation of original songs, this process involved two cycles of performance, videography, transcription, re-writing and re-performance. Led by this creative practice, the research investigated the potential for sonata and song cycle as influences on performance structure, in the creation and performance of Composed Theatre. This manifested as a theatricalisation of compositional processes. Performed by ‘Tyrone and Lesley’, performance personae of David Megarrity (lyricist/composer/performer/ukulele) and Samuel Vincent (composer, musician, performer), Gentlemen Songsters played at the Brisbane Powerhouse as part of its inaugural Queensland Cabaret Festival on June 13 2014

"Unruly women and semiotic spaces": Jay Verney's a mortality tale

Written at a time of significant changes for women and for women writers in Queensland, Australia, Jay Verney's A Mortality Tale (1994), privileges women's experiences of place and seeks to redeem the feminine from its entrapment in masculine stories/discourses of self and place. This chapter draws on Julia Kristeva's conceptualisation of the semiotic as a way of reading Verney's witty and reflective re-articulation of phallocentric orderings of spatiality and gender.

Scripted drama: The long wait for football to be taken seriously as a literary subject

This article is a work of non-fiction which draws on my research in football fiction.

Musicalising theatre, theatricalising music: Writing and performing intermediality in composed theatre

This investigation combined musicality and theatricality in the creation of four shows: Bear with Me, The Empty City, Gentlemen Songsters and Warmwaters. Led by creative practice, the research identified four polyvalences that characterise Composed Theatre, a transformational artistic domain which offers distinct challenges for performance makers. These include tensions and resolutions between compositional and theatrical thinking; music and words; setlist and script; and finally persona and character. The research finds that these interplays not only lend Composed Theatre its distinct qualities, but offer a potential set of balances to strike for writers, performers, composers and musicians who mix music and theatre in intermedial performance.