In the late 18^th Century the French writer Xavier de Maistre was sentenced to six weeks house arrest in Turin for fighting a public duel. Rather than see his forced confinement as a barrier to creativity and production, he wrote the non-fiction book A Journey Around My Room (1794) which explored the details of his bedroom, from the stories of the tapestries on his wall to the ‘topography’ of his wooden floor and the value of his dog Rosine as a ‘travel’ companion.

There are many such examples throughout history of writers finding creativity, purpose, and inspiration from within their periods of confinement beyond de Maistre, whether it be Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of French Elle magazine who wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1998) only using the blinking of one eye to write after suffering a catastrophic stroke; or Behrouz Boochani who sent out the chapters of his award winning book No Friend But the Mountains (2018) from his Manus Island prison via mobile phone messages.

The forced isolation throughout the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the work patterns, job security and mobility of many as we endeavour to continue writing and researching despite the continual challenges. As a response to the changes that the current pandemic has forced on all of us, creatively, geographically and ethically, this special edition of Ethical Space will look to explore Journalism and creative non-fiction within isolation and confinement as a way to not only contextualise many of the present challenges, but also as a way to observe and reflect on how this has been approached in different historical and geographical settings when we have been faced with similar periods of confinement and uncertainty.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Impacts of COVID-19 on journalism production
• Ethics of working as a journalist or non-fiction writer during the pandemic
• Explorations of creativity within a pandemic
• Life writing
• Experiments
• Historical approaches to writing during previous pandemics and periods of enforced isolation
• Journalism, ethics and war (from nurses to foreign correspondents and trench presses)
• The challenges of writing about illness, both in contemporary and historical settings
• Writing from within ‘closed’ environments such as North Korea
• Explorations of mobility and travel during isolation and confinement

We welcome abstracts of 250 words for articles and non-traditional outputs which explore the diverse and profound impact of writing during isolation and confinement, as a way to contextualise and reflect on the current predicament within COVID-19.

To participate, please email Ben Stubbs by April 30^th 2022 with a 250 word abstract for the Ethical Space peer review process. Contributing scholars will need to send their completed essays or articles by the 30^th of September 2022.

It is with much pleasure that submissions are invited for Beyond Human Scales ASLEC-ANZ’s conference edition of Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology. Submissions close 28 March 2022. Creative work and scholarly essays are welcome, and even more so, submissions that set these genres askew.

We seek submissions that relate to the recent ASLEC-ANZ conference, Ngā Tohu o te Huarere: Conversations Beyond Human Scales, which focused on thinking beyond the human, embracing situated and distributed knowledges across and beyond Moana Oceania. Conference participants were asked to think about questions such as: ‘What if the way to understand the world today is to step outside of ourselves for just one minute? How long can that minute last? Isn’t there an arrogance in even thinking we can do such a thing?’ The concept of scale can relate to time, or size, or space, or other interpretations that inspire you. Submissions should engage with any aspect of the conference theme, with a regional focus on the continent currently known as Australia, Aotearoa and other landforms and waters nearby, where the swamphen (Porphyrio) is flourishing. Approaches that foreground Māori, Aboriginal, Indigenous or decolonial (tauiwi) strategies are strongly encouraged.

Swamphen is a peer reviewed journal, previously published as the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. This will be the 10th volume of the ASLEC-ANZ journal. The Swamphen editorial collective are Alanna Myers, Christine Howe, Kate Middleton, Robyn Maree Pickens and Sue Hall Pyke.

We look forward to your submissions and encourage short and focused works with 5,000 words being our maximum.

Please submit full papers via the online portal here:
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/Swamphen/author.

If you are not already registered, you will need to create a user account. For technical difficulties please contact: susan.j.murray@sydney.edu.au. For general enquiries contact: smpyke@unimelb.edu.au.

Australia’s leading creative writing journal, TEXT, is calling for expressions of interest to guest edit an upcoming Special Issue for publication in December 2022. 

Special Issues of TEXT have long provided leading research for the creative writing discipline in Australia and internationally. We welcome issues that engage with timely or relevant themes, examine previously unaddressed themes or topics, develop new experimental methodological approaches, share or exchange inter/national perspectives, or encourage new lines of creative practice research. 

Each Special Issue comprises 8–10 articles of 6000–8000 words, including the Guest Editors’ Introduction. Guest Editors will circulate a call for papers, manage the double-blind peer review process, select papers for publication, and ensure papers are rigorously revised and edited in line with TEXT policies and house style. The completed issue is due no later than November 1^st, 2022 for a December publication date. 

TEXT publishes both research-led creative works and scholarly articles. We invite expressions of interest from emerging and established academics, both in Australia and overseas. 

Before submitting an EOI, please familiarise yourself with TEXT’s policies and examples of past Special Issues, available on the TEXT website.

EOI submissions should include the following information:

• Proposed title of your special issue
• Proposed Call for Papers (no more than one page)
• Where you will advertise and circulate this Call for Papers
• Where you will draw your peer reviewers from (nationally and internationally)
• A clear outline of the relationship of this special issue to TEXT‘s brief and audience, and particularly its relationship to current scholarship on creative writing
• The approximate predicted size of the issue 
• A list of your editorial team, including brief CVs outlining editorial experience (1-3 guest editors per Special Issue is usual)
• The main contact person for the team and their email details
• A proposed timeline for the processes involved, including circulating a call for papers, the double-blind peer review process, revision, copyediting, and proofreading.

The deadline for submitting Expressions of Interest is Monday, February 28^th 2022. Successful applicants will be notified within two weeks.  

For questions or to submit an EOI, please contact the Special Issues Editors Associate Professor Sue Joseph, Dr Emma Doolan, and Dr Kate Cantrell at textspecialissues@aawp.org.au

In the spirit of the spooky season, the new book series Horror and Gothic Media Cultures is launching a monthly online discussion group open to scholars (including graduate students) and creative practitioners around the globe working in the area of horror and Gothic media. Each discussion will be sparked by a short podcast episode that will offer a provocation related to current and key debates in the field.

The discussion group will occur 1-2 weeks after the release of each podcast episode, with the first discussion occurring on Thursday the 18th of November(08:00am Amsterdam time, CEST / 05:00pm Melbourne/Sydney time, AEDT).

The group is led and hosted by the Horror and Gothic Media Cultures series’ founding editor, Dr Jessica Balanzategui, Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies at Swinburne University of Technology. Jessica presents the first provocation: “What’s the deal with ‘elevated’ horror?” https://youtu.be/A-boNAtYMuI (also below).

Future episodes will feature special guests, including the authors of forthcoming or recently launched books in the series. Discounts for books in the Horror and Gothic Media Cultures series will be offered to those who attend the discussion group.

You can find both the series and Jessica on Twitter @HorrorGothCult and @JKBalanzategui.

Calling on sub-editors, or would-be sub-editors.

TEXT Special Issues is seeking applications for four annual 12 month sub-editor internships, beginning 2022. We are looking for people who love words, understand grammar, spell well, have an eagle eye for technical literals, and can learn and apply our style guide rigorously.

TEXT Special Issues is published every June and December, with one to two special issues each publishing round. You will be working with the three Special Issues Co-Editors, eager to mentor and support you through this learning curve.

If you are interested and able to volunteer your time and effort to hone your editing skills, please send me a short paragraph, outlining your current skills and any experience to date. This is an opportunity for a mid-doctoral candidate or ECR looking to make connections in our academic and creative communities.

Co-Editors: Associate Professor Sue Joseph; Dr Kate Cantrell; and Dr Emma Doolan. Please send to: sue.joseph@unisa.edu.au

Thursday 30 September 2021, 10am – 12pm AEST

The Arts Faculty at Macquarie University is holding a special online event — Creative Nonfiction and Social Justice: In conversation with Behrouz Boochani — on Thursday 30 September at 10am AEST. It will be recorded for people to view later in other time zones.

Behrouz Boochani’s book No Friend but the Mountains drew intense local and international interest when it was published in mid-2018.

The book conveys the inhumane treatment of refugees and asylum seekers imprisoned on Manus Island by the Australian government to prevent their resettlement in Australia. Boochani’s tools were successive contraband phones hidden at one stage in a cavity he carved deep in his mattress. Originally written in Farsi, No Friends but the Mountains was produced text by text under constant surveillance and the threat of retribution and violence.

In August 2019, after the book won a slew of major literary awards, the Papua New Guinean government offered to relocate all the men from Manus Island to Port Moresby. Boochani is now in New Zealand and able to reside there permanently.

In this conversation, Behrouz Boochani discusses the writing and form of his book – why he chose creative nonfiction over journalism – and the impact the book has had on Australian refugee and asylum seeker policy.

View Behrouz Boochani’s profile.

Anyone interested in joining can use this link to register: https://event.mq.edu.au/behrouz-boochani…/registration

Any questions about the event should go to events@mq.edu.au

Social Alternatives is an independent, not-for-profit peer-reviewed journal with quarterly publications. It is committed to the principles of social justice, commenting on important social issues of current concern or public debate. We publish practical and theoretical articles on relevant topics, as well as reviews, short stories, poems, graphics, commentaries and critiques.

While Social Alternatives is primarily a scholarly journal, publishing articles and commentary, the collective firmly recognises the ability for literature to comment on range of social issues and act as vehicle for social change. Fiction is by definition transformative, allowing us to reveal and re-imagine ourselves. No particular theme or focus is required for short stories.

Please note, authors are invited to submit short stories they have polished and should not attempt to artificially target social issues since the creative nature of short story writing can be stymied by this focus.

Please read these guidelines carefully before submitting your writing.

Direct enquiries and submissions to the Short Story Editor:
Dr Thu Hoang – Independent scholar
hoang_ngoc_thu@yahoo.com.au – Please use this while the Social Alternatives server is undergoing reconstruction. Once this is completed, future contact can be made at thoang@socialalternatives.com

Poetry on the Move Symposium 2021:
Archives, counter-memory, creative practice and poetry

We are seeking wide-ranging work for a Poetry on the Move 2021 symposium (in Canberra and via Zoom) and a subsequent issue of the Axon Creative Explorations journal that takes up what has been a lively discussion about archives and counter-memories situated in opposition to official histories.

This call is for presentations/papers that explore the contemporary relationship between creative thinking, creative practice, poetry and the archive. We are especially interested in topics that connect to the following issues:

• Poetry and the archive
• The archive re-imagined as counter-memory and/or resistance
• Creative writers as archivists
• Poetry and memory
• Poetic biography
• Archives, connections and genealogies
• Non-dialectical histories and the reconstruction of memory
• Poetry and the digital archive
• The quotidian, fact and creative writing
• Poetry and forms of resurrection

The editors are seeking papers for a symposium to be held in Canberra and via Zoom on Thursday, 14 October 2021, from 10 am to 3:30 pm (it will be followed by the launch of the Poetry on the Move festival). Selected papers from the symposium, as well as other papers on theme, will be published in the first issue of Axon: Creative Explorations for 2022.

Please submit a 100–150-word abstract by midnight on 30 September 2021. If you wish to write full paper of between 3,000 and 5,000 words for subsequent publication in Axon: Creative Explorations (subject to the usual referee processes) this paper will be due on 15 March 2022.

When you submit your abstract, please record whether you want it to be considered for 1) the symposium; 2) the journal issue; 3) or both symposium and journal issue

Please submit via Submittable

Early Bird Registration is open for the @historicalnovelsocietyaustralasia HNSA 2021 Virtual Conference in October. 

With the Conference being hosted virtually for the very first time, HNSA has created its most extensive conference program to date featuring Guest of Honour, Geraldine Brooks. 

Join HNSA over two weekends in October to celebrate historical fiction with panels, interviews, workshops, bootcamps and so much more. Recorded sessions will remain accessible to registrants for three months after the event. Check out the program and book now.

Check out the program and book now.

Dear Colleagues,

The passing in June this year of Janet Malcolm, the longstanding journalist for The New Yorker, and author of The Journalist and the Murderer, started us thinking about her legacy.

We want to collate some reflections about her work here in Australia, for possible publication in a journal. If you are interested in participating, could you please answer the six questions in the attached word document and email it to me.

Let us know whether you want to remain anonymous and if you would be willing to do a follow-up interview if needed.

Thank you so much for your time in advance. It is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Associate Professor Sue Joseph and Professor Matthew Ricketson