ABSTRACT Innovative in its stance on presentational form in scholarly research outputs, the article comprises two transcribed dialogues, a short photo essay, four poems, and a series of Non-Traditional Research Output (NTRO) statements on the package’s contribution to knowledge. It starts with a dialogue recorded during a trip to Collis’s tribal Country in and around Bourke, outback Australia. Collis is a Barkindji man, novelist, and poet. Poets Crawford and Magee travelled with him, tape-recorder in tow. The initial dialogue is an account of the tow truck driver who unsettled Collis and Crawford with the distressing and weirdly postcolonial ghost stories Collis’s Aboriginality seems to have sparked in him, driving the two back from their broken car while Magee hitched. The second dialogue is with Rina Kikuchi, a Japanese poetry academic who came to visit the team once there in Bourke. Kikuchi talks about water imagery in Japanese poetry and also about Japanese imperialism and misogyny on the banks of the Baarka (aka Darling) River, which is flowing by her as she does so. The whole is about the white/black conflict at the heart of the Australian nation, but it is also about the ways multiculturalism speaks in and around that, particularly in poetry.

ABSTRACT Interstitial ghosts is an account of a questing beast of a research project in pursuit of my doctoral creative and critical thesis. Like all questing beasts it has taken several unexpected twists as the researcher has followed the spoor of the primary concept: that sword-&-sorcery, particularly Robert E. Howard's initiating form of the genre can potentially exist as a kind of ghost genre or genre of echoes, in fact a mode rather than a genre. The essay incorporates metafictional techniques, balancing storytelling and academic methods in an unorthodox attempt to not only give an account of the research but an account of the research process. It begins by investigating the term ‘mode’, suggesting a worldview implied by Howard's fantasy stories and discusses earlier forms of fragmentary literature before characterizing the type of intensity engendered by both of these. The essay attempts to identify some of the symbols that recur in Howard’s fantasy fiction and notes where these have influenced later sword-&-sorcery writers, before following the questing beast in attempting a poetic tarot of such elements and finally testing this by reference to and analysis of two texts which pre-date the Howardian creation of a distinctive sword-&-sorcery form.

ABSTRACT While many novelists redraft their work repeatedly, the narrators they create often seem to reject the idea of revision. In first-person novels, the narrative is often presented either as an oral performance, a spontaneous speech act, or as the product of a single draft, hastily scribbled down. But this article argues that there is much to be gained from giving fictional narrators a drafting practice as rich and complex as their author’s. Positioning the narrator as a reviser opens up a wealth of narrative possibilities that shed light on character, motivation and change. In the case of confession narratives, revision can be especially revealing, expressing profound ambiguities inherent in the act of confession. Through a critical examination of confessional literature (including autobiographies such as Rousseau’s Confessions and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words, and confessional novels like Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending), and practice-based research in the shape of the author’s own recently completed novel, Montreal, the paper explores the paradoxical challenge of a revised, polished text that invites the reader to consider the drafting practice that created it, and suggests ways in which this practice might be revealed.

ABSTRACT Creative writing has proven effective at all levels of education and has recently emerged as a dynamic approach to language teaching. This study presents a literature review that examines the application of creative writing to foreign language learning over the last 15 years (2009–2024). By encouraging imagination, self-expression and emotional engagement, the innovative writing enables learners to explore the language in depth, improving grammatical accuracy, lexical variety and communicative competence. Findings suggest that the approach motivates learners to experiment with language and develop authentic writing skills, making the process both enjoyable and effective. The review synthesises evidence from different studies to show how creative writing improves learners’ writing techniques, pronunciation and overall motivation. The term Creative Writing Approach to Foreign Language refers to an experiential writing experience that can actively motivate foreign language learners to manipulate language, express themselves and become ‘potential writers’ in the foreign language through personal experimentation, self-expression and writing techniques.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the complexities of teaching fiction writing in Indian higher education. It argues that the Cold War-era workshop model, which originated in the U.S. and emphasizes the written text over broader cultural and socioeconomic contexts responsible for generating the text, is inadequate for Indian universities and colleges lacking dedicated creative writing programs or an opportunity to teach advanced fiction workshops. The paper highlights the logistical challenges faced by instructors, including the limited opportunity to teach fiction writing courses and the lack of exposure of students to craft courses on fiction writing in Indian schools. It critiques the American workshop model and proposes alternative strategies to teach fiction workshops that are tailored to the Indian context. These include a modified anonymous floating workshop model and a seminar-based structure to teach fiction writing. The paper underscores the need for context-sensitive approaches to creative writing pedagogy that address the unique cultural, institutional, and educational realities of Indian universities.

ABSTRACT This article considers the object-essays of Vanessa Berry, Rachel Robertson and Brenda Miller, along with my own practice-led research, to suggest the personal essay has key affordances that make it useful for creative writers seeking to represent the active or agential quality of objects – what Jane Bennett calls ‘thing-power’. Using the conceptual framework of the object itinerary, it contends that essaying the active object also provides insight into the ways the essay itself can be ‘object-like’.

ABSTRACT The PhD in creative writing, like other practice-oriented advanced degrees, suffers from academic scepticism and even disdain. Unlike other practice-focused degrees, it claims the label concerning philosophy, and with it a standard of contributing to knowledge. This paper responds to a challenge to make explicit what types of knowledge the hybrid model of the degree – with its expectation of a book-length piece of creative work and a long essay – creates. It does so through examining accounts of the detrimental effects of the lack of clarity and the remedies students and supervisors have identified. It analyses the expectations that universities in Britain set and a personal account of undertaking such a project, before relating accounts of the practice in one such university and the problems that arose there. While prior accounts have considered workarounds, this paper suggests we focus on what knowledge such work creates, how it is created, and to whose knowledge it contributes. Practitioners can thus see ways to decide whether to make more explicit what types of knowledge the degree can create and decide whether a different label might better describe the nature of the degree they choose to offer.

ABSTRACT Like Glenn Gould’s return to Bach’s Goldberg Variations decades after the exuberant recording of them that launched his career, Adam Rapp’s long-awaited Broadway debut, The Sound Inside, revisits thematic material he adopted as a young playwright bursting onto New York’s downtown theater scene with his Pulitzer-nominated Red Light Winter. Drawing connections between these two plays, which both feature writers as protagonists and end in the snowy suicide of a writer’s muse, this paper explores the way that narrative matures and the relationship to the muse deepens. The real-life story of Takako Konishi – particularly as she is presented in Jana Larson’s memoir, Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay – is also considered, not only as a chronicle of suicide in winter that parallels Rapp’s works, but ultimately as an investigation of the artistic process a writer undergoes when invoking the muse. Weaving through personal ethnography that relentlessly chases down the muse in the physical world, we take an inside look at Rapp’s Red Light Winter through the actor’s process of crafting character. Time alters the timbre of the sounds inside, but the artist’s connection to the muse is perennial, resounding ever more poignantly when played da capo.

ABSTRACT This creative reflection reconsiders key moments between my mother and me that are rooted in the overarching story of our relationship. It engages with storytelling as a process of re-creation, drawing on William Randall's notion of living-as-art, to reconcile some long-held tensions and enable new ways of understanding this significant relationship. Critical reflection on the feminist philosophical concept of relational autonomy, and ideas of time as non-linear, refracts the singularity of the experiences shared here to illuminate dynamics between mothers and daughters more broadly, and to demonstrate the transformative potential of storytelling over time to resolve and re-envisage human relationships.