ABSTRACT This paper continues ongoing research, by the three authors, into possible ways to write climate fiction, a subgenre of literature that focuses on depictions of climate change. Curious as to whether climate fiction has become fixed as a negative genre, most frequently mired in dystopian landscapes, we posited that writing fiction collaboratively might be one method to help us imagine a future in which we have agency and are not simply helpless victims of the inevitable. To explore this hypothesis, we ran a two-day Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory with six other professional writers, all based on Kaurna and Permangk country in Tartanya/Adelaide, Australia. In detailing the setup and findings of this experiment, the paper looks towards artistic practice that does not focus on the capitalist individual and details the thrill of collaboration. We propose that there is a strong (posthuman) argument for writers to abandon the desire to be identified as one singular being with a ‘unique’ voice and reimagine their creative subjectivities as a sticky web of connections.

ABSTRACT This article contributes to ongoing dialogues in creative writing research relating to three areas of inquiry: writing as a way of knowing; collaboration and communities of practice; and writing in response to environmental crises. We connect these areas by articulating insights from a collaborative arts-based research project on the theme of green encounters. We associate green with what is often problematically referred to as nature – plants, trees, animals, fungus, landforms, waterways, weather, and more, as well as rawness, naïveté, the unknown, rottenness, death, and the unworldly. Through methods of poetic inquiry, we produced ethical, creative, and critical texts demonstrating a diversity of responses to environmental crises made available through creative inquiry. This article offers a distinct articulation of the pressures and tensions inherent to humans’ relationships with the more-than-human, while interrogating our own precarity as early career researchers as linked to the contingencies of living things. With reference to Félix Guattari’s ecosophical theory, we recognise academia as a part of the mental ecology wherein need currently exists to nurture diversity and evolve praxes for sustainability. Towards this end, we highlight the value of creative arts-based collaborations for generating knowledge about ways we can face multiform ecological and other crises.

ABSTRACT How does it feel to encounter a writer through his or her archive? In this piece of creative non-fiction, I explore my encounter with Malcolm Lowry through his archive at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver: specifically, through a set of love-notes written to his wife, Margerie Bonner, and through his ‘Last Notebook’, a tiny notebook kept during the Lowrys’ trip to Northumberland and the Lake District in summer 1957, just weeks before Lowry’s death. I reflect on the sense of connection across time created by this encounter with a writer’s archive, and connect this to the way that Lowry himself explores the same sense of connection in his short story ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession’. I consider what type of text a writer’s notebook might be, particularly whether or not we might agree with Kirsty Gunn’s claim that a writer’s notebook is the ‘most private’ type of writing, and I reflect on what my own responses to Lowry’s notes to Margerie and ‘Last Notebook’ might tell us about our relationship, as readers, to those writers who matter the most to us.

ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence is changing how we can choose to resolve writing challenges. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are readily accessible to generate text effortlessly. This paper explores the human-AI relationship when generative AI is used to assist a writer suffering from writer’s block. Research shows that talking to others is an effective strategy for blocked writers. This other no longer needs to be a human. I examine what happens when generative AI is brought into the writing loop: the nonlinear process of writing and rewriting a creative piece. The film Adaptation (2002. Directed by Spike Jonze, Performance by Nicolas Cage. Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper. Columbia), written by Charlie Kaufman, is used as a case study of writer’s block to illustrate several complexities of the disorder and to theorise potential openings and limitations for the use of AI. Through the film, writer’s block is also explored as having a twin pathology of hypergraphia. Writing with AI is seen to mimic peculiarities of creative writing that include projecting one’s inner voice and seeking a false self. In the example of Adaptation, one ultimately comes to appreciate too that suffering through a block unaided can propel a writer to make bold decisions and test the limits of human creativity.

ABSTRACT Philosophically engaged fiction often employs ideas in ways that reflect the exploitation-exploration dilemma in developmental psychology: by exploiting well articulated theories by enacting their conflicts, or by exploring the uncertainties of puzzling ontologies or moral complexities. We can see this in action in many works, but some novels of ideas seek to defy such categorisation, with lessons for readers and writers. This paper analyses two recent works – The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) and Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen (2016) – to show how they deal with related concerns and settings through very different approaches. While Powers offers an enactment, its complexity seeks to evade the book becoming a simple polemic. McKenzie’s protagonist explores her muddled identity, philosophy and much else while flirting with the enactment of ideas when she does not comprehend.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I respond to Australian author Charmian Clift’s question about writing: ‘what are you doing it for?’ (Wheatley 2022, 291). This question is the title of one of Clift’s essays, from a collection of narrative-driven essays, written for the Women’s Pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, after Clift’s return to Australia in 1964. I consider the similarities between realist fiction and writing that (by classification) purports to bear a closer allegiance to the author’s autobiographical life. I understand realist writing to be a representation of living | memory – the complicated and multi-faceted nature of our interior selfhood. This essay reflects my preoccupation with the cartwheels of our inner consciousness as it relates to what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write, and how we engage with the work of others, both writers we know in the everyday, and writers we ‘know’ through the page. I consider the act of producing narrative as a sensate response to enigma, a creative response to rumination and (perhaps) an antidote to ongoing rumination – shirking the discussion about autobiography in favour of a discussion about impetus – considering writing as a reflection upon the operations (and inherent conundrums) of an interior consciousness.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichelene WandorMichelene Wandor is an acclaimed poet, playwright and cultural commentator. She teaches on the Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her most recent poetry collection, Travellers, was published in 2021. Her first novel, Orfeo’s Last Act, will be published in 2023 by Greenwich Express. Critical-Creative Writing is available direct from her, for £10, postfree.

ABSTRACT Jamming is one of those Janus-faced words that is its own contronym. Just as cleaving can refer to splitting things apart or uniting them together, to jam in jazz is to perform improvisational pieces with a whole band; but it also means to wedge shut, breakdown and, in the case of radio jamming, refers to a mode of saturating the airwaves with white noise or false information. In this two-part article, a British Australian poet and Indian American writer present a collaborative jam session which takes up all of these meanings through a work of linked verse that explores creative (dis)location, silence, white and black noise, and the impinging of multiple cultures on one's aesthetic imagination and physical identity in the world. Informing their individual and linked practices through the execution of this work is a reflection on the mode, process and tradition of collaborative poetic works. It argues the worth of a collaborative yet distanced practice, which may mirror the dislocation of spoken dialogue, but also magnifies the trust each participant places in each other, a trust intensified by the conceptual and linguistic risks taken.

ABSTRACT English Writing as a second language learner faces more cognitive, social, and emotional challenges. Students can improve their writing skills through creative writing. From this perspective, this study examined the relationship between creative teaching behaviours (CTB) and English creative writing (ECW) and the role of English writing self-efficacy (EWSE) and creative self-efficacy (CSE) in multi-mediating the relation. It also investigated whether there is any difference between English-majoring students (EMS) and non-English majoring students (non-EMS). Participants included 478 university students in China. The results of the structural equation modelling supported the mediating role of EWSE only, indicating that CTB leads to ECW both directly and indirectly through EWSE. However, multi-group analysis revealed that CSE played as mediator for EMS. Therefore, college English teachers should strengthen their strategic awareness of CTB and pay more attention to students’ EWSE and CSE.