David Carlin | RMIT University (original) (raw)
Books by David Carlin
From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connectio... more From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connections where you least expect them, edited by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short..
It’s a sweltering night in Kuala Lumpur, and a journalist is protesting in a city on the edge of meltdown. It’s post-9/11 San Francisco, and a woman meets her foster child, who provokes painful reminders of her past. It’s contemporary Bangkok, and a writer’s encounter with ladyboy culture prompts him to explore gender boundaries. And high in Queensland’s Border Ranges, a boy prone to getting lost is having six tiny silver bells pinned to his chest …
The Near and The Far is what results when award-winning writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces, and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program — a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers — this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
Featuring fiction and nonfiction from Cate Kennedy, Melissa Lucashenko, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Musa, and many more, this collection bridges the distances between Asia, Australia, and the world.
'This meticulously curated mix of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry explore place, culture and identity in luminous and inventive ways ... The anthology attests to the important work that can result from writers immersing themselves in a place so unlike their home, where fresh collaborations are forged and new ways of thinking divulged.'
BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER
Sosina Wogayehu learnt to do flips and splits at the age of six, sitting on the floor of her pare... more Sosina Wogayehu learnt to do flips and splits at the age of six, sitting on the floor of her parents’ lounge room in Addis Ababa, watching a German variety show on the only television channel in the land. She sold cigarettes on the streets at the age of eight, and played table soccer with her friends who made money from washing cars, barefoot in the dust. She dreamed of being a circus performer.
Twenty-five years later, Sosina has conjured herself a new life in a far-off country: Australia. She has rescued one brother and lost another. She has travelled the world as a professional contortionist. She can bounce-juggle eight balls on a block of marble.
Sosina is able to juggle worlds and stories, too, and by luck — which is something Sosina is not short of — she has a friend, David Carlin, who is a writer.
Following his acclaimed memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There, David brings us his ‘not-me’ book, travelling to Addis Ababa where he discovers ways of living so different to his own and confronts his Western fantasies and fears. Through Sosina’s story he shows us that, with risk and enough momentum, life — whom we befriend, where we end up, how we come to see ourselves — is never predictable.
From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connectio... more From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connections where you least expect them.
The Near and The Far is what results when award-wining writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program - a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers - this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
"These stories - by some of the region's brightest stars - burn so compellingly, you can almost feel heat from the pages" - Benjamin Law
"What a pleasure to read such a diverse group of strong writers ... setting down their truths, while learning others" - Sophie Cunningham
Creative Works by David Carlin
Hunger Mountain, 2018
[https://hungermtn.org/the-biological-station/\] This is the in-between season. May in northern Fi... more [https://hungermtn.org/the-biological-station/]
This is the in-between season. May in northern Finland, when the snow has not yet finished melting. The thick, white crusts on lakes and rivers bruise violet in the sunlight. Out of sight, underneath, water flows, cannibalising winter’s skin. What looks solid isn’t. There’s not so many places you can walk.
[Published in Terrain.org, December 5th, 2017] [opening] Between the train tracks by the La Posa... more [Published in Terrain.org, December 5th, 2017]
[opening] Between the train tracks by the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, a yellow line on the platform marks where you should stand behind. Less than a step away another yellow line marks where you should stand behind if a train approaches the other side of the platform. To get to the platform you have to walk across a first set of tracks but there is a place to do this a little to one side of the gate that caps the path from the hotel. The woman at the hotel desk said that to board the train headed west through Flagstaff and across the desert towards L.A., you had to cross that first set of tracks to reach the narrow platform. She hadn’t said anything about when was best to do this, so three of us who were keen went out and stood there. I took my suitcase to board the train. The others were there to see me off. Having had a kind of nervous breakdown, I was fleeing at the end of the first day from a writers’ residency I had organized, leaving them all behind to get to know each other and make themselves raw and vulnerable together so as to make breakthroughs in the difficult and painful process of writing...
'A writer-friend said to me about the book I was stuck on: it feels as if you are spinning the wh... more 'A writer-friend said to me about the book I was stuck on: it feels as if you are spinning the wheels. The story wasn’t going anywhere. But looked at like this, an impasse, perversely, can be viewed as an opening of creative potential. It is a blockage in the ongoing, breathless flow of life in which we are otherwise consumed and consuming. It is a forced interruption to normal life within which, otherwise, we occupy ourselves by attaching to objects that won’t in the end lead to the emotional satisfaction we seek.'
This essay is inspired by David Graeber's book 'The Utopia of Rules', thinking about imagination,... more This essay is inspired by David Graeber's book 'The Utopia of Rules', thinking about imagination, neoliberal 'realities' and the violence of bureaucracies.
We head deep into the mindscape of a non-fiction writer. He is holed up in the liminal world of a... more We head deep into the mindscape of a non-fiction writer. He is holed up in the liminal world of a shabby international hotel and caught like a merman out of water in an existential meditation on gender identity and the act of making up. He is not alone. The vocal past and voiceless present bleed inwards along the edge of his frame of reference— challenging his insights, threatening to hijack his narrative and dismantling his monocultural comforts and fiction of heterosexual coherence.
In this lush and layered production, acclaimed creative nonfiction writer David Carlin and award-winning audio feature maker and sound designer Kyla Brettle collaborate to bring you a playful radiophonic mix that irreverently dons the tropes of 'storytelling' to dance the fictional divide between the essay and documentary forms.
An essay consisting of an imagined conversation with Nicole Walker, the curator of a series of es... more An essay consisting of an imagined conversation with Nicole Walker, the curator of a series of essays in Essay Daily called 'Breaking the Rules', and thereby a reflection on the theme.
Invited essay for Essay Daily (US) introducing international readers to some outstanding Australi... more Invited essay for Essay Daily (US) introducing international readers to some outstanding Australian essayists, including Melissa Lucashenko, Helen Garner, Gerald Murnane and Fiona Wright.
This work attempts to self-reflexively apply the method of ‘childlike freedom’ (Adorno 1984: 152)... more This work attempts to self-reflexively apply the method of ‘childlike freedom’ (Adorno 1984: 152) inherent in the post-Montaigne tradition of the essay, to an exploration of the vicissitudes of ‘picturing’. Picturing, particularly since the advent of photographic technologies, is often associated with apparently verifiable representations of the material world, and yet there has long been a fascination with the interplay between picturing and the imagination suggested by the very word image. This essay braids memoirist scenes and images from contemporary popular culture with vignettes from the early Spiritualist tendencies within the history of photography. It traces the erotics and the mysteries to be found in the overlapping margins between vision, memory and fantasy when essaying the picture.
An improvised experimental collaborative account of the uncertain cultural life and futures of th... more An improvised experimental collaborative account of the uncertain cultural life and futures of the fabpod, as of August 21, 2014.
How might the affordances of the essay as a writing practice be brought to bear within a workshop framework of collaborative improvisation, in response to an urban architectural model structure? This is the question that motivated this experiment, which took place in 2014 in Melbourne, in and around an innovative architectural design artefact, the Fabpod (RMIT 2012).
Authors: David Carlin, Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, Adrian Miles, Kyla Brettle, Annie Fergusson, Brigid Magner, Alvin Pang, Francesca Rendle-Short and Shanti Sumartojo
Scholarly Works by David Carlin
TEXT, 2018
This essay moves between the performative, the discursive and the ethnographic to compose an argu... more This essay moves between the performative, the discursive and the ethnographic to compose an argument about how essaying as method, and then collective essaying as method, might contribute to new approaches to world-making. It begins with an essay-within-an-essay that takes as its object of pressure the contemporary context of biophysical crisis that has been called the Anthropocene, which soon becomes entangled with another pair of objects: the image on the front of a vintage jigsaw set and the essayist’s affective response to that image. Thereafter it brings in Latour’s concept of the ‘risky account’ to argue for essaying as a reflexively constructed mode of making accounts of the world. The experimental nature of essaying is extrapolated into a collective context, with a report on a transcultural creative writing workshop conducted as part of a residency program in the Philippines. The essay proposes and teases out the concept of ‘collective essaying’. It circles back to look at world making with Haraway’s invocation of sympoesis as a method for ‘worlding-with, in company’ (Haraway 2015), and asks how collective essaying might be considered in this light.
The essay as a genre in the tradition of Montaigne stages the inadequacies of attempts to grasp a... more The essay as a genre in the tradition of Montaigne stages the inadequacies of attempts to grasp at objects and what connects us to them and them to us and us to each other, and then slings away the safety wheels by wondering: who we are anyway? But what happens to the essay in the age of 'hyperobjects' (Morton 2013) like global warming? This essay examines how the anti-methodical techniques of the essay (personal, lyric) might be placed to respond to life in the Anthropocene, when the 'I' of the essayist finds itself in increasingly uncharted waters, when 'nature' itself, let alone 'human nature', begin to look like quaint conceptual knick-knacks, and when humans can no longer claim special ontological status over nonhumans. Philosophers, anthropologists, environmental humanists and other scholars are increasingly experimenting with modes of writing enmeshing scientific data and critical theory with affectively charged, embodied and intimate accounts. At the same time, essayists are rethinking the boundaries of the personal, and trying new ways to write from a standpoint rejecting human/nonhuman binaries. This essay seeks to draw connections across the disciplines, to invite further alliances between creative writers and fellow academics, as together we essay the Anthropocene with entangled nonfiction. Biographical note: David Carlin's nonfiction books include The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015), Our Father Who Wasn't There (2010), and edited collections The Near and the Far (2016) and Performing Digital (2015). His radiophonic feature/essay with Kyla Brettle,
The Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange programme, or WrICE, is a research project proposing ... more The Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange programme, or WrICE, is a research project proposing and trialling a model for cultural exchange based on collaborative residencies for writers. At the heart of this programme is the proposition that there is value in creating opportunities for writers to step outside their writing studios and cultural environs to connect and share ideas with other writers, from different cultures and across generations. Perspectives and networks are enlarged and transformed, and this in turn acts, however subtly, to stir and shift national and transnational cultures. Written at the midpoint of the first phase of WrICE, this essay discusses five compositional principles implicit in how this proposition has been developed and enacted. If Ross Gibson is right when he suggests that to find the rhythm of narrative knowledge you roam inside ‘but also outside – but also inside – but also outside – but also inside’, then the cataloguing of these principles is a test of this idea. The experiment developed and enacted through WrICE points towards new ways to generate networks of authentic cultural exchange that draw upon techniques of gift exchange, what we have called here, ‘acrossness’, and the potential of writing in the company of.
Vol 17, No. 2 Special Issue: Nonfiction Now, Oct 2013
This essay seeks to explore the tensions in the paradoxical location of ‘non-fiction’ — or the de... more This essay seeks to explore the tensions in the paradoxical location of ‘non-fiction’ — or the de-hyphenated ‘nonfiction’, as we prefer — as a literary/artistic category, one that is built upon a negation. The opposition set up in the term by the operation of the ‘non’ upon the ‘fiction’ suggests a steadfast binary. However the friction between the two sides of this binary, and the inherent resistance embodied in the close proximity and conjoining of the two parts, accounts for much of the energy and interest in contemporary nonfiction writing.
Here we bring together etymologies and theoretical topographies to problematize the intriguing situation of ‘nonfiction now’.
From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connectio... more From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connections where you least expect them, edited by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short..
It’s a sweltering night in Kuala Lumpur, and a journalist is protesting in a city on the edge of meltdown. It’s post-9/11 San Francisco, and a woman meets her foster child, who provokes painful reminders of her past. It’s contemporary Bangkok, and a writer’s encounter with ladyboy culture prompts him to explore gender boundaries. And high in Queensland’s Border Ranges, a boy prone to getting lost is having six tiny silver bells pinned to his chest …
The Near and The Far is what results when award-winning writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces, and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program — a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers — this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
Featuring fiction and nonfiction from Cate Kennedy, Melissa Lucashenko, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Musa, and many more, this collection bridges the distances between Asia, Australia, and the world.
'This meticulously curated mix of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry explore place, culture and identity in luminous and inventive ways ... The anthology attests to the important work that can result from writers immersing themselves in a place so unlike their home, where fresh collaborations are forged and new ways of thinking divulged.'
BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER
Sosina Wogayehu learnt to do flips and splits at the age of six, sitting on the floor of her pare... more Sosina Wogayehu learnt to do flips and splits at the age of six, sitting on the floor of her parents’ lounge room in Addis Ababa, watching a German variety show on the only television channel in the land. She sold cigarettes on the streets at the age of eight, and played table soccer with her friends who made money from washing cars, barefoot in the dust. She dreamed of being a circus performer.
Twenty-five years later, Sosina has conjured herself a new life in a far-off country: Australia. She has rescued one brother and lost another. She has travelled the world as a professional contortionist. She can bounce-juggle eight balls on a block of marble.
Sosina is able to juggle worlds and stories, too, and by luck — which is something Sosina is not short of — she has a friend, David Carlin, who is a writer.
Following his acclaimed memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There, David brings us his ‘not-me’ book, travelling to Addis Ababa where he discovers ways of living so different to his own and confronts his Western fantasies and fears. Through Sosina’s story he shows us that, with risk and enough momentum, life — whom we befriend, where we end up, how we come to see ourselves — is never predictable.
From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connectio... more From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connections where you least expect them.
The Near and The Far is what results when award-wining writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program - a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers - this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
"These stories - by some of the region's brightest stars - burn so compellingly, you can almost feel heat from the pages" - Benjamin Law
"What a pleasure to read such a diverse group of strong writers ... setting down their truths, while learning others" - Sophie Cunningham
Hunger Mountain, 2018
[https://hungermtn.org/the-biological-station/\] This is the in-between season. May in northern Fi... more [https://hungermtn.org/the-biological-station/]
This is the in-between season. May in northern Finland, when the snow has not yet finished melting. The thick, white crusts on lakes and rivers bruise violet in the sunlight. Out of sight, underneath, water flows, cannibalising winter’s skin. What looks solid isn’t. There’s not so many places you can walk.
[Published in Terrain.org, December 5th, 2017] [opening] Between the train tracks by the La Posa... more [Published in Terrain.org, December 5th, 2017]
[opening] Between the train tracks by the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, a yellow line on the platform marks where you should stand behind. Less than a step away another yellow line marks where you should stand behind if a train approaches the other side of the platform. To get to the platform you have to walk across a first set of tracks but there is a place to do this a little to one side of the gate that caps the path from the hotel. The woman at the hotel desk said that to board the train headed west through Flagstaff and across the desert towards L.A., you had to cross that first set of tracks to reach the narrow platform. She hadn’t said anything about when was best to do this, so three of us who were keen went out and stood there. I took my suitcase to board the train. The others were there to see me off. Having had a kind of nervous breakdown, I was fleeing at the end of the first day from a writers’ residency I had organized, leaving them all behind to get to know each other and make themselves raw and vulnerable together so as to make breakthroughs in the difficult and painful process of writing...
'A writer-friend said to me about the book I was stuck on: it feels as if you are spinning the wh... more 'A writer-friend said to me about the book I was stuck on: it feels as if you are spinning the wheels. The story wasn’t going anywhere. But looked at like this, an impasse, perversely, can be viewed as an opening of creative potential. It is a blockage in the ongoing, breathless flow of life in which we are otherwise consumed and consuming. It is a forced interruption to normal life within which, otherwise, we occupy ourselves by attaching to objects that won’t in the end lead to the emotional satisfaction we seek.'
This essay is inspired by David Graeber's book 'The Utopia of Rules', thinking about imagination,... more This essay is inspired by David Graeber's book 'The Utopia of Rules', thinking about imagination, neoliberal 'realities' and the violence of bureaucracies.
We head deep into the mindscape of a non-fiction writer. He is holed up in the liminal world of a... more We head deep into the mindscape of a non-fiction writer. He is holed up in the liminal world of a shabby international hotel and caught like a merman out of water in an existential meditation on gender identity and the act of making up. He is not alone. The vocal past and voiceless present bleed inwards along the edge of his frame of reference— challenging his insights, threatening to hijack his narrative and dismantling his monocultural comforts and fiction of heterosexual coherence.
In this lush and layered production, acclaimed creative nonfiction writer David Carlin and award-winning audio feature maker and sound designer Kyla Brettle collaborate to bring you a playful radiophonic mix that irreverently dons the tropes of 'storytelling' to dance the fictional divide between the essay and documentary forms.
An essay consisting of an imagined conversation with Nicole Walker, the curator of a series of es... more An essay consisting of an imagined conversation with Nicole Walker, the curator of a series of essays in Essay Daily called 'Breaking the Rules', and thereby a reflection on the theme.
Invited essay for Essay Daily (US) introducing international readers to some outstanding Australi... more Invited essay for Essay Daily (US) introducing international readers to some outstanding Australian essayists, including Melissa Lucashenko, Helen Garner, Gerald Murnane and Fiona Wright.
This work attempts to self-reflexively apply the method of ‘childlike freedom’ (Adorno 1984: 152)... more This work attempts to self-reflexively apply the method of ‘childlike freedom’ (Adorno 1984: 152) inherent in the post-Montaigne tradition of the essay, to an exploration of the vicissitudes of ‘picturing’. Picturing, particularly since the advent of photographic technologies, is often associated with apparently verifiable representations of the material world, and yet there has long been a fascination with the interplay between picturing and the imagination suggested by the very word image. This essay braids memoirist scenes and images from contemporary popular culture with vignettes from the early Spiritualist tendencies within the history of photography. It traces the erotics and the mysteries to be found in the overlapping margins between vision, memory and fantasy when essaying the picture.
An improvised experimental collaborative account of the uncertain cultural life and futures of th... more An improvised experimental collaborative account of the uncertain cultural life and futures of the fabpod, as of August 21, 2014.
How might the affordances of the essay as a writing practice be brought to bear within a workshop framework of collaborative improvisation, in response to an urban architectural model structure? This is the question that motivated this experiment, which took place in 2014 in Melbourne, in and around an innovative architectural design artefact, the Fabpod (RMIT 2012).
Authors: David Carlin, Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, Adrian Miles, Kyla Brettle, Annie Fergusson, Brigid Magner, Alvin Pang, Francesca Rendle-Short and Shanti Sumartojo
TEXT, 2018
This essay moves between the performative, the discursive and the ethnographic to compose an argu... more This essay moves between the performative, the discursive and the ethnographic to compose an argument about how essaying as method, and then collective essaying as method, might contribute to new approaches to world-making. It begins with an essay-within-an-essay that takes as its object of pressure the contemporary context of biophysical crisis that has been called the Anthropocene, which soon becomes entangled with another pair of objects: the image on the front of a vintage jigsaw set and the essayist’s affective response to that image. Thereafter it brings in Latour’s concept of the ‘risky account’ to argue for essaying as a reflexively constructed mode of making accounts of the world. The experimental nature of essaying is extrapolated into a collective context, with a report on a transcultural creative writing workshop conducted as part of a residency program in the Philippines. The essay proposes and teases out the concept of ‘collective essaying’. It circles back to look at world making with Haraway’s invocation of sympoesis as a method for ‘worlding-with, in company’ (Haraway 2015), and asks how collective essaying might be considered in this light.
The essay as a genre in the tradition of Montaigne stages the inadequacies of attempts to grasp a... more The essay as a genre in the tradition of Montaigne stages the inadequacies of attempts to grasp at objects and what connects us to them and them to us and us to each other, and then slings away the safety wheels by wondering: who we are anyway? But what happens to the essay in the age of 'hyperobjects' (Morton 2013) like global warming? This essay examines how the anti-methodical techniques of the essay (personal, lyric) might be placed to respond to life in the Anthropocene, when the 'I' of the essayist finds itself in increasingly uncharted waters, when 'nature' itself, let alone 'human nature', begin to look like quaint conceptual knick-knacks, and when humans can no longer claim special ontological status over nonhumans. Philosophers, anthropologists, environmental humanists and other scholars are increasingly experimenting with modes of writing enmeshing scientific data and critical theory with affectively charged, embodied and intimate accounts. At the same time, essayists are rethinking the boundaries of the personal, and trying new ways to write from a standpoint rejecting human/nonhuman binaries. This essay seeks to draw connections across the disciplines, to invite further alliances between creative writers and fellow academics, as together we essay the Anthropocene with entangled nonfiction. Biographical note: David Carlin's nonfiction books include The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015), Our Father Who Wasn't There (2010), and edited collections The Near and the Far (2016) and Performing Digital (2015). His radiophonic feature/essay with Kyla Brettle,
The Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange programme, or WrICE, is a research project proposing ... more The Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange programme, or WrICE, is a research project proposing and trialling a model for cultural exchange based on collaborative residencies for writers. At the heart of this programme is the proposition that there is value in creating opportunities for writers to step outside their writing studios and cultural environs to connect and share ideas with other writers, from different cultures and across generations. Perspectives and networks are enlarged and transformed, and this in turn acts, however subtly, to stir and shift national and transnational cultures. Written at the midpoint of the first phase of WrICE, this essay discusses five compositional principles implicit in how this proposition has been developed and enacted. If Ross Gibson is right when he suggests that to find the rhythm of narrative knowledge you roam inside ‘but also outside – but also inside – but also outside – but also inside’, then the cataloguing of these principles is a test of this idea. The experiment developed and enacted through WrICE points towards new ways to generate networks of authentic cultural exchange that draw upon techniques of gift exchange, what we have called here, ‘acrossness’, and the potential of writing in the company of.
Vol 17, No. 2 Special Issue: Nonfiction Now, Oct 2013
This essay seeks to explore the tensions in the paradoxical location of ‘non-fiction’ — or the de... more This essay seeks to explore the tensions in the paradoxical location of ‘non-fiction’ — or the de-hyphenated ‘nonfiction’, as we prefer — as a literary/artistic category, one that is built upon a negation. The opposition set up in the term by the operation of the ‘non’ upon the ‘fiction’ suggests a steadfast binary. However the friction between the two sides of this binary, and the inherent resistance embodied in the close proximity and conjoining of the two parts, accounts for much of the energy and interest in contemporary nonfiction writing.
Here we bring together etymologies and theoretical topographies to problematize the intriguing situation of ‘nonfiction now’.
The Encounters: Place, Situation, Context Papers-The Refereed Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2012
How does the ‘claim to truth’ of narrative nonfiction affect the way it is read, in a way that ma... more How does the ‘claim to truth’ of narrative nonfiction affect the way it is read, in a way that marks it out from fiction? What is the nature of the encounter with the real promised by narrative nonfiction, and how can this be viewed as an intertwining of ethico-political choices and aesthetic strategies? This paper enacts a series of encounters with nonfiction, arguing that the awkwardness of the form when it cares more for ‘works of art rather than accumulations of information’ (Shields 2010, 64) is what lends it both its urgency and beauty. The first encounter is an autoethnographic account of a cross-cultural scene of storytelling in Addis Ababa. The second surveys theoretical approaches to the definition of nonfiction. The third offers a case-study: some recent works by American lyric essayist John D’Agata and the critical reaction to them.
TEXT Special Issue No 5 The Art of the Real, Apr 2009
The Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds Papers - the refereed proceedings of the 16th conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2011
This paper examines, in the context of the creative practice of writing a ‘negotiated memoir’, th... more This paper examines, in the context of the creative practice of writing a ‘negotiated memoir’, the strategy of Roland Barthes, who in his final lecture series (1978-80) at the College de France (Barthes 2011) travelled step by step through an extended ‘thought experiment’ exploring the issues (or ‘trials’) he confronted as if he was writing or about to write a novel. The paper represents an initial testing of the ‘trials’ articulated by Barthes, as a framework for reflection and analysis of the issues confronted in my own writing practice, issues at the intersection of the aesthetic and the ethical. I am embarked on a project I have described as a ‘negotiated memoir’, having been approached by a former asylum seeker (an Ethiopian-Australian woman whom I know through a previous professional relationship at a contemporary circus) to ‘write her story’. In this circumstance, she is neither employing me as a ghostwriter or official biographer, nor am I approaching her as a documentary subject. What does she mean by ‘write her story’ – what are her expectations? She has a desire to have her story told: she has no desire to write. What sort of story would I desire to write in negotiation with her, and what would be the texture and terrain of those negotiations? The co-option of Barthes’s method proves productive, I argue, providing an original prism through which the problems the creative writer faces in the practice of his or her craft can be refracted.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2010
In this paper I analyse the textual strategies employed in Ross Gibson and Kate Richards's intera... more In this paper I analyse the textual strategies employed in Ross Gibson and Kate Richards's interactive database narrative project Life after Wartime (2002), which I argue generates a form of narrative that embodies a ‘poetics of haunting’. Shifting juxtapositions of image and text, archive and fiction within Life after Wartime serve to foreground the ambiguities within testimony and to set in motion the connections we make with the past. I explore whether Life after Wartime may be productively viewed as a distinctive new media model of a ‘trauma text’, one eschewing notions of narrative or therapeutic closure, in which complex interconnections between memory, history and fantasy are played out.
Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy Quarterly Journal of Media Research and Resources, Nov 1, 2014
4th eResearch Australasia Conference, 2010
New Scholar, Jun 17, 2013
How might film-makers and designers from other fields collaborate to create new ways to develop s... more How might film-makers and designers from other fields collaborate to create new ways to develop screen works? What new forms of ‘script’ might be designed, and to what purpose? How might such ‘writing by design’ make a tangible difference to the film(s) produced?
A couple sit, pace the floor, or make love on the disheveled bed. She leaves in a car, driving be... more A couple sit, pace the floor, or make love on the disheveled bed. She leaves in a car, driving beyond the future. He arrives from the past, and can only stay half an hour. In Motel, three short films explore the spaces of an anonymous motel room, and the spaces of a relationship and time-travel.
Scholar/practitioners in the fields of creative arts and design are increasingly looking to locate their creative practice within a research context that leads to the development of new insights, processes and approaches. Motel was a trans- disciplinary practice-based research collaboration between a group of scholar/practitioners: three filmmakers and two interior designers from RMIT University. The project aimed to explore the innovative potential the academy affords to situate filmmaking and interior design practices outside usual industrial/commercial contexts so as to create what Geuens (2007) calls a ‘differential space’ of film production.
The Motel research group used techniques of reflective practice—reflection-in- action and reflection-on-action (Schön 1983)—to analyse shifts in practice and conceptual frameworks brought about by the constraints applied to the collaborative project. These constraints came from a set of collaborative 'rules' applied to the production process which, among other things, altered the usual hierarchical relationship between design and film, which privileges the director and his/her vision. In Motel the interior designers called a halt to the machinery of production, demanding an examination of established practices. The traditional A4 film scripts were tilted sideways and exploded, laid out alongside each other like patients in a ward, and new intimate relationships were formed. Exactly what was interior and what was exterior came into question. The space of an Australian motel room, and the space of filmmaking itself was interrogated, dissected, made new. The resulting triptych of short films is only one of the media objects to have resulted from this innovative collaboration.
This paper discusses interior as a concept used as a motivating principal in a collaborative wor... more This paper discusses interior as a concept used as a motivating principal in a collaborative work between three filmmakers and two interior designers. It will describe and critique the film based operations and processes used by the three writer/directors, two interior designers, sound team and cinematographer in the production of interiors within the recently shot triptych of short films titled Motel.
IDEA: Interior Territories, 2009
This paper discusses interior as a concept used as a motivating principal in a collaborative work... more This paper discusses interior as a concept used as a motivating principal in a collaborative work between filmmakers
and interior designers. This raised work substantial questions in relation to the role of ‘interior’ within each of
the films made through the collaboration. Where and how was interior defined and located? What sort of interior
relations existed within each of the screenplays? And how might these be represented relative to the various filmic
instruments of camera, set, lighting, sound, etc?’
The paper describes and critiques the film-based operations and processes used by the three writer/directors, two
interior designers, sound team and cinematographer in the production of interiors within the recent triptych of short
films titled Motel.
Drawing on contemporary transition pedagogy, this paper provides a case study of a suite of trans... more Drawing on contemporary transition pedagogy, this paper provides a case study of a suite of transition activities piloted by The Belonging Project in collaboration with a creatively oriented academic program in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Through qualitative research, this case study demonstrates the importance of adopting Kift, Nelson and Clarke’s (2010, p. 6) notion of transition “as a process, not an event.” This paper argues that a sustained program of low cost transition activities that bridge the formal and informal curriculum fosters an essential ‘sense of belonging’ among first year students. It provides a successful example of an approach that embeds essential social and academic literacies while facilitating positive social, cultural, and academic transitions.
Drawing on contemporary transition pedagogy, this paper provides a case study of a suite of trans... more Drawing on contemporary transition pedagogy, this paper provides a case study of a suite of
transition activities piloted by The Belonging Project in collaboration with a creatively
oriented academic program in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.
Through qualitative research, this case study demonstrates the importance of adopting Kift,
Nelson and Clarke’s (2010, p. 6) notion of transition “as a process, not an event.” This paper
argues that a sustained program of low cost transition activities that bridge the formal and
informal curriculum fosters an essential ”sense of belonging” among first year students. It
provides a successful example of an approach that embeds essential social and academic
literacies while facilitating positive social, cultural, and academic transitions.
Drawing on contemporary transition pedagogy, this paper provides a case study of a suite of trans... more Drawing on contemporary transition pedagogy, this paper provides a case study of a suite of transition activities piloted by The Belonging Project in collaboration with a creatively oriented academic program in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Through qualitative research, this case study demonstrates the importance of adopting Kift, Nelson and Clarke’s (2010, p. 6) notion of transition “as a process, not an event.” This paper argues that a sustained program of low cost transition activities that bridge the formal and informal curriculum fosters an essential ”sense of belonging” among first year students. It provides a successful example of an approach that embeds essential social and academic literacies while facilitating positive social, cultural, and academic transitions.
This paper presents some preliminary findings from The Belonging Project – a longitudinal learni... more This paper presents some preliminary findings from The Belonging Project – a
longitudinal learning and teaching research project seeking to develop and define
a new approach to student engagement. In this project, the concept of belonging is
used as a tactic to engage both staff and students in the School of Media and
Communication at RMIT University as part of the project’s aim to improve the
student experience. This paper maps the way in which we use belonging – defined
in relation to the educational experience – as a point of departure to achieve this
outcome. Having established our definition of belonging and its purpose in our
project, we then discuss some key results of focus groups with students, outlining
the way in which students navigate issues of transition, interdisciplinarity, and
notions of space and place, in their relationship to university and campus life.
The Belonging Project is a four-year pilot project to investigate, design and trial an integrated... more The Belonging Project is a four-year pilot project to investigate, design and trial an integrated program and school-based approach to enhancing the RMIT undergraduate cohort experience.
In the Belonging Project narrative model (the model), each student’s sense of identity and belonging is built incrementally across the three years of their undergraduate degree program. In first year students establish a strong disciplinary and professional
base within their program cohort. In second year, students build on this disciplinary base, becoming more aware of their place within an interdisciplinary community (a wider school cohort). In third year,
they are supported to test their disciplinary and interdisciplinary identity and knowledge by working in a wider world of intercultural and global links and experiences.
In this report detailing Phase Three Focus on the Interdisciplinary Experience (2013) we discuss ... more In this report detailing Phase Three Focus on the Interdisciplinary Experience (2013) we discuss the rationale for interdisciplinary learning within the broader context, how we have mapped and modelled interdisciplinary practice within the School of Media and Communication and propose a range of strategies and recommendations for embedding interdisciplinarity within student lifecycles.
Overwhelming catastrophic events have become part of the ‘new normal’ of climate change. This ess... more Overwhelming catastrophic events have become part of the ‘new normal’ of climate change. This essayistic, collaborative lived experience report by a group of writers, each of whom lived through Australia’s 2019—2020 Black Summer of catastrophic bushfires, demonstrates how the effects of shared but different proximate relations can produce an affective, care-ful account of the lived experience of climate change. Our project asks: how might a practical entanglement with others allow for a meaningful response to climate change? How might collaboration allow for a mode that places care at the centre of writing practice?
Axon: Creative Explorations, 2015
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022
A to Z of Creative Writing Methods
"This research took the form of a 2 x 26 minute documentary series, pre- sold to SBS Televis... more "This research took the form of a 2 x 26 minute documentary series, pre- sold to SBS Television and funded by investments from Film Victoria and the Australian Film Commission. Produced by Cracker Night it screened on SBS national free-to-air TV. Carlin was sound-recordist and co-producer with Nicolette Freeman, VCA Film and TV lecturer, who also directed. In recent years a number of TV documentaries have examined social issues around growing contemporary tensions in Western societies between work and family life as women enter the workforce in greater numbers. This series places a particular focus, new to Australian documentary, on the phenomenon of the growth of new service industries, where areas of previously private domestic life are now subject to advice from 'expert' consultants such as life coaches and 'lifestyle assistants'. The aim was to use documentary techniques of observation and personal storytelling to intervene within the genre of mainstream 'lifestyle' television by introducing critical questions around how the professionalisation of domestic competencies has surfaced in Australian society as a specific response to widely felt work/life pressures. The series adopts a personal case study approach to draw out the larger issues and follows time-poor people who call in professionals to help them rebalance work and family life. It takes a fresh perspective, showing how these new professional industries offer time-pressured people enticing ways to improve their lives. It screened in prime-time on SBS TV to an audience of some 256 000, with a skew to older women, reflecting that it reached its target audience, and was widely reviewed. SBS Sales selected it for distribution to the educational sector and the general public."
For us the year passed has been one of conferring around the notions of slowness and silence. It ... more For us the year passed has been one of conferring around the notions of slowness and silence. It has meant committing ourselves to radical slowness in thinking, living and writing together. We have ...
How does the 'claim to truth' of narrative nonfiction affect the way it is read, in a way... more How does the 'claim to truth' of narrative nonfiction affect the way it is read, in a way that marks it out from fiction? What is the nature of the encounter with the real promised by narrative nonfiction, and how can this be viewed as an intertwining of ethico-political choices and aesthetic strategies? This paper enacts a series of encounters with nonfiction, arguing that the awkwardness of the form when it cares more for 'works of art rather than accumulations of information' (Shields 2010, 64) is what lends it both its urgency and beauty. The first encounter is an autoethnographic account of a cross-cultural scene of storytelling in Addis Ababa. The second surveys theoretical approaches to the definition of nonfiction. The third offers a case study: some recent works by American lyric essayist John D'Agata and the critical reaction to them.
Essays in Criticism, 1972
If I am to write the true history of the Circus, I must start by telling you how my girlfriend ra... more If I am to write the true history of the Circus, I must start by telling you how my girlfriend ran off with the silent clown. 'Harpo!' we called out to him across the border from South Australia, my loyal friends nursing my ego.
RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research, 2019
This exposition attends to the theme of peripheral spaces, sites, practices, epistemologies and c... more This exposition attends to the theme of peripheral spaces, sites, practices, epistemologies and conceptions. It takes the form of a playful, nonfiction archival document that comprises the interleaving of two scripts within a series of photographic images. It stands as trace for an event—originally described as "peripherally performative"—that took place at an academic conference in creative writing in Australia in 2018 (the annual Association of Australian Writing Programs Conference, in Perth). As a research artefact, the methods and mode of presentation of this work are tangential to normative procedures. This exposition co-mingles the performed accounts of two collaborative writing projects in which the exposition's four authors—Carlin, Murray, McKinnon and Lobb —had been variously enmeshed: the collectively written book project 100 Atmospheres; Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019), and the Murray/Carlin speculative research endeavour How To Dress For Old Age: an Enquiry with Costumes. Each of these projects experiments with devising creative methods of collaboration so as to approach research questions multifariously and heterogeneously. Slant, in other words. What does collaboration offer writers and writing processes? How is vision refracted through a multiplicity of gazes? How does the peripheral make itself felt? In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation, the 100 Atmospheres project—speculative, poetic, provocative—pays attention to future ways of being and becoming. In a tightly scripted dialogue, Lobb and McKinnon reflect on a collaborative process involving an interdisciplinary ensemble of 13 people, that uses ‘cross-over writing'. This process allows for fluid boundaries, multiple entries and exits, and other peripheral strategies, to enliven living and practicing in the Anthropocene. This first script is met sideways by the more improvisatory, contingent approach of Murray and Carlin, who re-construct their process of framing and investigating "how to dress for old age," as a live and unfolding methodology (including costume changes). They report on how, in improvising with writing methods that involve alternating responses, redirections, and unanticipated shifts in focus / tempo, they have been drawn to sport, theatre and domestic metaphors to negotiate evolving rules of engagement and exchange. The original performance used a length of rope pinned with images to stand in for a tennis net and a backdrop. This malleable object allowed us to demonstrate materially the multiple experiences of collaboration: combative and communal, public and private. In our written document we will use inset photographs (portraits and images of place), columned text and variable typography: these will interrupt and intersect with the ideas discussed in order to amplify the complex interactions central to the collaborative process. Our visual and verbal approaches assert tactics of peripherality to examine that which is often overlooked, irrelevant or superficial, and serve as a counterpoint to normative methods. Our approaches argue for a different kind of sensitivity in practice, one which pays heed to the dance of agency between subjects and objects.
Text: Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, Apr 28, 2018