Category Archives: Call for papers

A photograph of a well-lit narrow alley.

Call for Papers – Axon: Creative Explorations

This issue of the Axon: Creative Explorations journal will explore the relationships and connections between Creative Writing, Place and History and will be published in the December–January 2024-25 issue.

The editors, Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton, now invite 150-word abstracts for proposed articles related to the relationships and connections between Creative Writing, Place and History, which might include topics such as:

  • Poetry and place
  • Poetry and history
  • Genius Loci as a concept
  • Creative writing and the factual
  • Writing about ‘what actually happened’
  • Recreating histories
  • The relationship between truth, facts and invention
  • Visiting writing locations
  • Understanding the ‘other’ in other places
  • The creative use of documentary resources
  • Biography and creativity

Abstracts for articles on other related topics are also welcome.

All abstracts should be submitted by 30 APRIL 2024 at Axon’s Submissions Manager (https://axoncreativeexplorations.submittable.com/submit)

If an abstract is accepted by the editors, the full article will be due by 31 OCTOBER 2024.

Articles, essays, papers and other scholarly contributions are peer reviewed in a double blind process and in producing a research-based paper, authors should be drawing on a sound framework of scholarship relevant to the paper’s topic, rather than purely on personal experience and/or anecdotal evidence. Papers are expected to make a contribution that extends the current literature in the field. Authors are welcome to take a creative or lateral approach to their topic or to incorporate images or other graphic work.

Further information for authors is available here: https://axonjournal.com.au/contribute

Final revised articles, papers, essays and interviews (including endnotes) will be a minimum of 3,000 words and maximum of 6,000 words in length.

Please note: poems for the issue will be solicited by the editors. Unsolicited poems should not be submitted.

Call for Papers | TEXT Special Issue: Writing from the Fringes

Deadline: Monday 22 April 2024

TEXT editors are calling for paper abstracts and creative EOIs for a December special issue of the journal. The theme of the issue is “Writing from the Fringes”, and possible subject matter includes (but is not limited to) the following:

·         Written perspectives from writers of colour

·         Writers challenging neo-liberalism and patriarchy

·         Writing from the shadow/y land of Gothicism

·         Writing and reading Aboriginal Gothic literature/stories

·         Writing to challenge/subvert gender stereotypes

·         Writing and reading from positions of neurodiversity

·         Writing and reading from positions of disability

·         Thoughts and perspectives on reconfiguring Australia’s literary “canon”

·         Writing through/about trauma and pain

·         Writing through/about personal “hauntings”

·         Writing through/about racism

·         Writing through/about experiences of dislocation

·         For love or money? Writing through socio-economic hardship

·         Writing about diaspora and the immigrant’s/migrant’s experience

·         The margins as a liminal space (place): What is happening there?

·         (Re)writing history/perspectives from historical narratives, suppression, and oppression

·         Exploring relationships with the more-than-human world (through written work)

·         Writing that uses other englishes and/or languages other than English in English-based writing

·         Writing from/through translation.

Abstract Submissions

Abstracts for scholarly papers should be 200 words and sent to the editors at textsifringe@gmail.com with the subject line: “EOI for Scholarly Submission”.

Final scholarly papers would be 6,000 to 8,000 words, per TEXT guidelines (including endnotes).

EOIs for Creative Submissions

EOIs should be sent to the editors at textsifringe@gmail.com with the subject line: “EOI for Creative Submission”.

Creative EOIs should include a 200-word synopsis/description of the proposed work and its relation to the special issue’s theme, as well as a 200 to 300 word- (10 to 20 lines) creative sample.

Final prose works would be 2,000 to 3,000 words or a conventional equivalent for script-based works. Poem sequences of up to 80 lines (500 words for prose poems) are also welcome.

The deadline for scholarly paper abstracts and creative EOI submissions is Monday 22 April.

Call for Papers: a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

Submit a Manuscript to the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies for a Special Issue on: Lives, Selves, Media and #MeToo: Anticipating Futures, Tracing Histories and Articulating the Present.

The Journal is seeking 250-300 word abstracts for articles of up to 6000 words, and shorter creative or critical contributions of up to 1000 words. Please make clear in your abstract which format your proposal pertains to.

Abstracts are due on 4 March 2024, and full papers will be due on 2 September 2024.

We are also planning a collaborative workshop for potential contributors in July 2024, and details will follow for those whose full papers are requested.

The editorial team for this special issue is led by Kylie Cardell (Flinders University) and Emma Maguire (James Cook University). Please submit abstracts via email to: kylie.cardell@flinders.edu.au and emma.maguire@jcu.edu.au

EOIs are open for RMIT’s non/fictionLAB and Mekong Review

RMIT University’s non/fictionLAB is proud to partner with Mekong Review to commission a new series of short, collaboratively-written literary works or criticism (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics work, book reviews etc) for publication in forthcoming issues of the international publication.

Mekong Review, under the managing editorship of Kirsten Han, is a quarterly English-language magazine of arts, literature, culture, politics, the environment and society in Asia, written by people from the region or those who know it well. From its founding in 2015 by Minh Bui Jones, its aim has been to provide a fresh perspective: one that covers Asian histories, lives and cultures through emerging regional voices. Its approach is close to that of publications like the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books—that is, basing its writing around new publications of interest—but its view is distinctly Asian. Contributors are requested to please familiarise themselves with the content and style of Mekong Review.

In line with the publication’s position as a cosmopolitan and free press in Asia, this series will examine the notions of space and place through creative exchange and collaboration between writers from Australia and SE Asia. Questions that these pieces might consider/respond to include: What are the pressing conversations or exchanges we might have today about space, place, home, housing, belonging and/or unbelonging? How do writers understand and/or represent place and space? How does the politics of place inform our writing/art? What kinds of spaces do we create through writing? What opinions do we share or differ on regarding space/place phenomena? How might we approach the writing of place together from our respective positions?

Works will be commissioned IN PAIRS but published as a single work. We would like one writer to be based in Australia and one in the SE Asia region. You might like to discuss and debate a book, cocreate a poem, story or comic, review one another’s books, interview one another, or anything in between or beyond! It is up to you to choose your writing companion and approach.

There will be up to EIGHT works commissioned. Prose: 1000-1200 words; 50-60 lines poetry; comics up to half a page (dimensions W 24.96 x H 16.74 cm).

How to submit your EOI:

Interested contributors need to submit:

  • 150-word abstract articulating the form and nature of the intended work
  • Bios for each author
  • A piece (or excerpt) of writing by each contributor in the form (e.g. fiction, review, poem)proposed in the abstract (or similar sample of writing).

Please submit the above to both Sree Iyer sreedhevi.iyer@rmit.edu.au and Kirsten Han kirstenhan@mekongreview.com by 20 January 2024. Decisions on abstracts will be made by first week of February 2024, and final pieces will be due on a rolling basis as negotiated with Mekong Review. *

*Please note that the first issue in the series (May) has a deadline of 20 March for final pieces. Please indicate in your submission if you would be able to make that deadline.

Industry-based writers (ie non-salaried practitioners without university affiliation) will be paid for their work.

Call for Abstracts: Beyond Words: Interdisciplinary Intersections of Creative Writing andWellbeing

EDITORS: Dr Caty Flynn (The Genre Lab.) & Professor Ursula Hurley (University of Salford) CALL DEADLINE: 500-word abstracts by FRIDAY 6th OCTOBER 2023
CONTACT: bookandvolumeofthemind@gmail.com


CONTEXT
The phrase “creative writing” is used in wellbeing interventions as a catch-all term for many forms of practice. Currently, there is scant research to back up claims of efficacy, and little insight in terms of what the actual benefits of specific creative writing practices are, why these benefits occur, and how we can utilise this knowledge for shaping such practices so that we can get the most out of them. We believe passionately that creative writing can, indeed, improve wellbeing. But, we want to present a collection of investigations into the mechanisms of why and, by doing so, lay blueprints for how. This important intersection between wellbeing and creative writing has yet to be addressed robustly and this collection attempts to do so.

Creative writing research is inherently interdisciplinary. As Mi Csikszentmihalyi explains,
“being able to braid together ideas and emotions from disparate domains is one way writers express their creativity” (263). Science and psychology recognise the broader implications of creative writing’s applicability, evidenced by a wealth of developments over the last century, including but not limited to the explicit influences apparent in everyone from Freud to Damasio to Hofstadter, to Narrative Psychology (see Sarbin, 1986) and Drama Therapy (see Jones, 1996). Theorists of all disciplines typically turn to storytelling to elucidate their points. But, what can creative writing do for these fields beyond offering metaphors or analogies (useful as that may be)? What can creative writing do in terms of application, theory, communication, and creative conceptualisation with regard to wellbeing? In this proposed collection, we seek to move beyond metaphor towards mutual enrichment.


The overall purpose of the volume is to showcase innovative methodologies and new theories, highlight benefits and challenges, offer frameworks and directions for future research, and encourage new developments at the intersection of creative writing practice and wellbeing. Our enquiry considers the implications for creative practice; psychological and therapeutic practice; self-help; intersectionality, social justice and transformation; and experimental scientific research.

SUGGESTED THEMES/TOPICS
We aim to be inclusive in terms of discipline, approach, and background. We encourage both single-author and collaborative submissions, and chapters which incorporate practice-based research or creative or hybrid forms into process or presentation, thereby making form as well as content part of the research, as well as more traditional academic chapters. We are interested in chapters that foreground specific genres of writing or specific areas of wellbeing, and those which take a broader view. We encourage personal investigations as well as social research. Essentially, we are open to receiving any creative and robust response to the brief from any and every disciplinary perspective, to showcase the diversity of current practices and their transformative potential.


Of particular interest is interdisciplinary work that can creatively raise issues, themes, and topics such as:

  • Creative writing as a practice through which to shift perspective, question given rules and habitual behaviours, and imagine things otherwise.
  • Connections between the processes and concepts of writing and those of the cognitive and social sciences. Comparative essays on concepts from psychology, mental health, neuroscience, sociology etc with concepts from creative writing i.e., stories and brain processes, rhetorical/literary devices as biological/psychological/emotional functions/tools.
  • How can we make creative writing concepts accessible beyond literacy, vision, or any other barrier which impedes engagement? Chapters might imagine brail or audio methods, oral storytelling, dramatic or musical performance, games, and/or inclusive social facilitations.
  • Re-imaginings, syntheses, or innovative extensions of traditional or existing theory from an interdisciplinary lens – i.e., creative writing and psychology.
  • Case-studies, evaluative reports, cameos, co-constructed content or other outputs from creative writing wellbeing intervention trials or projects.
  • The capacities of creative writing to constitute a free and accessible mode of self-care for a large demographic of people in ways that support intersecting social inequalities observable in accessing effective mental health, wellbeing, and self-development support.
  • Are all types of creative writing good for us? Are certain types of writing “better” for us or more transformational, and others “worse” for us or regressive? In terms of reading or writing, particular genres or styles or movements or periods or practices.
  • Specific genres & their wellbeing potential / mental health utility/resonance; specific mental health conditions explored through the lens of creative writing; specific outcomes – self-expression; reconceptualisation; control; confidence; change; perspective; reflection; etc.
  • Evolutionary advantages of creative writing.
  • Disciplinary, sectoral, and/or any other challenges, difficulties, issues, or barriers in creative writing wellbeing research, development, engagement, and evaluation, including but not limited to ethical procedure, methodology, engagement, skillset, resources, knowledge base, facilitation, publication, funding, collaboration, and interdisciplinary working. How can we transform or overcome these challenges?
  • Robustly researched theoretical essays regarding the “why” and “how” of wellbeing/self-development benefits which emerge from creative writing.
  • The potential of creative writing for social change, resisting injustice, and transforming perceptions.
  • Methodologies for creative writing & mental health research and innovation.
  • Theoretical, experimental, and creative investigations of concepts and practices such as journaling; self-expression; life-writing; self-writing; and so on.
  • How can we build co-construction, community involvement, and social engagement into creative writing wellbeing projects?
  • Everyday utility/application of creative writing concepts/practices for self-care/expression/development.
  • The future of writing for wellbeing – directions/next steps; predictions/hopes; necessary changes; potential problems.

All chapters must constitute fully-integrated interdisciplinary work – a dialogue between fields, rather than a reading of one discipline through another in a one-way dynamic. All of these topics/ideas can be approached in whatever genre of writing feels appropriate. However, we do expect there to be rigorous interdisciplinary research, reading, and critical thinking underpinning even the most creative or experimental chapter. We interpret creative writing broadly, so do contact us if you are unsure about definitional boundaries.


Format: We invite 500-word Abstracts for 5,000-10,000-word chapters (negotiable). Please include up to 5 keywords and a brief biography of the author(s) which includes an institutional affiliation and your contact email.


Send your abstract to: bookandvolumeofthemind@gmail.com

Deadline for Abstracts: 06/10/2023.
Accepted authors will be notified 20/10/2023.
Accepted chapters to be delivered no later than 19/04/2024.
Editorial team: Dr Caty Flynn (The Genre Lab.) & Professor Ursula Hurley (University of Salford)


REFERENCES
Cozolino, L. (2010). The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Perennial.
Damasio, A. (2000). The Feeling of what Happens. London: Vintage.
Freud, S. (2008). The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford’s World Classics.
Hofstadter, D. (2007). I am a Strange Loop. Philadelphia: Basic Books.
Koestler, A. (1975). The Act of Creation. London: Picador.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. London: University of Chicago Press.
Prentiss, S. and Walker, N. eds. (2020). The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction. London: Bloomsbury.

Call for Papers : The writer’s place

A Special Issue of TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses

Deadline for EOIs: 29 May 2023.

This Special Issue seeks to explore the experience of the place of writing. Much has been written about how writers immerse themselves and ‘feel’ – even vicariously in recent years – in/to the place/s their stories are set. But little scholarly attention has been given to the writer’s place, where the works are often ‘written up’. 

Yi-Fu Tuan clarifies in differentiating ‘space’ from ‘place’:

Place has a history and meaning. Place incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people. Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning.  

(Tuan 1979:387).

This Special Issue seeks contributions from writers (of creative nonfiction, fiction, academic writing, poetry/poetics, life/self-writing) as to the meaning attached to their place of writing.   

Malcolm Holz (2022) suggests that as many writers work alone, a large space may not be required to be most creative/productive, rather, that it is often the small place, the archetypal writer-hermit’s hut in the wild, where many influential (and infamous) writers retreated. Martin Heidegger, for example, produced most of his vast works in a hut in the Black Forest (Sharr 2006). Virginia Woolf’s (1929) classic essay illuminated the significance of having ‘a room of one’s own’ in which to write.

This provocation/invitation for contributors is centred on the phenomenology – the phenomenological experience – of the writer’s place. Potential contributors might like to consider:

  • What are the characteristics of the writer’s (preferred or limited) place of writing, and how important is the articulation/decoration/function of that place in the creative process e.g., the writer’s chair, desk, bookcase, pictures, music, temperature?
  • What is the writer’s experience – how does the writer ‘feel’ when writing – and how does the place of writing influence that experience, the creative process, and creative outputs; can the place be imagined/ virtual; how does technology affect the planning or design of the writing space; what does writing in that place smell or taste like? 
  • Does the writer (or their editor?) feel that the work created in a place of the writer’s own making is of a higher quality than if produced in a place they would prefer not to be?
  • Is the writer’s place only/solely the mind/body, and if so, what goes on in writing in that place?

This Special Issue of TEXT is seeking, but is not limited to, creative works and scholarly studies in the coalescence of the psychological space and the physical place of writing. Where do writers go: is it alone in their head, or bed; down the hall, or beside the pool; perhaps on the veranda, or in a fold-up chair by the beach, or a hut in the mountains? What is it about that place which attracts, and what happens – what is the writer’s experience – when the writer gets ‘t/here’?

How to submit your expression of interest:

Please submit a 200-word Expression of Interest by email to Malcolm Holz with ‘The Writer’s Place’ as the subject line. In your EOI please outline how your paper or work(s) explore(s) aspects of the experience of the writer’s place.  Please also include the following information: your full name, institutional affiliation (if any), email address, title of paper/work, brief biography (50–100 words), and 3 to 5 keywords (at least 2 of which should clearly relate to the issue’s title).

Deadline for EOIs: 29 May 2023.

Deadline for finished works/papers: 31 July 2023.  
Enquiries: Malcolm Holz (malcolmholz@outlook.com)

References

Holz, M. (2022) (Re)creative reflective writing in Focus and Flow: towards a timeless way of Being

Paper presented at Australasian Association of Writing Programs Annual Conference, Fire Country, University of the Sunshine Coast, November 2022

Sharr, A. (2009) Heidegger’s hut

MIT Press, Massachusetts

Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1979) Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective

In Gale, S. & Olsson, G. (Eds.) Philosophy in Geography

D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.  pp. 387-427

Woolf, V. (1929) A room of one’s own

Hogarth Press, England

Call for Abstracts | We Need to Talk: The 28th Annual Conference of the AAWP

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 28 July 2023, 11:59PM (AEST). 

The 28th annual conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs is hosted by the University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. 

The event will be held on Ngunnawal Country; we acknowledge with gratitude that we have been welcomed to walk on this unceded land, and pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging.  

We invite proposals for conference papers, panels, or performances that focus on issues that demand personal, social and institutional attention; and we are very interested in proposals that are collaborative, dialogic, improvisational, and/or performative.  

Please consider the following list of starter-topic areas as you construct your abstract/proposal:  

Orality – e.g. 

  • Spoken word forms 
  • Writing/improvising for performance 
  • Song / chant 
  • Script/screenplay 
  • Audio and transdisciplinary storytelling modes 
  • Yarning Circles 
  • Podcasts 

Poetry – e.g. 

  • Performance poetry 
  • Transformative practice 
  • Collaborative work 
  • Ecopoetry
  • Poetry of resistance

Essay – e.g. 

  • Intimacy 
  • Lyrical or dialogic essay
  • Writing as conversatio, or collaboration
  • Reading as intimacy 
  • Manifesto / diatribe / rant 

Sustainability – e.g. 

  • The environment and living in the more-than-human world 
  • Traditional ways of knowing, being and storying 
  • Economic and political engagement in writing/by writers 
  • Object writing 
  • Alternate knowledge systems 
  • Umwelt 

Queering Writing – e.g.  

  • Decentred and diverse voices 
  • Indigenous stories 
  • Neglected art forms 
  • Queering forms 
  • AI / Chat GPT – implications, limitations, possibilities  
  • Gatekeeping 

Arts/Health – e.g.

  • Writing, reading, and wellbeing 
  • Transdisciplinary practice for health 
  • Creative interventions and trauma 
  • Working beyond the academy (outreach, communicating research) 
  • Silences in academia 
  • Care for the author 

(or other topics, though we do ask that you aim to accommodate the theme of the conference in your work)

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 28 July 2023, 11:59PM (AEST). 
Proposals should include: 

  • your name
  • your university or other institutional affiliation 
  • your e-mail address  
  • the title of your proposed paper 
  • your abstract (250 words max) 
  • identify whether it is for a paper, a panel, or a performance
  • a short bio (100 words max).  

Please submit your queries to jen.webb@canberra.edu.au.

NB: while everyone is welcome to attend the conference, only current AAWP members are eligible to present. You can find membership details, prices, and online sign-up options here. 

Call for papers: EACWP VI Pedagogical Conference 2023

The deadline for submissions has been extended to March, 24 (2023).

The EACWP Conference is a biannual event devoted to foster a European and Worldwide dialogue on the different approaches to creative writing education. The VI EACWP conference will take place in Madrid, in the locations of Casa Árabe (The Arabic House) and in the context of Escuela de Escritores 20th anniversary, from Thursday 4 to Saturday 6 May 2023. The on-line format for proposals will only be accepted for the Multilingual Workshops. 

Central to the conference will be an acknowledgement of the importance of creativity and how enhance it through the practice of writing. In times of crisis – probably, the only possible times – writers can make creativity a permanent way of living as artists, continuously questioning, developing and reformulating our craft.

Visit the EACWP Conference website for further details.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Creativecritical Writing Now 

A Special Issue of TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 


This Special Issue aims to explore forms of, and approaches to, creativecritical writing: writing which performs scholarly and creative functions simultaneously. Such blended approaches are no longer new—indeed, they are tracking distinct paths and uses in various contexts inside academia and beyond. As such, this Special Issue will take stock of the current nexus between the creative and the critical, as well as speculate on future conceptions of hybrid creative writing /scholarship.  


The creativecritical mode has a long lineage across fictocritical, autotheoretical and ethnographic writing, as well as creative nonfiction and the essay form. Recently, creativecritical writing has gained popular currency, as evidenced by the work of Rebecca Solnit, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. It is also attracting critical momentum, most noticeably at doctoral level, where, as Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas note, ‘Many postgraduates [in Life Writing] are engaging in projects where the creative and critical/exegetical are an integrated text’ (207–208). In this Special Issue of TEXT, we invite articles (of roughly 6-8,000 words) that engage with the functions, processes, poetics and ethics of creativecritical writing in its many forms (creative nonfiction, fiction, academic writing, poetry/poetics, testimony and more). These engagements should constellate, in order to ask: Where are we now, and what is next for creativecritical writing? We hope to encourage a compiling of the essayistic, the fictocritical, life writing, the seamless, and more, to assess how the exegesis—and creative writing as research more broadly—might be conceived through a creativecritical lens. 


Potential contributors might like to consider:

  • What creativecritical writing approaches do within research? (And, what have they done,
    where are we now, and where we are going?).  
  • Creativecritical possibilities for the exegesis, and questions regarding what counts as
    scholarly output (E.g., what creative writing might do to shift the lexical possibilities of
    scholarly work; how it can work within institutions). Articulating the role of the exegesis, creative exegetical forms, teaching/doing exegetical writing. 
  • Creativecritical approaches as indicative/supportive of new vistas in representation, such as embodied thinking or non-dualistic approaches. (What kind of work is necessary at this juncture? How do thought/body/lived experience interact with scholarly forms? How can life writing operate as scholarship?). 
  • The critical power in creative work, and the inherent criticality of creative expression. (What is creative and what is critical? How can the ‘ancient quarrel’ (Brien and Webb 2012) between poetry and philosophy be re-visited? Is creative work possibly critical work?). 
  • The popular turn towards the creativecritical. 
  • The difference, in creative writing scholarship, between explaining the work and the work being research. 
  • The lineage of creativecritical forms: fictocriticism, art writing, autoethnography, essay. 
  • The ethics of creativecritical writing.  
  • Potential forms and approaches to writing that makes and considers/reflects/thinks 
  • Hybridity in academic writing. 
  • The essay and essayism in scholarly contexts; braided writing and blended forms.

How to submit your expression of interest:  
Please submit a 200-word Expression of Interest by email to Stefanie Markidis and Daniel Juckes with ‘Creativecritical Writing Now’ as the subject line. In your EOI please outline how your paper or work(s) explore(s) aspects of the creativecritical mode. Please also include the following information: your full name, institutional affiliation (if any), email address, title of paper/work, brief biography (50–100 words), and 3 to 5 keywords (at least 2 of which should clearly relate to the issue’s title).
Deadline for EOIs: April 14, 2023.

Deadline for finished works: June 30, 2023.  
Enquiries: Daniel Juckes (daniel.juckes@uwa.edu.au) or Stefanie Markidis (stefanie.markidis@rmit.edu.au)