Works by Duc Dau, Belinda Rule, Diwakar Gautam, Stephanie Green, Md Mujib Ullah, Mrashall Moore, Ryan O’Neill, Jane Downing, Caitlin Burns, Christos Constantine, Ian C Smith, Lauren Pitt, Julia Prendergast, and Nikki Wong.
Since the Australian Society of Authors piloted Australia’s first mentorships for creative writers in 1995, programs connecting emerging authors with guidance from established industry professionals have become an established part of the nation’s literary landscape. Yet over this thirty-year period, only one academic study of Australian writing mentorship practices outside of the academy has been undertaken (Krauth & Baranay, 2002). Using Krauth and Baranay’s survey as a comparison point, this paper re-examines the Australian field to map the availability and practices of creative writing mentorship in 2025. It finds that mentorship remains a popular activity, centred on creating pathways to equity for writers who are underrepresented in Australian publishing. However, rather than being offered as a stand-alone, dyadic practice, it is now frequently supplemented by other activities that seek to develop emerging writers and strengthen communities of practice. As hybrid forms for developing and guiding writers evolve, mentoring appears increasingly likely to come from within communities of shared cultural experience and to be only one element among multiple practices that provide support and enrich author networks. The article concludes by suggesting further pathways for research into creative writing mentorship. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following content may contain voices or names of people who have died.
As creative writing researchers, we are often expected to talk in and about writing’s forms. For this “article,” we set out to discover how collective thinking shapes form through creativecritical writing, investigating what emerges when creative writers across disciplines move through their respective thinking and forming of forms in a shared space. This article examines how collective authorship influences form. In Movement One, the authors explore their individual relationships with (the limits of) writing forms; Movement Two considers what form is possible when we “form” together through exchange, debate and play; Movement Three exits the more “playful” space of creative exchange to reflect more critically on our collective form-ing, before Movement Four offers a spatiotemporal metaphor for that form-ing. Creative writing academics are, it seems, at the forefront of expanding scholarly “forms” of discourse; we offer this creativecritical article as a contribution to this evolving literature, especially in relation to collective or collaborative writing scholarship.
This article examines zombie fiction as a subgenre of horror and considers its relationship to the broader category of speculative fiction. It argues that zombie stories can provide writers with an appropriate metaphor to address the polycrisis, noting the challenges of scope and scale often raised in writing climate fiction and adequately addressing grand challenges. It observes how, unlike other monster stories, zombie narratives reflect a change in the story world and in turn focus on the nature and adaptability of humanity within a state of existential crisis. This work draws on academic literature and narratives within the zombie genre (across several mediums), as well as climate fiction, to create a parallel between these two modes of storytelling. Finally, the author provides a reflection on how he applies these ideas within his forthcoming novel, The Garden.
Donna Lee Brien reviews Nigel Krauth’s Island Horizon: Fictions, Nonfictions ; Elizabeth Walton reviews Loribelle Spirovski’s White Hibiscus: A portrait in words and David Stavanger’s The Drop Off ; Denise Beckton reviews Juliet A Paine’s The Tempus Imperium ; Jen Webb reviews Julia Prendergast’s Blent ; Andrew Leggett reviews Phil Brown’s Confessions of a Minor Poet ; Mellie Green reviews Anna Donaldson and Natt Shank’s Derek ; Charlie de Salis reviews Matthew Hooton’s Everything Lost, Everything Found ; Claire Watson reviews Barrina South’s Makarra ; Tarla Kramer reviews Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities ; and Jocelyn Hargrave reviews Benjamin Sheppard et al.’s Composite City .
This article explores connections between discrete ekphrastic poems that address the same work of visual art: Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889). Contemporary poems about this painting continue to proliferate and new works are often influenced by previously published poems on the artwork, elaborating on or modifying content in the previous poems. In such cases, the earlier poems may be understood as part of the new poem’s ekphrastic inheritance. We explore how such poems, when considered together, constitute a form of enchainment, linking related poetic ideas and tropes. In particular, we discuss Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night” (1961), W. D. Snodgrass’s “Van Gogh: ‘The Starry Night’” (1968), Robert Fagles’s “The Starry Night” (1979), William Virgil Davis’s “Starry Night” (2007) and Elizabeth Spires’s “Starry Night” (2017). Various ekphrastic poems about van Gogh’s painting appear to write back to one another and these ekphrastic connections demonstrate that contemporary poetic ekphrases may be a product of multivalent literary influences as well as being direct responses to an artwork. In such cases, poetic ekphrasis moves well beyond James A. W. Heffernan’s often cited definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation”. This article introduces the terms ekphrastic inheritance and enchainment.
This article investigates how hyflex pedagogy can enhance the learning experiences of undergraduate creative writing students by supporting real-time idea generation and sustained creative development regardless of attendance mode. A complex skill requiring consistent educator support, creative writing is commonly taught in a workshop-style setting, yet hybrid and asynchronous learning formats often limit opportunities for dynamic peer interaction and feedback. To address this, three hyflex activities were integrated into Reading and Writing Genre Texts, a semester-long undergraduate subject, that explores genre through critical and creative lenses. Hyflex, defined as a hybrid-flexible participation model, offers students choices in how they engage with learning, aiming to foster inclusivity and sustained engagement. Supported by an Adobe Innovation Grant, the activities were designed to promote collaboration and independent work through the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS). This study evaluates the effectiveness of these activities using participation metrics, clickstream data, and student feedback surveys. Findings reveal how students engaged with the activities and whether they perceived them as beneficial to the development of their creative craft. The article concludes with recommendations for designing and evaluating hyflex activities in creative writing education, contributing to broader discussions on technology-enhanced learning in higher education.
A cornerstone of the Australian federal government’s 2023 National Cultural Policy, Revive: A Place for Every Story and a Story for Every Place – the first formal federal arts policy in Australia in more than a decade – has been the establishment of the office of a national poet laureate, whose objectives according to legislation are twofold: to “promote poetry,” and to “mentor up and coming poets” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2023, p. 69). Across international iterations of poet laureateships, there is a common understanding of the role as a means by which national acknowledgment can be made of an individual’s distinguished contributions over time, and that the individual poet will champion the cause of poetry. The role of mentorship for a poet laureate is less clear. This paper explores the Australian National Cultural Policy’s novel framing of the poet laureate role as a form of mentorship by offering a comparative analysis of international laureateship models within the context of current mentorship theory and practice to consider how it might frame or expand notions of mentorship.
Where Lauren Berlant’s crisis ordinariness asks us to step away from trauma theory and recognise how we are mostly treading water in an increasingly problematic world, Ann Cvetkovich presents depression as a sociopolitical response to structural inequality. Responding to Cvetkovich’s call for performative writing which combines embodied subjectivity with intellectual inquiry – and Lauren Elkin’s ode to the art monster, “with her diaristic indulgence and her personal clutter” – this autotheoretical investigation follows a feminist, queer imperative to write through symptoms of depression and systemic brokenness, embracing resistant modes of navel-gazing (Febos), ventriloquism (Poletti), autotheory (Fournier), autoforms (King) and diaristic indulgence through creative practice research. A series of mini-manifestoes invites an interleaving of diaries with theory.
In our call for papers for this special issue, we solicited submissions of/about all modes of life writing that consider experiences, relationality, and intersubjectivity beyond the human. We posed the following questions to our potential collaborators: • How do we write the abundance of more-than-human and nonhuman life in which we situate our own? • What forms emerge when lives aren’t coded via anthropocentric timelines? • How might anthropogenic climate change prompt urgent new forms of life writing that exceed and entangle human subjectivities? As the essays and creative works within this special issue attest, such questions were only a partial list of possible lines of enquiry when it comes to life writing beyond the human. But all of these lines of enquiry are underpinned by a desire to undo the myth of human superiority. In this special issue of Text, we are thrilled to include contributions by postgraduate students, early career researchers, and established writers and scholars. Each contributor brings their unique orientation to the theme and its provocations, writing into and through the human as an always ambiguous and permeable category, whose boundaries shimmer and smudge in connection with vibrant material, technologies, animals, environments, illness, and finitude. As in any curated anthology, the specific enquiries of individual researchers here attain further complexity in conversation with one another.
This essay uses sketchbooks, songwriting, and cartooning as a way of drawing lines and breath into our relationships with animals (dogs in particular), each other, and grief. Using the author’s own sketchbook of repeated drawings of her dog, the sketchbook of her late best friend, and Bento’s Sketchbook, where John Berger fills an empty sketchbook as a way of imagining the missing sketchbook of Baruch or Benedict (Bento) Spinoza, often discussing the process of drawing and grief simultaneously, this work looks at repetition in sketchbooks, cartooning, and songwriting as a way of “holding on” to what is fleeting – in a way our own lives, the lives of our friends, and especially the lives of our animal companions.
‘The sad little park’ is a work of creative nonfiction which explores the challenging emotions and tension created by a serious family illness and proposes how that tension and the hard truths associated with it can be alleviated through the comfort and familiarity of neighbourhood objects encountered on a night-time walk. Its narrative structure is based upon a father-daughter evening walk and seeks to use this common everyday occurrence to reckon with the difficulties of greater truths about life, anticipatory grief and having tough conversations.
“An arrangement” is an excerpt from a long-form experimental spatial writing work. Adjacent to (but questioning) autofiction, it details a series of encounters between an opaque narrator and building materials around her. Drafted in situ around Naarm/Melbourne, this work emerged through my current doctoral creative practice research. In this work, I draw on concepts such as Haraway’s (2016) sympoiesis, Braidotti’s (2014) nomadic writing and Rendell’s (2011) site-writing to open my fiction practice to its material and spatial surroundings, with a focus on ‘non-places’, spaces such as malls, hotels and lobbies, which are often considered to lack relationality (see Augé 2009). In writing “An arrangement”, I aim to create openings for ambiance (see Matteson 2022) – literary and architectural – to surface subtle relations that persist in these apparently nondescript urban spaces. Through sparse text design and gestural words such as this and here (also known as deictics; see duPlessis 2019), and drawing inspiration from concrete poetry and artist’s books, “An arrangement” invokes porous nothingnesses. Into these might appear light, shadow, vibrations, movements and other subtle presences – human and nonhuman – that inhabit and affect our spaces of reading and writing. You are encouraged to read this text in a non-place that moves you.
In the Anthropocene era, human activity on the planet – including deforestation, agriculture, extraction, industrial production and consumption – has dominated earth’s biosphere so drastically as to create global, ecological imbalances. The practice of ecopoetics stands in contrast to an anthropocentric approach of place-domination. Instead, ecopoetic place-making explores connection and responsibility to earth. In Australia, this is a difficult task, since many of us are living on stolen land that is also “wounded space … that has been torn and fractured by violence and exile” (Rose p. 2). In the ecopoetic vein, these poems seek to witness: to listen with attentiveness to the destruction of ecological and cultural systems, as well as to the life that endures through trees, rivers, soil, plant life, culture, animals and people – all beings. Responsive to the processes of nature, the poems begin to imitate. Within this framework of relationality, poetry becomes an act of care. As John Seed and Arne Naess posit, conscious identification with other life-forms leads to coexistence and care (Seed et al. p. 13, p. 25). Through voice and connection, writing engenders receptive healing, both personal and in the historical present, and into death. The poetry imagines a diverse reality: one in which the land is returned to its rightful caretakers and all beings retain the chance to flourish.
This personal essay explores the partly autonomic, partly behavioural process of thermoregulation in relation to everyday life. Queer feminist and materialist life writing regularly examines how socio-economic systems and cultural norms relate to the desiring self. I build on this tradition by reflecting on how experiences of extreme heat and cold can influence thermoregulatory processes and seed new desires. Although the non-human meteorological elements of heat and cold feature in a narrative representation of a formative decade in my adult life (24–34), this piece does not adopt a strong post-human or eco-sexual stance. Rather it questions whether the messiness of human desire, combined with our animal need for thermoregulation, can collude with the variabilities of weather in queerly anti-imperalist forms of ecological embodiment. What takes this life writing beyond the human is the attempt to document the possibilities in the human-weather relation: the human potential outlined here cannot be separated from the aliveness of the body and the energetic force of the weather.
I first started writing this piece in 2020, when during the day I was working on a PhD using archival research and at night I was unpacking and settling into a new home. In both capacities, I was keenly considering objects and the place they hold in my life and home. I was interested in how these objects felt like both a part of me and beyond me. These ideas were made more urgent when considering how objects have an inextricable connection to my own ill health. A dodgy piece of pottery, a cucumber plant, and sketches put together with cheap acrylic paints all became and continue to be a part of my archive as someone with lived experience of multiple chronic illnesses. Yet as this was written five years ago – perhaps ironically – I now consider this essay a part of an archive on objects and illness, instead of a snapshot of my present life.
In my novel-in-progress I am investigating the legacy of the automobile – the twentieth century’s chief commodity – as we zoom into a new era characterised by the transition from fossil fuels to hybrid and electric alternatives, as well as growing technological complexity around data and surveillance. In this creative work, I present a series of digital images produced as part of my research for this novel, alongside a creative–critical reflection about the creative process. Taken while on a research trip in Paris and Shanghai last year, the images ask us to consider the intimate roles we assume within the vehicle – the driver versus the passenger – and the ways in which the automobile is mediated by the technologies of the day, such as the smart phone. The animating concept for my novel figures the car as an animal that is going extinct, and this line of inquiry raises additional questions explored in my reflection: as we move away from the animal as a formative referent, what real and imagined losses might we be incurring?
The three poems collected here form part of a larger project exploring the littoral zone of Australia’s southern coastlines. The littoral zone is the intertidal region — alternately covered and uncovered by the tides — and extends to include shallow reefs, beaches, and the spray zones of rocky coasts. It is a place of transition, where terrestrial sand dunes give way to tidepools and kelp gardens, where waves rise and break across the sea floor, and where life-forms shift from breathing air to drawing oxygen from water. It is a space of vibrant unpredictability, a familiar yet complex landscape of entangled ecosystems and diverse species. This project arises from a desire to draw attention to the interwoven lives of species such as the leafy seadragon and its fragile kelp habitat, and to consider how humans might connect with the more-than-human world in ecologically conscious ways. My poetry asks how a littoral poetics might both raise awareness of the intertidal bioregion and enact a sense of human interconnection with the kelp and seaweed, animals, dune grasses, coastal plants, oceanic movements, and the weather systems of the southern littoral zone.
The manufacture of artificial fruit specimens gained popularity in the late nineteenth century. Despite holding forms of hundred-year old fruits, these specimens, often made from wax, resins and papier-mâché have changed over time as colourants have faded, surfaces have cracked and forms have melted. Responding to two collections of artificial fruit – the Museo della Frutta in Turin and the Museum of Economic Botany in Adelaide – this essay subtly engages with themes of reproduction, translation and change through specimens of fake fruit that oscillate between curiosity, artefact and junk. Drawing on a confluence of life writing and material culture studies, the piece adopts an approach to object writing that foregrounds material change and transformation through observing the quiet dynamism of objects created with the intention of capturing stasis. By conceptualising materiality as implicated in subjectivity and as something inherently unstable, the piece itself participates in these objects’ continual unfolding in a world that is in constant flux.
This is an extract from a memoir, provisionally entitled “Hoarding: a how to guide”, each chapter of which focusses on an object. “Standing Wood” explores the idea of more-than-human narrative through the relationships between the character of the Wood Cutter and the firewood he chopped and burnt. The piece explores the idea of giving voice to standing wood – long-dead trees, dead but still burnable. It narrates the movement of humans (as well as ice and seeds) across continents. Various types of timber are animated – bog oak and abandoned fish crates from the peats of Scotland, mallee root from the arid country of the Riverland – to explore the boundaries between subjectivity and objecthood. Standing wood is not just a metaphor for human characters in the piece, but is also metonymic and literal. It uses creative non-fiction to try to map some practices, relationship and stories that weave together and co-constitute these humans and the firewood that warms, comforts, shames and defines them.
