She, With a Warm Palm, the Skin Over My Spine

She, with a Warm Palm, the Skin over My Spine is a collection of sixnonfiction essays and three vignettes divided into two parts. The first part tells the stories of my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother, and is entitled Home; the second part is entitled Away and consists of travel writing set in Thailand, Egypt and India.

Clarifying creative nonfiction through the personal essay

In a recent issue of TEXT, Matthew Ricketson sought to clarify the ‘boundaries between fiction and nonfiction’. In his capacity as a teacher of the creative nonfiction form he writes, ‘I have lost count of the number of times, in classes and in submitted work, that students have described a piece of nonfiction as a novel’. The confusion thus highlighted is not restricted to Ricketson’s journalism students. In our own university’s creative writing cohort, students also struggle with difficulties in melding the research methodology of the journalist with the language and form of creative writing required to produce nonfiction stories for a 21st century readership.
Currently in Australia creative nonfiction is enthusiastically embraced by publishers and teaching institutions. Works of memoir proliferate in the lists of mainstream publishers, as do anthologies of the essay form. During a time of increasing competition and desire for differentiation between institutions, when graduate outcomes form a basis for marketing university degrees, it is hardly surprising that, increasingly, tertiary writing teachers focus on this genre in their writing programs.
A second tension has arisen in higher education more generally, which affects our writing students’ approaches to tertiary study. The student writers of the 21st century emerge from a digitally literate and socially collaborative generation: the NetGen(eration). From a learner-centric viewpoint, they could be described as time-poor, and motivated by work-integrated learning with its perceived close links to workplace contexts and to writing genres. They seek just-in-time learning to meet their immediate employment needs, which inhibits the development of their capacity to adapt their researching and writing to various genres and audiences.
This article examines issues related to moving these NetGen student writers into the demanding and rapidly expanding creative nonfiction market. It is form rather than genre that denotes creative nonfiction and, we argue, it is the unique features of the personal essay, based as it is on doubt, discovery and the writer’s personal voice that can be instrumental in teaching creative nonfiction writing to our digitally and socially literate cohort of students.

Review essay : insiders, outsiders, and shared stories

The article reviews several books including "Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity," by Catriona Elder, "Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape," by Jeanette Hoorn, and "The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the National Character Since 1770," by John Hirst.

Writer-as-narrator: engaging the debate around the (un)reliable narrator in memoir and the personal essay

Subjective and personal forms of nonfiction writing are enjoying exponential popularity in English language publishing currently, as an interested public engages with ‘true’ stories of society and culture. Yet a paradox exists at the centre of this form of writing. As readers, we want to know who the writer is and what she has to tell us. Yet as writers we use a persona, a constructed character, a narrator who is only partially the writer, to deliver the narrative. How is a writer able to convey ‘true’ stories that are inherently reliant on memory, within a constructed narrative persona?We find a ‘gap’ between the writer and the narrator/protagonist on the page, an empowered creative space in which composition occurs, facilitating a balance between the facts and lived experiences from which ‘true’ stories are crafted, and the acknowledged fallibility of human memory. While the gap between writer and writer-as-narrator provides an enabling space for creative composition, it also creates space for the perception of unreliability. The width of this gap, we argue, is crucial. Only if the gap is small, if writer and writer-as-narrator share a set of passionately held values, can the writer-as-narrator become a believable entity, satisfying the reader with the ‘truth’ of their story.

Disruption and resonance in the personal essay

The personal essay, as one of the most delightfully subjective manifestations of creative nonfiction, explores what is real and tangible, refined through the intimate perspective and curiosity of the writer. In her best works, the personal essayist has the capacity to disrupt her narratives in ways that will resonate with readers who are themselves adjusting to the disruption of their own personal narrative interactions by social media tools. This paper explores the process by which fragmentary episodes become segments of a linked narrative through the capacity of the personal essayist to leap associatively from personal into universal ‘truths’. Segments coalesce into cogent entities, drawn together as a resonant narrative by themes as echoes, or the deliberate juxtaposition of fragments of story. Such segments-as-narrative are based on perceptions of the essay as a disruptive text, which by the nature of its structure reverberates metaphorically beyond the known and the familiar.

Not like my mother : truth and the author in creative nonfiction

This exegesis examines how a writer can effectively negotiate the relationship between author, character, fact and truth, in a work of Creative Nonfiction. It was found that individual truths, in a work of Creative Nonfiction, are not necessarily universal truths due to individual, cultural, historical and religious circumstances. What was also identified, through the examination of published Creative Nonfiction, is a necessity to ensure there are clear demarcation lines between authorial truth and fiction. The Creative Nonfiction works examined, which established this framework for the reader, ensured an ethical relationship between author and audience. These strategies and frameworks were then applied to my own Creative Nonfiction.

Catalogue essay : a thin white line

Objects have consequences, seemingly. They move, atomic, formlessly – when static they are seen. That they vibrate constantly, that they are NOW present, is something we will have to trust the physicists on. They only seem here. Now is their moment of form, but later, who knows? Things SEEM when we recognise our own transience and temporary-ness. We call upon a bevy of senses that forever frustrate us with their limitation, despite our little understanding of what we actually have – is this here? So some forms seem to be telling us to trust our senses – that this world IS as it seems. Their form constantly refines and is refined and refined until in its essentialness it cannot be doubted – it absolutely IS. Is this our eyes? Can we only see it? But light is also a particle, if I remember correctly, so there is some weight to seeing. So to SEEM is also to FEEL,as this light imposes its visual weight upon our skins – we see with every pore of our body.

Creative nonfiction : Granta 104

A 1000-word review of Granta 104 - Fathers : The Men Who Made Us (Allen & Unwin, 2009)

Review essay -- Weber L and Pickering S (2011) Globalization and borders : death at the global frontier

The pertinence of this book cannot be overemphasised. The world’s refugee crisis has reached a two‐decade high with the United Nations recently announcing that ‘displacement is the new 21st century challenge’ (UNHCR 2013). The transnational movement of dislocated peoples fleeing conflict, persecution and poverty is a global responsibility requiring nation states to collaborate for humanitarian resolutions embedded in human rights. However, in times of human rights expansionism, and the relaxation of borders for maximising free‐trade and fiscal prosperity, the movement of people experiencing immense abuse and deprivation has witnessed an increase in draconian regulation within discourses of intolerance and deterrence. Weber and Pickering cogently and emphatically emphasise the human cost of inhumane and populist government immigration and border‐entry polices underpinned by ideologies of retribution, suspicion, and demonisation. It is a moving and engaging narrative: a book that exposes state prejudice and abuse, whilst advocating for the victims who undertake perilous journeys in search of safety from lives of violence and persecution. Moreover, it is a book that pushes ideological boundaries and seeks new criminological horizons, for which the authors must be sincerely congratulated. It is a text of innovation, inspired thinking and long lasting criminological value.

Tactile abstractions [Exhibition Catalogue Essay]

Among the many meanings of abstraction is the focus on images that are at a distance from their origins. This understanding of abstraction is central to Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s layered, textured and sensuous canvas Crossing (2003). The references in this painting to Laotian textile design and creation endows it with the sense of a fabric-like nature, gives it the feel of cloth wrapped around bodies and of threads woven into complex symmetrical patterns. Here, the distance from origins is expressed as a separation from the material forms of Lao culture. At the same time the work is a visual reference to the stretching or bending of forms, the breaking up of shapes in the natural or constructed environment, all of which create an expressive effect through the warm rose grid and visual illusions of movement and travel. This visual play suggests the sense that migration or movement is a means through which cultural forms get recoded and translated. The making of Crossing like many of Savanhdary’s works involved manipulation of the canvas through pricking and poking, and then the application of layers and dots of paint. The overall effect is one of a synthesis of different cultural motifs and the addition of new dimensions to familiar forms. This highlights the centrality of the idea of 'reassemblage’ in abstraction, the processes of remaking of self, of the natural world and of cultural artefacts. Savanhdary constructs intricate laced knots of colour and texture in work which expresses the possibilities presented by travel, migration and the subsequent remixture that emerges upon crossing through different cultural worlds.

Review essay : Crime, risk and money : "The Currency of Justice : Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies" and "Crime and Risk", both by Pat O'Malley

Sharing some closely related themes and a common theoretical orientation based on the governmentality analytic, these are nevertheless two very different contributions to criminological knowledge and theory. The first, The Currency of Justice: Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies (COJ), is a sustained and highly original analysis of that most pervasive yet overlooked feature of modern legal orders; their reliance on monetary sanctions. Crime and Risk (CAR), on the other hand, is a short synoptic overview of the many dimensions and trajectories of risk in contemporary debate and practice, both the practices of crime and the governance of crime. It is one of the first in a new series by Sage, 'Compact Criminology', in which authors survey in little more than a hundred pages some current field of debate. With this small gem, Pat O'Malley has set the bar very high for those who follow. For all its brevity, CAR traverses a massive expanse of research, debates and issues, while also opening up new and challenging questions around the politics of risk and the relationship between criminal risk-taking and the governance of risk and crime. The two books draw together various threads of O'Malley's rich body of work on these issues, and once again demonstrate that he is one of the foremost international scholars of risk inside and outside criminology.