Essays

Modern experiments in fiction writing have long convinced us that consciousness flows like a stream, but is it true of animals or AI? Ronnie Scott explores the range of narrative techniques used by writers from Lucy Ellmann to Octavia Butler to approach the ‘humanly inaccessible facts’ of consciousness.

Through a series of vignettes, author and bookseller Laura Woollett exposes the lack of transparency, as well as the tensions between building a business and supporting a community, in the publishing industry.

Melanie Walsh looks at how the data company BookScan hold the power to shape publishing companies, authors, and readers, and the emergence of “counterdata”.

How should researchers acknowledge their selfhood in their writing? Kate Rossmanith addresses this question as both a compositional and philosophical issue, unpicking the assumptions behind the most common strategies for self-examination.

Evelyn Araluen on the pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty.

Astrid Lorange reflects on what it might take – conceptually and politically – to rewrite gender as a practice of liberation rather than capture.

Jeanine Leane gets under the skin of the diversity and inclusion mythscape in creative writing programs.

Fire dragon feminist Quah Ee Ling dissects the banalization of gender equity and diversity initiatives in academic and corporate spaces – initiatives that often fail to break out of a pernicious binary logic.

Living between Bosnia, Berlin and Melbourne/Naarm, Dženana Vucic reflects on the parallels between the migratory flights of birds such as the bar-tailed godwit and the flyways that have mapped her own life’s journey.

This essay is in conversation with ‘A Third Space: Giving voice to works in progress’ by Romy Ash and Rose…