School of Culture & Communication:
Creative Writing 15000 Seminars
Time: 5.30-7pm
Venue: Room 216A, Level Two, John Medley Building West Tower
All 3rd Year Creative Writing Students, Honours/Masters Creative Writing students and staff encouraged to attend.
Contact: Elizabeth MacFarlane
Upcoming Seminars
July 1st Suzanne Hermanoczki and Richard Knight
October 12th Nick Walton-Healy
Amanda Cottingham
A SENSE OF PLACE: THE REPRESENTATION OF HOME IN HELEN GARNER’S CREATIVE NON-FICTION
A Sense of Place explores the idea of home and how it is represented in the creative non-fiction of Helen Garner, especially in Writing Home, Sad Grove by the Ocean, Tower Diary and Melbourne’s Famous Water. In these short stories the idea of home is strongly linked to a psychical house situated in a particular place and time, usually in the past. There is also a struggle between Melbourne and Sydney as Garner attempts to call each one home, although never quite succeeds. The creative component of A Sense of Place consists of a portfolio of creative non-fiction short stories based on my own experiences living in Melbourne and Sydney. The stories explore the idea of home on a personal level in both childhood and adulthood.
Megan Twycross
'Disc Two'
Megan Twycross has recently finished a double major in Theatre Studies and Creative Writing at The University of Melbourne. Her interest in theatre has seen her involved in many of the performances around the university campus and also around Melbourne. Her writing seems to have fallen into a very performative realm and last year she was published in the University creative writing anthology Above Water. This year her Creative Writing honours thesis is her first attempt at a longer performance piece.
'Disc Two' (working title) is an exploration of the public and private self through the role of the clown and its relationship to society and theatre. This has emerged from the fear of current uses of technology such as YouTube, Facebook, Twittering, and the fact that the private self is no longer sacred; our whole lives it seems are now in threat of becoming pure spectacle. 'Disc Two' comes as a warning asking an audience if they too are succumbing entirely to a 'public self' and whether they too are clowns?
Suzanne Hermanoczki
‘Suburbio’
The partly autobiographical fiction ‘Suburbio’, consists of ‘Two Shoes’ and ‘Cane Toads’.
Set in the 70-80s in the western suburbs of Brisbane, Australia, these interconnected pieces of short fiction, ‘Two Shoes’ and ‘Cane Toads’ (also stand alone works), centre around Eva Fernandos, a young girl from a bi-cultural background, her family, and characters within her immediate community.
‘Two Shoes’ is all about shoes. Set in the late 70s, the story deals with the issues of understanding and cultural prejudice. For Eva, shoes are more than just footwear but symbols of freedom and envy, shame and acceptance. It is a tale of childhood struggle, narrow-minded Catholic education and family solidarity.
‘Cane Toads’ follows best friends Eva and Lizzie, two girls from different backgrounds, and their dog Good-Boy Benny. Set in the early 80s, the story conjures a time when boundaries like backyards could be crossed, and life was just another day exploring what friendship and the natural environment have to offer. It is a retrospective snapshot of friendship spent in a tropical suburban landscape. ‘Cane Toads’ explores themes of neighbourhood and home, innocence and loss.
Richard Knight
The structure of this thesis is tripartite. In the first chapter, employing a
technique skilfully demonstrated in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, I perform a
structuralist critique of the sign systems that underpin Winston’s (and, I will
argue, to an extent, Orwell’s) perception and comprehension of society. In the
second chapter I consider 1984 in the light of Foucault’s writings on
power/knowledge and the carceral nature of society, and the central role that
language plays in this exercise of power. In this section, the interpretation of
signs elaborated in the first part is shown to be inherently flawed. Finally, in the
third chapter, I analyse the relevance of 1984 in 2009, through a consideration of
the enduring power of doublespeak, referring back to Orwell’s essay on the use of
language.
Emma Vertigan
Focusing on ecocriticism and fifth century Britain, my thesis analyses the writings of Saint Gildas, the only known British historical account of the time: De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae or On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. Divided into three chapters, my critical argument investigates how Christianity, brought to Britain by the Roman conquerors, is ultimately responsible for the western world’s lack of environmental awareness and current ecological crisis. In the first chapter I investigate how Christianity has created the importance of man in comparison to cyclical religions. The second chapter, which I will be presenting, discusses Nature as the New Minority in current discourse, and the third chapter looks at how a comet striking Wales in the sixth century impacted on the writing of Gildas. I will be reading part of my creative piece, which is about the life of King Vortigern who was a British Roman left in charge of Britain when the Romans returned to Europe to defend their borders. Vortigern’s main claim to fame is for allowing the Saxons into Britain who became the new colonisers. I have written this portrait through the eyes of a druid, who represents the older celtic religion.
Erin Ritchie
Imaging the House in a Space of Literature
This thesis embarks on a creative and critical exploration of the house in literature. It seeks to identify the very nature of houses in literature and how they exist in a constant state of construction. Drawing on poststructuralist thinkers such as Deleuze, Guattari, Grosz, Casey and Parnet, this thesis asserts that the house is a place in constant motion; growing, shifting and altering beyond the boundaries of the text. As this thesis is centered on the imaging and meaning of place and space, Bachelard’s work The Poetics of Space has been crucial. Examples of literary houses are derived from the work of Duras, Cisneros, Birch, Stark and Berger.
The creative component of the text is a short story in three parts that explores the house through a central character, Robin, over the course of an evening. The creative feeds the critical and each stretches the other beyond the thesis itself and into its own space of becoming.
Rebecca Law
This poetry collection selects three centuries of verse and attempts a poetic survey of each by referencing familiar poems and adapting them to new subjects. The Nineteenth Century poetry sourced in the first chapter of this collection is studied for its verseforms and poetic meters. Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales are borrowed for their subject matter and new poetry is created from these sources. Each poem in the first chapter references a nineteenth century poem and poet for its initial verseform and meter, and then takes off on its own to become a new verse about fairytales, human happiness, romance, love and life matters. The objective of this academy of thought is to create a new suite of poems that sustains the fairytales of the past and the romanticism of nineteenth century poetry in a manner which consolidates my own personal memories of both. The poetry that was created from nineteenth century verse and Hans Christian Anderson becomes a childhood memoir that is rigorous enough to satisfy my adult readings.
The second chapter of the collection selects poems from the twentieth century and uses these to style new poems about random subjects relevant to my own recent experiences. Most of the poems in this collection are in free-verse for a more modern orientation. I found this contrasted nicely with the highly structured metrical patterns resurrected in the first chapter of the book. The last chapter studies twentieth century poetry from anthologies and individual poetry collections. The subject of these new poems is varied and considers not only personal experiences but also observes elements, animals, and everyday events. These free-verse poems make their way towards complete freedom from referenced texts and some may stand alone as new poems about contemporary subjects, with no borrowed metrical scheme or verse pattern.
In the course of writing these chapters, several writers of literary theory were influential. Harold Bloom, T.S., Eliot and David Perkins were immensely useful in understanding and developing romantic poetry and modern theories of verse. Alfred Corn’s chapter on verse forms in The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody was an extremely useful source I referenced often in my preliminary analyses of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first century poems. A hand-out provided by Chris Wallace-Crabbe on poetic meter and rhythm was informative and a helpful tool in the reading comprehension of early verse.
In summary, it is hoped these three chapters of new verse read as successful poems in their own right. But further, it is hoped that a reading of this collection shows my own development as an apprentice poet and the resultant freedom and confidence that has been gained from writing with “training wheels attached”. It is important to me that a reading of this collection includes a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of each poem, which I have tried to assist by including a brief paragraph on each poem. You will find these listings under the bibliography page that follows each poem in each chapter. The title, Cristabel in Asphodel refers to the poem ‘Christmas’ in the first collection. This poem was chosen because the fairytale was a favourite as a child and is, in some respects, autobiographical. The playful rhyme is deliberate because rhyming was one of the main endeavours of this thesis, and there are indeed, many many rhyming poems in the collection.