Showing papers in "New Writing in 2013"

Sensualities: Experiencing/Dancing/Writing

Abstract: Through this article I articulate the interplay between writing and improvisational dancing to describe a methodology for an embodied, sensual and experiential mode of writing/dancing in which the boundaries between these two disciplines are blurred. Through a consideration of this writing practice, I argue that, as a form of knowing, it offers an implicit challenge to the normalised economy of academic discourse. Developing out of a ‘practice as research’ project undertaken within The Choreographic Lab (University of Northampton), the article includes extracts of the work ‘Dear Practice …’, in which I, as ‘dancer’, enter into a series of exchanges in the form of letters with my improvisation ‘practice’.

The Recipe for Novelty: Using Bilingualism and Indigenous Literary Genres in an Advanced Level L2 Creative Writing Context in Pakistan

Abstract: With literatures in English asserting their legitimacy all across the globe in the post-colonial backdrop, what came to the fore was the predilection of various ‘Native’ writers in the former colonies to play with various indigenous literary genres while writing in English. This ‘hybridization’ (Bhabha 1994, 5) of literature has indeed generated ‘various and complex results’ (Eliot). While Harper views Creative Writing as a ‘form of face-making’ (Harper 2010), we can further imply that it is an interaction with faces that act and react within their own cultures. Therefore, in the case of second language creative writers, Creative Writing allows a synergy between the target language and the local literary paradigms. Keeping these trends in view, certain activities can be designed in an advanced class of second language Creative Writers, especially in a Pakistani context, since the variety of the local literary paradigms can allow an easeful substitution of stylistic patterns and lexical items. Thi...

Creative Praxis as a Form of Academic Discourse

Abstract: In most arts and communication courses, the students' main vehicle for expression of their research findings is the critical essay, the dissertation or thesis. But in Creative Writing and other practice-based disciplines, the student's main mode of expression is what Lincoln and Denzin call a ‘performance based’ creative artefact resulting from practice-led research. In this paper I will give examples of performance based research in four fictional pieces, ‘The Lives of Animals’ and Diary of a Bad Year, narratives in which J.M. Coetzee uses fictional devices in order to explore issues that are traditionally articulated by conventional forms of critical analysis; ‘Just a Story’, a student narrative assignment on meta-fiction which itself uses meta-fictional devices to make its point; and ‘The Absence of Theory’, a paper I wrote in the form of a short story, which explores theories of creativity that underpin creative writing workshops. In these stories, I aim to show how the creative language of the short ...

Negative Polarity in Eavan Boland's ‘The Famine Road’

Abstract: The essay that follows outlines a cognitive stylistic framework to identify and analyse the pattern of negation in the poem ‘The Famine Road’ by Eavan Boland (1975) and the effects engendered on the reader through manipulation of the text worlds (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007) created by the poem. It also traces the various voices of this polyphonic work and examines their interactions in terms of Stockwell's (2009) model of literary resonance. The framework is derived from a combination of Givon's (1993) classification of different types of negation, text world theory (Werth 1999) and particularly Gavins (2007) development of text world theory to account for how metaphors draw together two often conflicting text worlds; and Stockwell's (2009) model of literary resonance which examines, identifies and analyses the various processes which act on literary figures as they are maintained, allowed to decay or are occluded by new figures. The analysis demonstrates how Boland manipulates these features in ord...

‘An Extremely Pleasant New Kind of World’: Hughes Mearns and the Open-Access Approach to Creative Writing

Abstract: This article examines the pedagogy of Hughes Mearns, the arguable founder of academic creative writing in the United States in the 1930's and 1940's, in order to better understand issues of access and educational purpose for creative writing instruction. Mearns' belief in the imaginative ability of all students paralleled cultural messages at the time about the collective rather than selective ability of individuals to write creatively and the importance of providing individuals with creative writing instruction. The open-access view is evident in interdisciplinary approaches to creative writing including CWAC – or Writing Across the Curriculum initiatives that use creative genres to teach low- and high-stakes writing. Overall, the affirmative vision of creative writing as an academic pursuit that needs to be widely taught is a view that should remain central to the purpose of Creative Writing Studies.

Writing trauma : affected in the act

Abstract: Writing is an affective process. When the writer writes creatively it is ‘the affective response in the word choice and its resonance for the text's forms and patterns, and other words around it, that determine language use’ (Freiman 2009: 5). Yet this resonance does not occur solely within the text, nor even between text and reader. Writing entails not only the expression of affect, but the writer's experience of it. Or, as Elspeth Probyn (2010: 86) puts it, as we write ‘affects can seem to get into our bodies’. Such contagious affect becomes ‘not a representation of the other, but a rendering’ (Gibbs 2010: 193). Not only does the writer create the body of the text, the text changes the writing body – particularly when the writing itself is intensely affective. Drawing on the affect theories of Gilles Deleuze and Silvan Tomkins, this paper theorises these affective relations of writer and traumatic text. What emerges is a theoretical yet visceral account of transformative resonance of affect in ...

Poetic Self-Inventions: Hoaxing, Misrepresentation and Creative License in Poetry

Abstract: Poets have always created personae, inventing masks through which they may voice their works. Even contemporary lyric poetry – a key strand of which emphasises autobiography and confession – presents a multiplicity of voices, many of them at least implicitly claiming to sincerely register authentic feeling and experience and to tell the ‘truth’. But are truth claims in poetry – even ‘confessional’ poetry – a masquerade? Further, in acknowledging that Romanticism and the primacy of the individual and subjective voice in poetry was partly ushered in by a hoaxer, Thomas Chatterton, how much does the post-Romantic lyric retain a vestige of the hoaxer's art? As poets project themselves into imaginative spaces in their poetry can their work ever be said to be authentic or sincere? Starting with some of Simon Critchley's perspectives on poetry I will discuss works by Thomas Moore, Anne Sexton and Emily Dickinson, among others, in order to address these issues.

The Way Ahead: The Teaching of Hyper-narrative at Bournemouth University

Abstract: Interactive, multi-media storytelling continues to excite the imagination of writers and visual artists, and yet still has not crossed from academia and the artistic avant-garde into mainstream consciousness. Considering the possibilities for creative expression and for wonderful reading experiences, it is still surprising that ‘hyper-narrative’ is so unknown. Unless something changes in the way writers and readers gain access to hyper-narrative, both as an expressive means and an entertainment, then hyper-literature (as opposed to narrative gaming, which of course has become hugely commercially successful) might well remain in its current backwater. This paper aims to help enhance the visibility of hyper-narrative by developing the teaching of it to creative writers, who are interested in the form but nervous of sophisticated multi-media writing and design tools. The paper therefore first offers a guide to creating stories that incorporate multi-media and interactivity. It then describes a softw...

Creative Writing Praxis as Queer Becoming

Abstract: This paper examines how writing practice and engagement with textual artefacts (literature) can trigger an ongoing queer becoming. The paper discusses how the queer subject and subjectivity are constructed in the production and reception of queer texts. In other words, it explores how queer subjects are constituted by the processes and practices of reading and writing. Michel Foucault advocated an ongoing assembly and disassembly of subjectivity that constituted a kind of self-bricolage; a making and re-making of subjectivity that he saw as an aesthetic struggle towards an artistic ideal. Foucault described this process as an ethics of the self. An ethics of the self, or self-bricolage through writing, is a practice that has the potential to inform and alter the way subjects actively constitute themselves. Furthermore, creative and critical texts arising out of a queered aesthetics of existence can act as ‘models’ that strongly influence the ongoing becoming, and ethical refinement, of queer subjectivities.

Betwixt and Between: Creative Writing and Scholarly Expectations

Abstract: I have written this article from my own point of view as a full-time lecturer of English who is also a publishing and broadcasting essayist. Though I teach composition and writing skills on a daily basis in my college (a college of arts), my own creative work is worth little in terms of measurable scholarly activity. I find this discrepancy ironic. My institute is known for its teaching excellence, its links to industry, and its emphasis on transferable ‘real world’ learning. Yet refereed research remains the more prized form of scholarly activity, even though, by its nature, refereed research is directed at other academic insiders.

Real Time Critical Responses – Potential for Creative Writing?

Abstract: In the 2010 global video-linked creative experiment ‘Unmade!’ (see the report in New Writing, 8.1), multiple art form practitioners that is, those in Creative Writing, Drama and the Ceramic Arts met in a virtual global environment and produced a variety of creative works. The experiment was a wonderful success with the addition also of some technological experimentation and media artistry involving a fine media production team at the University of Montevallo, Alabama. However, something struck me, and as 2010 turned over into 2011 and moved along further, that thought grew bigger and more urgent. What struck me was the considerable degree of effort that was involved in setting up the 2010 link, and in maintaining it. The TV production team was tremendous and ensured it could happen, of course. But ‘Unmade!’ was without doubt a delicate combination of television production and creative practice webcast, TV production team working very hard to support creative practitioners, creative practitioners expertly beamed in and out and recorded but not independently present. To enable such a linked creative event to happen therefore involved two complete sets of people and two coordinated sets of timetables. What would have happened if the production team timetable had been less flexible? What would happen at any time if the kinds of technology we used in 2010 were not readily available to the creative practitioners, if they were somewhere independent of a university, for example, or in part of the world where even the most basic digital technology was a luxury? With these things in mind, and a group of colleagues keenly willing to participate, it was decided to hold a second event on 11April 2012. However, this time the plan was that we’d reduce the technological components to their most simple, their most portable and their most self-sufficient. This effectively removed one potential outcome the discoveries made by the production team during the event but in doing so it made the relatively low-tech flexibility something we could explore.

Self-Narrative as Performative Act: Student Autobiographers and the Postmodern Self

Abstract: This article traces how a cohort of students enrolled in a self-narrative writing course in New York began to (reluctantly) engage with the course material, including an introduction to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's constituents of autobiographical writing, as well as their own narrative experiments and investigations and their self-reflective writing. As a result, many of them found a deeper awareness of audience – as writers and as readers through the recognition of the postmodern, linguistic self and the autobiography as a performative act. By letting go of the idea of the autobiographical self as a fixed, stable entity, they were able to write for an actual audience, in fact, allow that audience to influence how they constructed their life narratives and how they understood their lives.

A New Office On Logan Street: The Demons in a Room of One's Own

Abstract: The writer recounts constructing a ‘perfect’ new studio in Denver where she intends to begin a ‘sixties memoir. To her surprise she discovers she can't write and blames the space. She describes the perilous journey that led her to discover that she does her best work in a Room of her Own, consecrated by Virginia Woolf. Did the great writer imagine that her iconic Room, a symbol of resistance to male oppression, could engender a block? No, and almost a century later, that Room remains an altar in American women writers’ collective consciousness, often cited and discussed. Yet when the author examines those writers' narratives about their creative process, she discovers that many become Victorian ‘Madwomen in the Attic’ in their sanctified Rooms. The Room figures as a problematic space to avoid or transform in works by May Sarton, Bonnie Friedman, Maya Angelou, Dorothy Allison and others. Ultimately the writer resolves her paralysis by escaping to a coffee shop, and questions the real reasons why her block ...

Writing for Adolescents: A Conversation with Kenneth Oppel

Abstract: The following interview was completed by Kenneth Oppel by two emails on 1 December 2010 and on 11 June 2012. It explores his views about writing for and about adolescents, and offers a thematic investigation of some recurring tropes and motifs in his writing. Oppel’s most autobiographical novel, Half Brother, earned the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award, the Canadian Library Association’s Book of the Year for Children Award, and the CLA Young Adult Book Award, and was selected by the American Library Association as a 2011 Best Book for Young Adults. Oppel is the bestselling author of many books for children and young adults. His novel Airborn won the Governor General’s Award for children’s literature, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award, and was named a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by the American Library Association. In 2009, the book spent six months in outer space aboard the International Space Station. It was carried in the personal flight kit of Canadian astronaut Dr. Robert Thirsk. It travelled 125 million kilometres, making it possibly one of the most travelled books in history. Airborn’s sequel, Skybreaker, was a New York Times bestseller, and was named Children’s Book of the Year by London’s The Times. Oppel’s Silverwing Saga, told entirely from the point of view of bats, has sold over a million copies worldwide, and received the Mr Christie’s Book Award, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, and many other honours. Kenneth Oppel lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.

Surface Tensions: Framing the Flow of a Poetry-Film Collaboration

Abstract: The article is a record of collaboration between a poet and a filmmaker – one undertaken under several people's gaze, becoming aware of itself through the perspectives of the visual and the verbal artist, of the critic and creative maker. It observes the process from the poet's and the filmmaker's sides of the interface, in the language and thought processes that come naturally to each, exploring particularly the use of metaphor to throw light upon the collaborators' investigation of poetry-film. As the project progressed it revealed the tensions between the participants' allegiance to the idea of collaboration and the urge to retain control of one's own medium and ways of working. Tracking the collaboration throughout each stage of development, from initial conversations, through false turns and periods of apparent impasse, the article records the inputs and shifts that led to a final synthesis and publication in an unexpected form.

Light the Towel: Narrative and the Negotiated Unconscious

Abstract: This investigation is a practice-based inquiry It takes place in the context of writing and editing a novel manuscript: The earth does not get fat (Prendergast 2012) The unpublished novel manuscript is a fractured narrative, a tale told in multiple first-person voices One of the problems the writer encountered, as the novel developed, was a problem from the perspective of logic and continuity: the stories did not fit together in a linear way As a result, the writer felt estranged from the writing and, at the same time, strangely familiar with it Despite having produced the narrative, the writer felt that it was ‘other’ This paper summarises the writer's methodology; it explains the writer's attachment to this fractured style of telling This fractured style is assessed within the context of the mind's ability to produce its effects without full consciousness The analysis of authorial intention therefore focuses upon the influence of altered states of consciousness upon narrative material

‘Fiction is the Final Draft’: Don DeLillo's Advice to Fiction Writers

Abstract: This paper collects and analyses some of Don DeLillo's writerly counsel, with an eye to how this advice might promise fresh ways to consider the aims of writing fiction and the fiction writer's place in the contemporary world. Specifically, DeLillo is concerned with the writer's relationship to a contemporary culture that falls most readily into patterns of mass consumption, assimilation, and waste. To counter this, DeLillo asks the fiction writer to labor to find the smallest moments of the individual life and to confront a loss of individuation.

Internationalising the MFA

Abstract: Once, in a hotel room in what was then commonly referred to as an ‘eastern European country’, I sat with a Hungarian literary critic, a British publisher, a Romanian memoirist and Czeslaw Milosz, t...

Writing and Dreaming Primary and Primal Scenes

Abstract: This article examines the concept of the primal scene in the broad context of narrative production, literary theory and the writing process. It will investigate how primal scenes, and variants of the term such as primary scenes, hold a pivotal position between imagination and memory, between factual accounts and fictions, between history and fantasy. Such scenes not only initiate novels, sparking first imaginative investigations, but they also feature in the later writing process and can motivate the writing throughout. The concept and terminology comes from Freud, and this essay will discuss those origins along with other contexts. The notion of primal scenes has been scrutinised in a wider psychological perspective and also by narrative theorists. These critical approaches offer possible links to testimonies and theories about the creative process, and the discussion will look in particular at a novel and essay by Rose Tremain, alongside other examples, including consideration of the developmen...

Poetic lives: The English Experience in Asia

Abstract: As English becomes more widely used around the world, it has also been increasingly adopted as a language for literary expression by writers who learnt it as an additional language. This is particularly so in post-colonial settings. Just as varieties of English have developed in different parts of the world, literatures in English with regional colour have also emerged. Yet, little is known about how learners of English become published writers in English. Understanding this phenomenon is important as it has implications for the cultivation of literature or literatures, the design of creative writing programmes and, more generally, the teaching of English. As poetry is one of the earliest types of writing to appear in such contexts, it seems useful to address this question by studying the development of poets. This essay offers a model of how poets develop and connects individual growth with the engendering of literary communities. The model is illustrated with the experience of five poets, one e...

The Same River: thirteen variations on Heraclitus

Abstract: Ποταµοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς έµβαἰνοµέν τe καἱ οὐκ ἐµβαἰνοµέν, eἶµἐν τe καἱ οὐκ eἶµeν. µeν. We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not. DK B49a (Diels, H. and W. Kranz, Die Fragmen...

A Matter for Debate

Abstract: the personal and idiosyncratic nature of the two apparently distinct realms are the artistic and technical business of the quest for beauty and truth may the practice of making changes to the variety of representation is the material changes for which the unremarked discrepancy is the action on the stage below the way characters tend to be the desired leap of faith into the next bit of excitement is the price of downplaying the the occasional misreading of the purpose for which it had the much awaited edition of the foundations upon which the sort of fluidity between the story we think we know the resources generated by the complexity evident in the root cause of this lay the paths of songs which the shortlist consisted of the text’s intertwining of the incomplete nature of the sort of fluidity which the dramatic model that the usual invocation of the limitations are not the divine scheme of the dispute in which the rhetoric is often the desire to collect the problem of the the implications of the mechanisms of the desecration of the way in which the tradition of the company of the entrance of the concept of the context of

‘Finding the Through-line’: A Portrait of an Innovative Creative Writing Organisation

Abstract: This creative nonfiction essay uses portraiture, a method developed by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, to examine the ways in which Grub Street, a creative writing organization for adults in Boston, USA, acts a support for adults' learning, growth, and development. In addition, this essay situates the organization within a broader context of nonprofit organizations designed to give voice and empowerment through writing especially to those who are traditionally underserved. Through the identification of themes such as finding a “through-line” or narrative to one's own writing, and by extension to one's own life, this work suggests that the same organization can have at times quite different meanings for its participants, but nonetheless unites them in the desire to integrate life and thought into creating one's best work.

Quantum Physics, Physics Fiction, and All Things Await

Abstract: This paper explores how elements of quantum physics might be applied to the creation of a novel. It offers an overview of the ‘Physics Fiction’ tradition. The paper considers how such elements might be used in a novel and addresses how these elements can work to support larger concerns of the text. The author provides specific examples of such applications in his own work.

Telling and Not Telling: A Conversation with Marthe Jocelyn

Abstract: Toronto-born Marthe Jocelyn is the award-winning author and illustrator of over 25 books for children and teenagers. Her range includes board books, picture books, chapter books, novels, and non-fiction. Her picture book Hannah's Collections was short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award for Illustration. Her novel Mable Riley won the inaugural TD Canadian Children's Literature Award. Jocelyn is the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Vicky Metcalf Award for her body of work. For more information, visit her website: www.marthejocelyn.com This interview explores Jocelyn's views about children's writing and her writing process behind Folly (2010), a finalist for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People. It examines her views about narrative focalisation, Victorian writing, and her research into the Foundling Hospital. Jocelyn responded to my questions through two emails on September 24 and 27, 2011.

Don't Show Us, Tell Us: An Interview with Jean Little

Abstract: Jean Little was born in Taiwan but has been living in Canada since the age of seven. She began writing as a child and has never stopped, in spite of the challenge of her blindness. Despite limited vision, she attended regular school and graduated in 1955 from the University of Toronto with an Honours Degree in English. Little taught handicapped children until 1962. Her first book Mine for Keeps, published that year, won the Little, Brown Children's Book Award. Since then, she has written over 30 works, including novels, picture books, autobiography, poetry and short stories. Written with a talking-computer, her books have been translated into 10 languages and have won many awards, including a Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award (for her Dear Canada title, Orphan At My Door), the Ruth Schwartz Award, the Canada Council Literature Prize, The Vicky Metcalf Award and the Boston Globe Horn-Book Honor Book Award. Her other Dear Canada books include Brothers Far From Home (2003), If I Di...

Narrating from ‘Nowheres and Notimes’: Tense, Parataxis, and Trauma in Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss

Abstract: Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss (1997) recounts the author's sexual relationship with her father, which took place when she was an adult. This article examines Harrison's use of the present tense and a paratactic structure to demonstrate how they affect the memoir's construction of time and space. It argues that these devices are particularly effective at conveying the trauma that the narrator experiences during the four-year affair. However, the present tense and parataxis can also create a tonally ‘flat’ prose that some readers interpret as lacking affect. This can have important implications for memoirists who choose to write a present tense, paratactic text.

‘I was everywhere that Jesus was, but I couldn't find him anywhere’: Arthur Slade on Life Writing and Megiddo's Shadow

Abstract: The following interview investigates Arthur Slade's experiences of working in Saskatchewan, Canada, and the writing and research processes for his young adult's novel Megiddo's Shadow. Slade was raised in the Cypress Hills of southwest Saskatchewan and began writing at an early age. He received an Honours Degree in English from the University of Saskatchewan, spent several years writing for advertising, and has been writing fiction full-time for 15 years. He is the author of 17 books, including Dust (which won the Governor's General Award for Children's Literature), Tribes, and the international bestseller The Hunchback Assignments. He currently lives in Saskatoon. The following interview was completed via email on March 12, 2012.

Anybodies: The Fact, The Fiction and The Make-Believe of Referencing

Abstract: David Shields' Reality Hunger (2010) is a collage of ideas; sources are not included to illustrate the notion that ideas are not owned. His approach, dynamic and performative, also creates a denial of the body (as symbol, as imagined author). This essay explores the relationship between text and body by considering how we, as readers and writers, might consider an author's or other artist's body to be. Whether we imagine it to be the literal form, which we might not know and have no experience of, or something more metaphorical. Work by authors that explores the notion of body is examined and used to consider how we can understand the body of an author as something solid but subject to constant change and interpretation. The body, then, becomes a place of fiction and non-fiction; referencing too becomes both an act of fictionalising and making real another author's body.