Category Archives: TEXT Journal

Call for Papers: TEXT Special Issues on “Disabled People’s Creative Writing”

This special issue of TEXT aims to highlight the myriad ways in which disability engenders creative writing. We invite papers that explore the influence of impairment and disablement on writing techniques or topics. We are particularly, but by no means exclusively, interested in how these are entangled with other personal characteristics such as race, gender, age, and class. 

Potential topics may include (but are not limited to): 

  • Analysis of a particular disabled author 
  • How impairment shapes creative writing 
  • How disabled authors influence each other’s writing 
  • Learning and unlearning writing conventions 
  • Translating individual experience for a diverse audience 
  • Stories told and stories concealed 
  • Crip style, genre, etc 
  • Disability politics and poetics 

Editors: Associate Professor Jessica White and Dr Amanda Tink 

Abstracts are due by 1 June. 

Read the full details and submission guidelines via the TEXT website. 

Read TEXT Volume 30, Issue 1

This issue includes scholarly contributions by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington on ekphrastic poetry; Ekaterina Pechenkina, Carolyn Beasley and Julian Novitz on new models of creative writing workshop; Delia Falconer on mentorship; Jenny Hedley on depression diaries; Seth Robinson on imagining the end of the world; Jenny Hedley, Gareth Morgan, Stayci Taylor and Jessica Wilkinson on form; and Delia Falconer with Sarah Holland-Batt on models to inform the new Australian Poet Laureateship.

We review books by Nigel Krauth, Loribelle Spirovski, David Stavanger, Juliet A. Paine, Julia Prendergast, Phil Brown, Anna Donaldson and Matt Shank, Matthew Hooton, Barrina South, Siang Lu, and Benjamin Sheppard et. al.

New creative writing on writing in this issue includes work by Duc Dau, Belinda Rule, Diwakar Gautam, Stephanie Green, Md Mujib Ullah, Marshall Moore, Ryan O’Neill, Jane Downing, Caitlin Burns, Christos Constantine, Ian C Smith, Lauren Pitt, Julia Prendergast and Nikki Wong.

Read the full edition via the TEXT website. 

Read TEXT Special Issue 76: Life Writing Beyond the Human

In our call for papers for this special issue, we solicited submissions of/about all modes of life writing that consider experiences, relationality, and intersubjectivity beyond the human. We posed the following questions to our potential collaborators:

• How do we write the abundance of more-than-human and nonhuman life in which we situate our own?
• What forms emerge when lives aren’t coded via anthropocentric timelines?
• How might anthropogenic climate change prompt urgent new forms of life writing that exceed and entangle human subjectivities?

As the essays and creative works within this special issue attest, such questions were only a partial list of possible lines of enquiry when it comes to life writing beyond the human. But all of these lines of enquiry are underpinned by a desire to undo the myth of human superiority.

Guest editors: Briohny Doyle & David McCooey