Three poet-researchers conduct three different readings of Tishani Doshi's poemA Fable for the 21st Century. We ask how as creative practitioners and critics we can negotiate the desire for mastery of a text, and the dangers a semiotic reading presents, allowing for difference, indecision, and complexity. We present our initial readings of the poem and summarize our discussions of them grounded in the transactional reading theory of Louise Rosenblatt and nuanced by assemblage theory. A final section includes three original poems written in response to Doshi, together with a brief discussion of them, and forms part of our conclusion.

This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or deconstruct the poem, but thinks it in an alternative way, as a broader collaboration, or intra-action between entities, both human and non-human. We avoid determining how our purported individual voices merge to form any united voice. Rather, we are alert to agencies and flows that complicate understandings of us as three rational, discrete, fully formed human figures articulating coherent narratives. We therefore offer a response to theoretical calls to explore collaborative writing as inquiry, through sharing our practice.

This practice-led paper discusses an ongoing creative and conceptual collaboration between three authors, in which poetry is approached as a means of exploring how lived experience and language are being transformed by the rapid evolution of digital devices and technologies. We reflect on our use of poetry to explore and interrupt the increasing invisibility of metaphors such as ‘cloud’ and ‘screen’ as applied to technology, by re-foregrounding the disjunctions between metaphor and what it describes. Engaging with the work of Paul Ricouer and Maurice Blanchot, we consider the unique operations of literary language and the ability of poetry to invite critical encounter in ways that foreground physical sensation and the free association of signifiers. We explore how such poetic engagements offer an important means of approaching questions concerning the implications of digitisation, via language and lived experience on what we perceive as the ‘real.’ In this context, we consider Baudrillard’s dystopic postulations regarding simulacra and hyperreality, and Susan Stewart’s perception of digital modes of communication as inducing a nostalgic longing for the immediacy of pre-digital reality. As this paper will discuss, such possibilities, at once dystopic and mournful, are at once complicated and offset by the generative potential of creative engagements with digitisation, which have exciting possibilities for creative practice.

This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or deconstruct the poem, but thinks it in an alternative way, as a broader collaboration, or intra-action between entities, both human and non-human. We avoid determining how our purported individual voices merge to form any united voice. Rather, we are alert to agencies and flows that complicate understandings of us as three rational, discrete, fully formed human figures articulating coherent narratives. We therefore offer a response to theoretical calls to explore collaborative writing as inquiry, through sharing our practice.

Writing as a Text Response Strategy in the Teacher Education Classroom', which theorises and illustrates the use of creative writing tasks to stimulate critical thinking in the analysis of critical material.This approach would, I think, enable creativity to be brought to learning critical thinking in any discipline.In this case, students write 'found' poems on slivers of text they have highlighted in their reading of a set critical chapter.The process and outcome becomes an enabler that leads the authors to 'recognize the potential of creative writing, when used as a teaching strategy, to amplify the act of learning' (59).Another intervention is Paul Munden's commentary 'Poetry by Heart', on a National Association of Writers in Education project (re)introducing the memorization of poetry in British schools to enhance learning.Memorization requires close attention to language and structure, and Munden emphasises how this project can extend 'our sense of match between memorization and comprehension, a match that suffered a temporary split at the time of Britain's postwar education reforms' (70).This also highlights the recognition of creative writing as part of English curriculum in A Level secondary education in the UK.Maggie Butt in 'Taking Creative Writing Seriously in Schools' outlines her design of the British A Level Creative Writing curriculum, including strategies to include some aspects of creative writing into exam conditions.This will be of interest to those involved in secondary and tertiary creative writing assessment.Nigel Krauth's 'The Radical Future of Teaching Creative Writing' notes the differences that new and multimodal media are making to reading and the production of stories -the incorporation of visual media and 'apps' as integral parts of some published creative texts.Clearly, creative writing needs to engage more closely with other media.While the industry word at this point is that e-publishing is 'stabilising', print output is definitely experiencing change and Krauth's suggestion that new media and creative writing should be taught together is one call to a future vision -even if English academics and creative writing teachers might find this a scary prospect, as Krauth acknowledges.Looking to the future in terms of both textual production and learning and teaching, is nonetheless necessary.Kevin Brophy and Elizabeth MacFarlane explore the need to respond to the increase in online learning environments and the currency of the 'flipped classroom' in 'Redesigning the Lecture in a Cyber World: A Creative Writing Case Study'.While the demands for these changes come from universities, the fact is that most students now engage with their textual worlds and learning predominantly in digital formats and encounters.Jeri Kroll's measured and very informative contribution, 'Originality and Research: Knowledge Production in Creative Writing Doctoral Degrees' grounds education as practice and research.This is a perfect essay to pass on to doctoral creative writing students and their supervisors.Overall, this book will be of great interest to all involved with

Just as absence mobilises the linguistic sign, so the felt experience of absence, through personal loss on the part of the writer, mobilises writing. While each of these ideas has been well-documented separately within their respective literatures, the fact of their correspondence, and its implications for the thinking of absence within creative writing studies, warrants further discussion. Engaging with the work of select thinkers within semiotics, literary philosophy, and psychology, this paper examines the operations of the analogous movement between the operations of the linguistic sign as a structure motivated by absence, and the phenomenon of generative loss in the experience of creative writers. Throughout, it draws from Roland Barthes’s elegiac meditations on literature, loss and writing following the death of his mother, in Mourning Diary (2009). This paper suggests that just as writers are mobilised by absence to write, so do they in turn self-consciously mobilise the narrative and aesthetic powers of absence for their own literary ends. Interrogating the relations between these movements offers a means toward further understanding the particular aesthetic force of much elegiac literature, as it bears on our motivations, processes and felt experiences as writers and readers.

References to futurism typically present technology as a source of threat and/or reform, and in The Future of Writing, editor John Potts has assembled a wide range of contributors and perspectives to discuss such threat and/or reform to writing as we know it.The Future of Writing considers the impact of online technologies on the structures and models of knowledge production (and the business of it) -where 'disruption' is a 'favoured descriptive word' (3) -as well as the impact that written content may exert on our future writing and reading practices.

Creative Manoeuvres: writing, making, being is an important recent publication theorising Australian Creative Writing (CW) practice and research approaches.Its intention is to 'move the study of creative writing towards broader issues of how knowledge is addressed by, or incorporated into, or embodied in, art' (Strange, Hetherington & Webb, back cover).For over thirty years -Australia's first Doctor of Creative Arts was awarded in 1988 (Shepherd 1988) -the combined effort of various scholars has driven the development of a body of Australian creative writing research.The political and economic imperatives for, and outcomes of this change are well-documented [1].