THURSDAY 8TH OCTOBER 2020, 1:30PM-2:30PM
The Blue Ecologies writing project was conceived on the ancestral lands of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal Nation. It began with the five writers from UOW sitting by North Wollongong Beach on a sunny spring morning in 2019, discussing ways in which we might turn what can often feel like a painfully solo, even solipsistic, activity – writing – into something more collaborative, more communal, more ecologically attuned. In the year or so since, the project has yielded numerous outputs, including public performance, conference participation and, most recently, a collaborative issue of Island magazine. In this panel discussion, we aim to share insights and discuss the nature of a collaborative creative research within the academic arena.
Presenters: Shady Cosgrove, Christine Howe, Luke Johnson, Joshua Lobb & Catherine McKinnon, In Conversation with David Carlin, Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT.
Shady Cosgrove is the author of What the Ground Can’t Hold (Picador, 2013) and She Played Elvis (Allen and Unwin, 2009). Her short works have appeared in Best Australian Stories, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Overland, Antipodes, Southerly, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age and various Spineless Wonders publications. She was the 2020 Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellow and has also been a Bundanon Trust writer-in-residence. She teaches prose and editing at the University of Wollongong, and has research interests in narratology, creative writing, pedagogy and writing as creative practice.
Joshua Lobb‘s stories have appeared in The Bridport Prize Anthology, Best Australian Stories, Animal Studies Journal, Griffith Review, Text and Southerly. His ‘novel in stories’ about grief and climate change, The Flight of Birds (Sydney University Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2019 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the 2020 Mascara Literary Review Avant Garde Awards for Best Fiction. He is also part of the multi-authored project, 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019).
Christine Howe is a writer and academic who teaches at the University of Wollongong. Her first novel, Song in the Dark, was published by Penguin, and her poetry and other short works have been appeared in journals such as the Griffith Review; Island; Cordite; Law, Text, Culture; and in various Spineless Wonders anthologies.
Luke Johnson‘s writing has appeared in such places as Southerly, Griffith Review, Overland, Westerly, The Lifted Brow, Island, Going Down Swinging, Mascara Review, TEXT, HEAT, Meniscus, The Slow Canoe, Australian Book Review, The Sun-Herald, Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, ABC’s The Drum, New Matilda, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Symplokē. He has won or been listed for numerous national prizes and fellowships, and is treasurer of the Australian Short Story festival. His first book-length work of fiction will be published by Recent Work Press in 2021.
Catherine McKinnon is a novelist, playwright and academic. Her novel Storyland (Harper Collins, 2017) was shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the 2018 Barbara Jefferis Award, and the 2018 Voss Literary Prize. She is one of the multi-authors of 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019). Her research investigates narrative voices, particularly first person narration, both fictional and non-fictional. What do the stories we tell reveal about ourselves and our culture? How do these stories influence others? More recently her work has examined the place of writing in a global climate-changed environment. Within this framework, she is currently exploring narratives around the first atomic test—Trinity (claimed as one of the significant moments that mark the beginning of the Anthropocene)—that took place in New Mexico, USA, and the dropping of the first atomic bombs in the Second World War, as understood by soldiers in the field. Catherine is Discipline Leader of English and Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong, and a co-convenor of the Centre for Critical Creative Practice (C3P).
David Carlin is a writer and creative artist based in Melbourne, Australia. He is Co-Director of the non/fictionLab research group at RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, where he is Professor of Creative Writing, and he is Co-President of the Board of the international NonfictioNOW Conference. David’s books include The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (co-written with Nicole Walker, Rose Metal Press 2019); 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (co-written with MECO Network, Open Humanities Press 2019); The Abyssinian Contortionist (UWAP, 2015) a memoir/biography of Ethiopian/Australian circus performer Sosina Wogayehu, and the memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There (Scribe, 2010).