20th Annual Conference

‘WRITING THE GHOST TRAIN | REWRITING, REMAKING, REDISCOVERING’

Dates: Sunday 29 November to Tuesday 1 December, 2015
Venue: Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn Campus

To register, visit the AAWP Swinburne page, Writing the Ghost Train: Rewriting, Remaking, Rediscovering. Click ‘Register now’ at the bottom of the page and follow the steps. Contact Eugen.Bacon@swin.edu.au if you have any problems.

 


KEYNOTES

Dr Tony Birch
Dr Tony Birch is an author, academic and educator of Aboriginal, West Indian and Irish descent. A writer of short fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction, Tony’s work has appeared in literary journals in Australia and internationally and has been anthologised widely. His recent collections include Shadowboxing (2006), Father’s Day (2009), Blood (shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award) and The Promise (shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award). He has worked as a writer and curator in collaboration with photographers, film-makers and artists and was the senior curator on the ‘Koori Voices’ exhibition at Melbourne Museum’s Bunjilaka Centre. He has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and a PhD in History, both from the University of Melbourne, where he taught in the School of Culture and Communication before this year becoming the Dr Bruce McGuinness Indigenous Research Fellow at Victoria University.

Professor Katharine Coles
Katharine Coles’ fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen 2013), was written under the auspices of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Ten poems from the book, translated into German by Klaus Martens, appeared in the summer 2014 issue of the journal Matrix; she has also been translated into Spanish and Dutch. Her chapbook, Bewilder, was published this fall by the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra, and her sixth collection, Flight, is due out from Red Hen in 2016. A professor at the University of Utah, she served from 2006 to 2012 as Utah Poet Laureate and in 2009 and 2010 as the inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Lia Hills
Lia Hills is a poet, novelist and translator, whose work has been published, performed, and translated around the world. Publications include her prize-winning poetry collection, The Possibility of Flight, and the novel, The Beginner’s Guide to Living, which was nominated for the Victorian, Queensland and Western Australian Premier’s Literary Awards. Recipient of an Arts Victoria grant in 2012 for her novel The Crying Place – set in a remote Aboriginal community – Lia is also working on a poetry collection that addresses the crisis of linguicide in Australia, and the idiosyncrasies of one of its mother tongues: Pitjantjatjara.


PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS

Papers and Presentations: Abstracts are no longer being accepted.

Papers and creative presentations are encouraged to explore, but are not limited to, the following four thematic streams, with variants of refereed and non-refereed academic papers and creative works, including installations and interactive panels.

  1. ‘Rewriting the historical event’ will address the issue of interpreting or re-interpreting the past through the filters of memory, ideology and ethics.
  2. ‘Recovering narratives, re-crafting texts’ will focus on reading drafts and archives against those rewritings that are corrective in nature and those that pay homage to the source, opening a space for modes of editing, teaching and publishing. This stream will also pay attention to the art of literary translation.
  3. ‘Rescripting the text, visual encounters in the text’ will bring together an original literary text with adaptations, transpositions or variations.
  4. ‘Refashioning the self’ will explore the effects of rewriting texts or remaking images in the experiences of the subject in the text as, for example, through the processes of self-editing, myth-making, and canon-formation.

In addition to this mix of standard academic, pedagogical and creative possibilities, there will be a series of panels and workshops. If you are interested in convening one of these events, or have other suggestions, you are most welcome to get in touch.

NOTE: Delegates must be members of the AAWP at the time of the conference to present. AAWP Membership fees for 1 year are $60.00 (full membership) or $30.00 (concession) and are additional to the registration for this conference. Please click here to register or here to renew your membership.Contributors may like to consider the following thematic prompts:

CONFERENCE INFORMATION

Please visit the Conference information page for full registration, venue and accommodation details. Details and a confirmed menu for the conference dinner can be found here.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE AND ABSTRACTS

The printed Conference Booklet will be made available in due course

KEY DATES FOR THE 2015 CONFERENCE

Conference registration opens 10 April 2015

Abstracts due 15 May 2015, and should be submitted to Dominique Hecq at dhecq@swin.edu.au

Full papers and creative compositions due by 30 July 2015

Final revised papers for inclusion in the refereed stream by 10 December 2015

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

To be announced.

CONTACT

Abstract Submissions and direct enquiries to:
Dominique Hecq
email: dhecq@swin.edu.au

THE AAWP CONFERENCE

AAWP was established at the inaugural conference in 1996. It now holds annual conferences at campuses around Australasia. The annual conference is the most important forum in Australia for the discussion of all aspects of teaching creative and professional writing and for debating current theories on creativity and writing.

With Thanks:

The Australasian Association of Writing Programs wishes to acknowledge those who have generously supported our annual conference ‘Writing the Ghost Train | Rewriting, Remaking, Rediscovering’.

The following literary publications provided generous donations of books, literary magazines and annual subscriptions:

Griffith Review, Island, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Southerly, Westerly.

The AAWP is extremely grateful for this support.