We are seeking an enthusiastic and engaging Lecturer who can deliver undergraduate coursework in Creative writing, whilst being an active contributor to the faculty’s research programs. 

Apply your knowledge by leading, developing and delivering innovative lectures, and tutorials, actively apply for grants, undertake research and take the lead in growing the Creative Writing space.

This is an education and research focused position, that will see you design, develop and coordinate high-quality courses. With a focus on research, you will need a research profile that aligns with research priorities in the ERA 2023 field of research 36 Creative Arts and Writing.

You will be known for your experience in teaching, student focused approach and passion to help shape the next generation of creatives.

If you enjoy inspiring those around you and are passionate about instilling your knowledge and experience in the next generation of creatives, you will have a track record of professional experience in writing and/or publishing and hold a PhD or are close to completion.

If you consider yourself an innovative educator with a PhD or equivalent, have 3 – 5 years’ experience, built your career within this space and are now looking to share and inspire the next generation with what you have learnt, then this role is for you.

UC’s Strategic Plan 2018-2022 sets a goal to be the national sector leader in equity, diversity, inclusion and access, and the ambitious goals of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Strategic Plan are designed to ensure that our Indigenous students and staff flourish in a welcoming and culturally safe environment. UC encourages applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people with disabilities and people from culturally diverse groups.

The University of Canberra is committed to the safety of vulnerable and young people. As such, successful applicants will be required to have a current ACT working with vulnerable people registration. For further details on how to apply please click https://www.accesscanberra.act.gov.au

To be considered for this role all we want is your CV, no other documentation required.

Please ensure you take the time to align you CV with the Position Description requirements. We want to understand how your skills and experience relate to the position you are applying for.

If you are initially shortlisted, you may be asked to complete an online one-way video interview. There will be a list of pre-set questions that will need to be answered within a stipulated time.

Before submitting an application: Staff intending to apply should consult with their supervisor and Director/Dean about their potential release, should they be successful in being recommended for the position.

Working Rights: Applicants who wish to apply for this position should have valid working rights or eligibility to obtain a work visa for Australia.

For job specific information: please contact Professor Glen Fuller, Head of School, School of Arts and Communication, via email glen.fuller@canberra.edu.au or at 02 6201 2485

Recruitment and application questions: please contact the Recruitment team on 02 6206 3867 or email uctalent@canberra.edu.au

Full job details: https://careers.pageuppeople.com/737/ci/en/job/497791

Closing Date: 11.55pm, Sunday 17^th July 2022

Two positions are open:

• Professor in Education (research intensive)
• Dean of the School of Education & the Arts

The position of Professor is located at any of the QLD campuses (Brisbane, Rocky, Cairns, Gladstone, Townsville, Mackay, Bundaberg) and includes a relocation package, and the Dean’s role is listed nationally with a ‘Central Queensland Campus Location Preferred’.

Professor – Education: https://careers.cqu.edu.au/job/Brisbane-Professor-Education-QLD/778049910/ (closes 31 July)

Dean – School of Education & the Arts: https://careers.cqu.edu.au/job/Dean-School-of-Education-and-the-Arts/778069210/ (closes 29 July)

Currently accepting submissions are two interdisciplinary journals:

• The Journal of Aging Studies, special edition co-edited with Professor Sarah Lamb (Brandeis University) on ‘Gender and Sexual Aging in the History and Culture of Medicine’. Submission are due by June 30^th 2022
• Australian Feminist Studies, special edition co-edited with A/Prof Tinashe Dune (WSU) and Dr Fouzieyha Towghi (ANU) on ‘Diverse Perspectives on Medicine and Health’. Submissions are due by April 30^th 2023 (abstracts/EOIs due by October 31st 2022)

The School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science seeks to appoint a Lecturer (Level B) in Creative Writing to contribute to teaching, research and service in the School.

Creative Writing at Griffith is an active community with a large and vibrant teaching program, an award-winning staff, and a strong research profile as evidenced by our ‘above world standard’ ERA ranking (4). Our Creative Writing Major focuses on fiction, poetry, non-fiction and experimental writing.

The successful candidate will be expected to teach and convene courses in Creative Writing; develop undergraduate curriculum; supervise Honours and Higher Research Degree students; undertake and publish high-quality research within the discipline; and make other valuable contributions to the life and culture of the School.

The School’s teaching activities are diverse: we deliver courses on campus, online and through Open Universities Australia (OUA).

This is a fixed term (until August 2025), full-time position based at either the Gold Coast or Nathan campuses. It is expected that the successful candidate will be available to attend campus in person as a normal requirement of the role. Further, you may be required to work on either a temporary or an indefinite basis at any premises, which the University currently has or may subsequently acquire or at any premises at which it may from time to time provide services.

Further information

Apply on Seek via this link: Lecturer in Creative Writing Job in Brisbane – SEEK

For further information about this role, please contact Professor Michael Ondaatje, Head of School on +61 (0) 7 373 54286.

For application queries, please contact People Services on +61 (0) 7 373 54011.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are strongly encouraged to apply. If you wish to discuss First Peoples Employment further please contact the Talent Management Partner (First Peoples) – Joshua Long on (07) 37355403 or joshua.s.long@griffith.edu.au

Closing date: Wednesday, 1 June, 2022 at 5 pm AEST. All applications must be submitted online.

My co-editor Elena Xeni and myself are publishing a book through Progressive Connexions on the topic of Children and Evil. These can be literary or film representations of evil children. Or representations of evil children in popular culture. See below for a description of our book called Explorations of Fearful Children.

Full Book description: The main intervention and development for evil children studies that the book demonstrates is the exploration of how children function as a blank canvas for adult projections. This notion has not yet received adequate and systematic attention within the still emerging field of scholarship dedicated to iterations of the figure of the evil child. Rather, scholars in this budding field have mainly looked at paradoxical way children are represented as either evil or innocent. The volume proposed here will enrich this existing research by exploring the question how children come to be represented as evil. Furthermore, it’s new focus allows it to make this figure relevant for a wide range of disciplines.

Children are considered to be the “next generation” and, therefore, the future of the human race. When adults feel anxious about their future, this anxiety is projected onto children. This is why representations of evil children are so popular in mainstream media but is also why the nature of the children’s evilness changes depending on the historical period and area in which the representation was first conceptualized. This current volume aims to show the diversity in representations of evil children and explore the relationships between these representations and the circumstances and fears associated with them. Only a truly inclusive, interdisciplinary volume could adequately explore this question, which is why this book will necessarily incorporate these concepts as guiding principles. Explorations of Fearful Children is a truly inclusive volume, with chapters touching on topics such as LGBTQIA experiences, racism and trauma, and caste. This inclusivity is also present in geographical terms: the book includes case studies from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia.

In these times of wide-spread anxieties because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting medical, economic and societal crises, this volume couldn’t be more well-timed. The book’s premise that adult anxieties result in a specific emanation of a figure of an evil child, as a figure that represents the hopeless and dark future that lies ahead, becomes more relevant in times of heightened anxiety. Therefore, a better understanding of our ideas about “evil children” will help provide more insight into the coping mechanisms available to us in times such as these. Furthermore, it is our hope that the analyses presented will help people reflect on their own relationships with children and the ways in which these young people can become the unwitting victims of adult anxieties. 

Progressive Connexions is a not-for-profit research network dedicated to the development and
production of novel forms of interdisciplinary knowledge, experience and living. We enable people
from a wide range of areas and contexts to meet and engage in dialogue with each other across a variety of platforms in carefully crafted spaces that allow for the free exchange and equal interaction of ideas and sharing of best practices. We offer possibilities for expanding and developing those exchanges beyond the initial point of encounter so as to create a vibrant and expanding nexus of creative, global collaborations.

Please send your full length papers max word length of 5,500 words to Elena Xeni at elena_xeni@hotmail.com

Or to Gabrielle Everall at gabbyeverall68@gmail.com 

Deadline Tuesday the 17th of May 2022.

Notre Dame University is offering six writing mentorships as part of the Environmental
Writing project. Round 1mentorships with author James Bradley are intended to assist in the
development of a new essay or work of reportage of 4000-8000 words exploring
environmental concerns.

For more information and to apply, visit https://bit.ly/3DAA9qP or alternatively, email writing.mentorship@nd.edu.au

Writing Dreams: reconceptualising the literary dream in storytelling

This Special Issue of TEXT will explore the capacity of dreams, dreaming and dreamscapes to function as powerful literary devices within a wide array of creative writing forms. It is also curious about creative practice as a kind of dreaming, where a practitioner’s engagements might constitute a quasi dreamwork-on-the-page. Thus, an inherent connection exists between dreams, creative impulse and storytelling. Are dreams stories that demand more space in our humdrum routines and lives? How does writing and its ethico-political scope relate to dreams and visions of what’s possible?
 
Dreams exhibit writerly devices at work in literature—metaphor and metonymy, among a raft of others. In addition, the unconscious processes that unfold during dreaming often tap the conscious processes deployed when constructing literature, and vice versa. However, the poietic strategies fundamental to crafting dream sequences for written forms entail more than simply duplicating the realdream’s narrative potential or structure: they require writers to translate dream-like elements into tangible sequences, rhythms, or scenes, to bring material substance to the oneiric.
 
Significantly, prominent psychologists have long argued that dreams evidence unconscious processes associated with human psychic operations and lived experiences. While Freud noted the ability of creative writers to access processes akin to psychoanalysis (through the manipulation of language, deliberate lapsus linguae, etc.), Jung believed that the narrative structures common to dreams provided insights into an individual’s internal imbalances. It follows that literary dreams have often attracted interpretation through a psychoanalytic lens. While written dream sequences are typically interpreted as a re-presentation of real dreams, another take suggests that dream texts are like other literary texts and require significant creative effort and skill to be effectively crafted.
 
It could therefore be asserted that the written dream—even if based upon a real-life “dreamt” experience—cannot duplicate simplistically any process in the unconscious, but rather may complicate and extend such processes, counterpoint and unsettle them. From this perspective, literary dreams are also closely related to the compositional manoeuvres of literature and literary knowledge; raw dreaming is only the beginning, an entwined, sibling phenomenon.
 
If—for Freud—dreams conjure complex forums that allow our wishes to be fulfilled (covertly or otherwise), then dream-writing and literary dreams with their particular logics speak to the role of desire, of wishes, of our ambivalences and our attitudes to the future. In other words, dream writing dares to go beyond the mundanely possible, testing the implausible, the forbidden, the tender and the strange. Perhaps, then, a broad conceptual approach can allow an investigation of the narrative features, aesthetics, and functions of literary dreams, an approach that extends, but doesn’t exclude, the insights of psychoanalysis.
 
In the Australian context, the term “dreaming” has even broader resonances and longer history, as the term “dreaming” was adopted as the shorthand term in the English, as Yunkaporta argues, for: ‘supra-dimensional ontology endogenous to custodial ritual complexes’ (Sand Talk 2019:22). “Dreaming”, therefore, for writers on Australian soil, includes not just what happens during sleep, but what we might have a chance of encountering, honouring, if we were to wake from a colonial stupor.
 
Thus, papers about writing dreaming, dreams, wishes, visions, the supra-dimensional and literary dreamscapes might embrace tenets central to critical textual analysis, and/or practice-led research, and be informed by Indigenous knowledges, so as to scaffold inquiries concerning the narrative features, aesthetics, and functions of literary dreams as they relate to creative writing practices, and diverse forms of storytelling more broadly.
 
We invite creative and scholarly papers that investigate the myriad of literary functions, and potential aesthetics, associated with dream sequences across various forms of written narrative and storytelling. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:  

• The dream text as de-familiarising devise 
• Amplifying the literary surreal through dreamscapes 
• Aesthetics and poetics of the literary dream 
• Dreams as literary structural devices 
• Dream sequences and the prophetic 
• Constructing gothic literary dreams 
• Representations of dreams in storytelling from different cultural perspectives 
• Dreaming in Indigenous knowledges and ontologies 
• Dreams and narrative discontinuities 
• Literary texts as dreams 
• Dreaming and creative nonfiction 
• Dreaming/writing as mode of resistance/expression 
• Literary dreams and character nuance 
• Dreaming and creative processes/methodologies 

Scholarly papers should be 6,000 – 8,000 words as per TEXT guidelines (including endnotes). 
 
Abstracts
 
Abstracts for scholarly papers should be 200 words in length and sent to the editors at textsidreams@gmail.com
 
1 – 2 creative submissions only will be considered for this Special Issue. We are particularly seeking work on the issue theme from First Nations authors locally and internationally. Prose works would be finally 2 – 3,000 words, (or a conventional equivalent for verse or script-based works). Creative EOIs to us should include a short synopsis of the proposed work (and its relation to the theme and focus of the Special Issue). Please accompany this with a 200 – 300 word creative sample.
If this topic inspires you more broadly, we encourage you to consider submitting creative works to TEXT’s sibling creative Meniscus.
EOIs should be sent to the editors at textsidreams@gmail.com, with the subject line: ‘EOI for Creative Submissions’.

The deadline for Abstracts and Creative EOIs is COB Friday, April 22 (AEST).  

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a heavy reliance on digital technologies: workplaces and classrooms have retreated to Zoom meetings; online video game narratives and streaming services have become a staple of contemporary entertainment; and social media pervades our life and seeks to distract us at every turn. Existence is now infused withnon-human computer language. Even contemporary print texts display what N.K. Hayles calls the ‘mark of the digital’ (2008).

What is realism in a digitally-saturated world? How are writers harnessing, impacted by, or restricted by such digitality?What are the new frontiers for digital literature? How does digitality interrogate/extend traditional forms? 

This special issue of TEXT seeks to publish scholarly papers, poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and born-digital worksthat investigate contemporary engagement with digitality. Papers and works are encouraged to explore, but are not limited to the following:

Scholarly papers should be between 6,000 – 8, 000 words, including notes. Up to three poems and/or one poetry sequence no more than 100 lines per poet will be considered. One short story/CNF piece per writer will be considered. Works of electronic literature will be considered, but will need to be hosted elsewhere by the submitter (links will be published in the issue). Please note, all creative submissions must be accompanied by a 200-word abstract (which may be modelled on an ERA research statement) that clearly explains the submission’s aims and significance. 

How to submit your Expression of Interest: 

Please submit a 200-word Expression of Interest for scholarly essays (by email to David Wright: davidthwright@gmail.com with ‘Digital Realism’ as the subject line. In your EOI please outline how your paper or work(s) explore(s) the theme of ‘Digital Realism’. Also, make sure you 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 two of which should clearly relate to the issue’s title). Deadline: April 1st 2022.

Creative submissions should be sent in full, accompanied by a 200-word abstract (which may be modelled on an ERA research statement) that clearly explains the submission’s aims and significance , by May 31st 2022.

Enquiries: David Wright, Nagoya University davidthwright@gmail.com or Chris Arnold, UWA chris.arnold@uwa.edu.au or Shastra Deo, UQ shastradeo@gmail.com

A University of Canberra Conference, December 5-7, 2022

For Randall Jarrell, “The good in poetry is always a white blackbird, an unusual and unlikely excellence.”

Poetry seems to have exceptionalism at its core.

But poetry is also a practice of the commonest medium there is – language. People within all classes and groups cherish its use: the well-landed expression, irony and word plays, subtle forms of power.

Poetry’s status as the oldest and most widespread of the verbal arts likewise implies a close link to tradition. All the same, a residual strangeness seems to pertain to poetry in all cultures. It may be that tradition is a stranger thing than we tend to imagine.

How do poems relate to the world they proceed from or create? What is the world of a poem?

Proposals for 20 minute papers, or 90 minute panels, are invited, in relation to the poetry or poetics of any language or historical period. Proposals may address the above CFP or any related themes involving poetry and poetics, including

Please submit your proposal to info@ucpoetry2022.info as follows: Title of paper, Name & affiliation, 250-word abstract and 100-word bio.      

Deadline for abstracts is 1 June 2022

(NB Attendees will be asked to submit proof of travel offsetting, as one plank (alongside carbon-neutral catering, public transport, low energy accommodation and paper eradication) in the conference’s strategy of achieving Climate Active certification as a Carbon Neutral Event) 

For all further information: https://ucpoetry2022.info/