OFFSHOOT: CONTEMPORARY LIFE WRITING METHODOLOGIES AND PRACTICE 3220_Offshoot.indd 1 18/01/2018 3:32 PM 3220_Offshoot.indd 2 18/01/2018 3:32 PM OFFSHOOT: CONTEMPORARY LIFE WRITING METHODOLOGIES AND PRACTICE EDITED BY DONNA LEE BRIEN AND QUINN EADES 3220_Offshoot.indd 3 18/01/2018 3:32 PM First published in 2018 by UWA Publishing Crawley, Western Australia 6009 www.uwap.uwa.edu.au UWAP is an imprint of UWA Publishing a division of The University of Western Australia This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Copyright © Donna Brien, Quinn Eades et.al. 2017 The moral right of the author has been asserted. <insert CIP logo> Typeset by J&M Typesetting Printed by Mcphersons Printing Group Cover image: courtesy of Jamie James 3220_Offshoot.indd 4 18/01/2018 3:32 PM This book is dedicated to the lives that remain unwritten, were deemed not important enough to write in the first place or lost before they could be written, as well as those who are attempting to stem this tide. 3220_Offshoot.indd 5 18/01/2018 3:32 PM 3220_Offshoot.indd 6 18/01/2018 3:32 PM CONTENTS Acknowledgements x Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades Life Writing, Truth, History and Speculation 11 Conjectural and Speculative Biography: Convict and Colonial 13 Biographies Donna Lee Brien Narrative Structure – Is It Making Us Liars?: Truth and 31 Autobiography in She Played Elvis Shady Cosgrove The Truth Is Like Truth: Grey 42 Jeri Kroll Strange Hybrids: Telling the Truth and Other ‘Lies’ 47 About Fiction and Life Writing Camilla Nelson Out 60 Lia Incognita ‘True Histories’: Using Fiction in Writing Lives 63 James Vicars Biographical Forms and Ways of Writing Lives 81 Profiling the Biography of the Contemporary 83 Political Figure in Australia Patrick Mullins Gatherers 98 Jeanine Leane 3220_Offshoot.indd 7 18/01/2018 3:32 PM Offshoot The Frame and the Score: Knowing a Subject Differently 102 Through Poetic Biography Jessica L. Wilkinson Unleaving, Leaving 119 Gail Pittaway ‘I Felt This Landscape Knew I Was There’: The Lake’s 121 Apprentice and Ecobiography Jessica White Stepping across Space and Time: Writing a Life from 135 Long Ago and Far Away Janine McVeagh Brolga Clan 145 Phillip Hall Life Writing and Self-Making 147 Queer Life Writing as Self-Making 149 Dallas J. Baker Les Fées S’écrivet: Wrestling with Women’s Life Writing 164 Nike Sulway Quickening 180 Dominique Hecq (Snippets of) Littoral Freedom: Collecting Nostalgic 182 Remnants on the Distant Shores of Childhood Zoe Thomas Memory Gardens 193 Jen Webb and Paul Hetherington Genealogy & The Sea 196 Robyn Ferrell viii 3220_Offshoot.indd 8 18/01/2018 3:32 PM Contents Mind as Hive 207 Kevin Brophy Blogging as Art: Life Writing Online 209 Lucas Ihlein Embodiment, Experiment and Fictocritical Modes 223 Writing the Self (The Body) as mer-mer 225 Francesca Rendle-Short Vivarium 243 Anna Gibbs this poem is not a panic (v.000) 251 Virginia Barratt How Is Staying Here Going? 253 Quinn Eades I Have Nothing To Say About Love (Fictocritical Fragments) 264 Stephen Abblitt Blood. Sex 278 Ellen van Neerven Waterspout, or, Queering Traumatic Fall-Out 279 Marion May Campbell girl body boy body 294 Quinn Eades Life Writing Futurities: No Future/Every Future and 295 What We Can See in the Horizon Quinn Eades and Donna Lee Brien Life Writing Bibliography 312 Contributors 326 ix 3220_Offshoot.indd 9 18/01/2018 3:32 PM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We conceived this project over cups of tea when, at a creative writing conference in 2014, we noticed how many of the delegates were researching and producing interesting work about life writ- ing. This led to discussions about the lack of current, locally inflected resources about life writing, and, especially, method- ologies for writing and researching life writing. Questions about what writers and scholars were producing in this field, and what would be useful for students, teachers and writers soon followed, and spurred us on to find some possible answers. It soon became apparent that others were also making similar enquiries, and the idea for this collection was born. Very soon in those discussions, moreover, we decided that we wanted to include creative work and, specifically, poetry about life writing, in order to not exclude its vital contribution to this subject. We would like to acknowl- edge, therefore, the foundational contribution of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs in terms of providing venues for scholars, researchers, students and writers to come together to have such important disciplinary conversations, and for paving the way for creative writing to be accepted as a valid means of express- ing research findings in Australia and internationally. Many of the contributors to this volume are members of that association. Of course, this book is the sum total of the work of all those contributors, whose hard work and commitment to the project made this book possible. Sincere thanks, too, to the many peer reviewers of the creative and the critical works herein, and whose astute and generous comments improved each piece in this volume. Due to the double-blind reviewing process, we cannot name these reviewers, but their input is evident throughout. A 3220_Offshoot.indd 10 18/01/2018 3:32 PM Acknowledgements warm thank you, too, to Terri-ann White, Publisher at UWA Publishing, who supported this project from its inception, and has never been anything but the most good-humoured of publishers, and whose input made this editorial journey creative as well as enjoyable. We would like to also gratefully acknowledge our universities – Central Queensland University and La Trobe University – for supporting the research that has resulted in this book, and for believing in our collaboration. A special thank you to the School of Education and the Arts and the cross-disciplinary research Centre for Regional Advancement of Learning, Equity, Access and Participation at Central Queensland University for their ongoing support of this research; and to La Trobe University’s Disciplinary Research Program in English, Theatre and Drama that supports critical and practice-led scholarship, which has a particular focus on biography and autobiography, and generously provided financial support for this project. Heartfelt thanks are due to the many colleagues, friends and members of our families who have offered their encouragement over the past two and a half years that we have worked on this project. We extend an extra special thank you to Alice Ewing, whose botanical drawings open each section of the book, and to James Photographic Services for assisting us in translating Alice’s beau- tiful drawings into digital form. Thank you, too, to Wes Hicks, who also helped with some digital image wrangling and intern assistant editors Brodie Smart and Virginia Birt, who joined us in the very final stages of the project, but whose help was invaluable. A sincere thank you to editor Katie Connolly for editing and Kate Pickard for shepherding this manuscript, and us, to publication. Finally, we both want to thank each other. As very different individuals, with quite different scholarly and creative approaches xi 3220_Offshoot.indd 11 18/01/2018 3:32 PM Offshoot and networks, and at different stages of our careers, working together has been one of the great pleasures of this project and, we both believe, at the core of its strength. xii 3220_Offshoot.indd 12 18/01/2018 3:32 PM CONTEMPORARY LIFE WRITING METHODOLOGIES AND PRACTICE Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades Over the past decades, life writing has evolved into both a form of creative production that is popular with authors and readers, as well as a diverse, inclusive and seemingly ever-expanding field of academic study. Attracting scholarship from those working in the disciplines of creative writing and literary studies, and a wide range of other fields including women’s, gender and sexuality studies, life writing as both a description of genre and a form of practice has displayed considerable potential to bring together a range of varied perspectives. Starting from the premise that life writing is a significant component of both contemporary artistic practice and scholarship, we felt it was necessary in putting this collection together to re-evaluate life writing in both those areas of enquiry, and to take account of its contemporary subgeneric incarnations and the range of methodological and practical approaches that are currently in use and circulation. In thinking through how to approach this, we kept returning to the organic, hybrid and rhizomic nature of much of the new and experimental life writing scholarship and practice occurring now in the second decade of the new millennium, seeing this evidenced not only in traditional areas such as biography and memoir (and enquiry into these forms), but also in emerging areas of research and practice. Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice thus focuses in on this pairing of contemporary life writing scholarship 3220_Offshoot.indd 1 18/01/2018 3:32 PM Offshoot and practice, consciously bringing together a wide range of rel- evant perspectives and approaches. Throughout the process of conceiving this collection, and piecing it together, we have concentrated on balancing both crit- ical and creative modes of research enquiry and production, and providing a forum where these modes could speak to, and across, each other. This collection aims to represent not only a wide range of subgenres and approaches current within life writing and creative writing studies, but to also offer varied and multifaceted readings of life writing, recognising the importance and impact of subgeneric differences and experimentation on life writing.