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 .

Works by Stone, Exbroyat (trans. Worth), Parnell, Smith, Wright, Kassel, Baranay, Zhao, Clarkson, Cosgrove, Lynch, Prendergast, Travalini, Atherton, Hecq, Webb, Finlayson, Bacon, Hetherington, Bullock, Seymour, Langford, Wilson, Oswin, Spencer, Jeffrey, and Wicks.

This article introduces the “Writing from the Fringes” special issue, outlining its key provocations and each article’s contribution to the issue’s central themes.

Jodi Vial reviews Shady Cosgrove’s Flight ; Philip Harvey reviews Kevin Hart’s Lands of Likeness: For a poetics of contemplation and Dark-land: Memoir of a secret childhood ; Amanda Tink reviews Andy Jackson, Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying’s Raging Grace: Australian writers speak out on disability ; Samuel J. Cox reviews The Cambridge Companion to teh Australian Novel (edited by Nicholas Birns and Louis Klee); Jen Webb reviews David Musgrave’s Mishearing ; Carolyn Booth reviews Languages of Water (edited by Eugen Bacon); Moya Costello reviews Helen Garner’s The Season ; Denise Beckton reviews JA Cooper’s Something About Alaska and Inga Simpson’s The Thinning ; Tarla Kramer reviews Anne Elvey’s Leaf and Anne Kellas’s Ways to Say Goodbye ; Andrew Leggett reviews Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation ; Jake Sandtner reviews Tim Winton’s Juice ; and Colin Dray reviews A to Z of Creative Writing Methods (edited by Deborah Wardle, Julienne Van Loon, Stayci Taylor, Francesca Rendle-Short, Peta Murray and David Carlin). Letter to the Editor: James Shea and Grant Caldwell, editors of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader .

Works by Martin Villaneuva, Edward Caruso, Gayelene Carbis, Jan Cyprian Dayop, Willo Drummond, Caitlin Kotula, John Leonard, Cassandra Atherton, Dominique Hecq, Shady Cosgrove, Gay Lynch, Jen Webb, Katrina Finlayson, Eugen Bacon, Paul Hetherington, Owen Bullock, JuliaPrendergast, Jessie Seymour, Luca Demetriadi, Ruth Jackson, Heidi Harrison, Ian C Smith, Heather Taylor-Johnson, Md Mujib Ullah, Lucinda Strahan, and Angela Glindemann.

This essay includes collated contributions from practising writers, participants in a Creative Writing|Neuroimaging Exploratory Study, Ideasthetic Imagining – Mapping the Brain’s Microstates Using Magnetoencephalography (MEG), conducted at Swinburne University (2023, Melbourne, Australia). The study investigates neural activity in participants’ brains while undertaking a creative writing workshop. Participants write imaginatively from short and long-term memory. The research team utilises MEG neuroimaging technology to determine where and how the brain is processing information at distinct stages of the workshop. The creative writing workshop at the heart of the study involves imaginative approaches to life writing, transforming unresolved memories through creative practice. As participants engage in the workshop, the research team measures activity in target regions of the brain. The researchers then analyse the interaction between distinct regions of the brain at various stages. The following essay gathers the voices of the experimental group (practising writers), asking them to reflect upon their experience of writing a long-term memory, as they experienced it at the time and, subsequently, from a perspective other than their own. In this exercise, particular regions of the brain are activated (to a far greater extent) in the experimental group (practising writers) as opposed to the control group (non- writers).

This article explores the social and cultural status of contemporary poetry, with reference to the enduring myth of the lone genius. Drawing on a corpus of research interviews with poets and on creativity literature, we analyse the validity of isolated poetic genius, comparing the narratives of the solitary life with the material evidence of lives spent in connection with others. Indications in previous studies of creativity suggest the importance of community and networks in building creative thought and capacity, and we examine transcripts from our interviews with 76 contemporary poets to compare their experience with that of other communities. Our findings indicate the importance of social and community networks among poets of high repute.

In public discourse, there is a tendency for arts and science – or, more broadly, academic research – to be cast as irreconcilable at best and oppositional at worst. However, the explication of trauma, resilience and wellbeing in creative writing is as much a matter of science communication as literary practice. It involves writing down the bones of the phenomena that researchers chart and treat, exploiting the narrative and poetic properties of such endeavours, and making explicit both cognition and affect, empirical evidence and felt experience. It is evident in fictional worldmaking, creative nonfiction, poetry, and in hybrid works such as narratives that combine memoir and scholarship. Such diverse approaches to literary expression do not necessarily aim to extend theory or present experimental data, but to provide opportunities for alternative ways to view and review such material content, and explicitly incorporate imaginative and evocative engagements. At their best, such writings enact a form of affective, micro-macro testimony that has the potential to demystify scholarly findings, personalise and humanise related issues, confront denial and minimisation, and build bridges between what C.P. Snow named the “two cultures”. This paper begins by considering Snow’s advice to rethink how science and literature operate, and moves on to discuss hybrid and multiple lines of knowledge and practice – in fiction, memoir and personal writing, and healing workshops – that can build bridges across knowledge domains and social cultures, and afford recovery from personal, community and environmental trauma.