16-18 September 2015, Female Orphan School, UWS Parramatta

The Writing and Society Research Centre is calling for applications for Creative Ecologies – a three-day masterclass program for students currently enrolled in a postgrad Creative Writing degree. The program is participatory, and includes lectures, plenary discussions and workshops led by experienced academics and practitioners.

Application details and more information can be found in the 2015 Information Package, and on the website. The maximum capacity for the retreat is 20 students, with 10 places reserved for UWS students. The cost is $340, and includes attendance, morning/afternoon tea, and lunch. Participants are responsible for their own transport and accommodation.

For further information, contact Dr Melinda Jewell, Writing and Society Research Centre Research Officer, University of Western Sydney: m.jewell@uws.edu.au

To create an appropriate atmosphere for this year’s conference, the AAWP conference committee is seeking submissions of short creative works (up to 500 words) to be read out (by the author) during break times. We are particularly keen to receive works that explore:

· Hauntings in the Australian landscape
· Adaptations of ghost tales from other countries
· Recontextualising of familiar ghosts

Your poems and stories need to be received by 31 July 2015. Writers will be notified of which texts have been selected for performance by 30 September 2015. Please send all submissions to Rachel.LeRossignol@vu.edu.au

The Pro-Vice Chancellor Research at the University of New England is offering four Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander HDR Participation Scholarships for higher degree study undertaken in Creative Practice, and based within the School of Arts at UNE. Successful applicants may elect to work with additional Schools, but the cohort will be based in the School of Arts.

Abstracts are being sought for the 13th biannual international conference of the European Association for Studies on Australia (EASA), hosted by the University of Pannonia (Veszprém, Hungary) in cooperation with Topos – Bilingual Journal of Space and Humanities. Abstracts are due before June 5, 2015.

The conference will provide an ideal venue for exploring Australia as a ‘topos’ in the academy and beyond, in ways that will seek to mobilize the manifold meanings of ‘topos’ as place, common place, and commonplace. The very fact that the discipline of Australian studies has constituted itself as a discrete branch of cultural studies, aggregating itself around self-contained and space-bound ideas of the nation, begs the question of biases possibly informing much research it has produced in the past, and points to the possibility of deconstructing today some of the foundational premises underlying the correlated discourses.

The conference will be held between 30 September and 3 October 2015. The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 5, 2015, and notification of acceptance is scheduled for June 20. For further details, see thecall for papers or visit the conference website

The $4000 Guy Morrison Prize for Literary Journalism recognises excellence in Literary Journalism and is awarded for the best piece of Literary Journalism by an undergraduate or postgraduate student enrolled in a Writing or Journalism program in an Australian university. In the context of this Prize, Literary Journalism is defined as: “a factually accurate, well-researched story that demonstrates the use of fiction techniques in a work of non-fiction; a work that is written with style, flair, detailed description and narrative flow; a work that demonstrates a journalistic and critical understanding of some of the finest reportage in the English language”. The work submitted for the Prize must demonstrate these qualities. Submissions close 30 April – click here to download details.

The prize honours Sydney journalist and playwright Guy Morrison, former Production Editor of The Australian and Features Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, author of the memoir We Shared an Island, and plays Jara, Those Old Picasso Blues, Dancing the Tango in Sensible Shoes, Victor, and Eat Cake.

To qualify for consideration for the Prize, the applicant must:

1. Have been enrolled in a Writing or Journalism Program as a part-time or full-time undergraduate or postgraduate in an Australian university.

2. Have submitted a story of not less than 2,000 words and not more than 10,000 words that exemplifies the qualities of Literary Journalism as stated here.

3. Have produced the work in the 2014 academic year.

There will be only one award presented each year and this will be at the discretion of the judges. The prize may not be given if there is not deemed to be a suitable candidate. The amount of the Prize is $4000. There is a travel allowance of up to $500 if the winner lives outside Sydney.

Do you write short stories? AAWP members are invited to join the international community of writers publishing and selling their work on the new short story publishing website, Cut a Long Story (CUT). The site has been developed in partnership with the National Association of Writers in Education in the UK, and many NAWE members are now featured. If you would like your work to be included ahead of the public launch of CUT later this year (with major financial backing), then do please register now and upload your stories. CUT is proudly committed to a fair deal for writers — and currently fighting the tax on e-books that is imposed within Europe. Visit www.cutalongstory.com

Abstracts are sought for the 20th annual AAWP Conference – Writing the Ghost Train: Rewriting, Remaking, Rediscovering. Swinburne University of Technology will host the conference from Sunday 29 November to Tuesday 1 December, 2015.

The focus of the conference will be the question of rewriting, interpreting and adapting texts.

Papers are invited in three streams: 1) a refereed scholarly stream; 2) a refereed creative stream; 3) a  general non-refereed stream for creative and scholarly texts. Presentations will be twenty minutes each, followed by a ten minutes discussion to allow for the exchange of ideas. Some presentations will be shorter, or longer, especially if they are part of an installation or interactive panel.

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.

Conference information and updates

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

For more information, see the Call for Papers.

NAWE Conference: Call for Proposals
13–15 November, Durham, UK

The NAWE Conference invites writers and colleagues to share their various approaches to writing and to the teaching of writing at all levels. The deadline for proposals is 4 May 2015, and further information is available on the NAWE website