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

An International Poetry Studies Institute Symposium
1 May 2015, 9.45am–4pm

This one-day symposium at the Inspire Centre, University of Canberra, will feature readings and presentations by leading poets including Jordie Albiston, Cassandra Atherton, Sarah Day, Paul Hetherington, Lisa Jacobson, Judy Johnson, Geoff Page, Maria Takolander and Jen Webb. A draft program is available on the IPSI website

Despite being imaged all around us in popular culture and the media, death and dying are, it often seems, the last taboo subjects in modern society. To address this, the inaugural Australasian Death Studies Network conference, ‘Death, Dying, and the Undead: Contemporary Approaches and Practice’, will be held at UCQ’s Noosa campus in Queensland on 12 October 2015.

This one-day multi-disciplinary conference brings together discussion and investigation in a range of cultural, humanities and social areas that consider death and dying, including creative arts, popular culture, health and community planning. Abstracts are due 1 May, 2015. Click CFP to download full details or read more …

The Conference will consider the practices and processes around death and dying, and approaches to these topics, including:

• Representations of death, dying and the undead in popular culture
• Gothic representations of the death, dying and the undead
• Death and dying in Australasian culture and history
• Writing and Reading about death and dying
• Approaches to death and dying: at home, in hospital or elsewhere
• The contemporary funeral and the multinational funeral industry
• Images of death and dying in visual art and the media
• The ‘good death’ and what this means in practice and for policy makers
• Roadside memorials, spontaneous shrines and other memorial practices
• Celebrity death and public grieving
• Transgression, death and crime fiction
• Teaching and learning about death
• Other relevant topics and issues

International Keynote Speaker

Dr Lorna Piatti-Farnell, AUT: The Price of Undying: Vampire Genetics and the Cultural Politics of Immortality. Director, Popular Culture Research Centre, Auckland University of Technology, AUT President, Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia. Chair, Gothic and Horror Area, Popular Culture Association of Australia & New Zealand

Publications and related events

An edited book / special issue of Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies (founded by Dr Piatti-Farnell) will be produced from this event. The conference will include the opening launch ofThe Vanities, a new exhibition in the CQUniversity exhibition space.

Submissions

Please email abstracts of 200 words, plus your name, email, plus brief bio note (50-100 words) by 1 May 2015 to Zoe Allen, z.allen@cqu.edu.au (Please put ‘Death, Dying and the Undead abstract submission’ in subject line of email.)

Contact/queries

Professor Donna Lee Brien, d.brien@cqu.edu.au

The National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) in the UK is delighted to announce the online publication of the first issue of its new peer-reviewed journal, which aims to explore the art of writing and to encourage all forms of related research.

The journal publishes scholarly articles about practice and process that contextualize, reflect on and respond to existing knowledge and understanding. Writers featured in the first issue are: Viccy Adams, Farrukh Akhtar, Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor, Donna Lee Brien and Bronwyn Fredericks, John Dale, Peter Griffiths, Mike Harris, Louise Tondeur, Sarah Wardle, J. T. Welsch, and Paul Williams. Guest contributor is Philip Gross. Read more or click CFP to download submission details for the second issue.

Submissions are now invited for the second issue of Writing in Practice, to be published in March 2016 and edited by Kathy Flann, Holly Howitt-Dring, Keith Jebb and Kate North. We are looking for articles that explore the art of imaginative writing of all kinds, highlighting and evolving current academic thinking and practice. Creative Writing itself is welcomed when integral to an article. The deadline for submissions is 5pm (GMT) on 17 June 2015.

Submissions should be in the region of 4-10,000 words, and include an abstract of up to 200 words. All submissions will be anonymously peer reviewed, with feedback given by early October 2015. Please refer to the full submission guidelines on the NAWE website before submitting your work to the editorial board: peer-review@nawe.co.uk

http://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-practice

The Minding The Gap: Writing Across Thresholds And Fault Lines Papers – The Refereed Proceedings Of The 19th Conference Of The Australasian Association Of Writing Programs, 2014 are now available under the publications tab

‘Writing the ghost train: rewriting, remaking, rediscovering’ will be the theme of the AAWP’s 20th conference, hosted by Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology from Saturday 28 November to Tuesday 1 December, 2015.

‘Reading and writing, we are at once visceral and ghost-like; in our bodies and out of them; making imagined places real’.
—Martin Edmond

While this conference looks back to twenty years of work carried out in the field of creative writing studies by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, it also looks forward to that which is ‘in the making’. With the title of this conference, ‘Writing the ghost train,’ we pay homage to Martin Edmond’s keynote address of 2014, ‘riding the ghost train,’ an insightful exploration of the creative drive of one singular writer. We also acknowledge that for the original inhabitants of this land, the white man was once—and perhaps still is—a ghost. As the planet moves, with a grim relentless urgency toward destruction brought on by our own spectral dreams, we also note both history and nature’s examples: destruction makes room for creation. Working by association, linking the real with the imagined, the memory with the artefact, the archive with the avatar, this conference is an invitation to explore what such scholars as Todorov, Genette, Hutcheon, Eco and Kristeva have called hypotext, hypertext, genotext, phenotext, and, more generally, the recontextualisation of narrative and aesthetic motifs.

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

The Conference will provide four thematic streams, with variants of refereed and non-refereed academic papers and creative works, including installations.

1. ‘Rewriting the historical event’ will address the issue of interpreting or re-interpreting the past through the filters o 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.
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, remaking images in the experiences of the subject in the text as, for example, through the process of canon-formation.

In addition to this mix of standard academic and creative possibilities, there will be a series of panels, a PhD hub and a Master class for Honours and postgraduate students with a notable writer. If you are interested in convening any of these events, or have suggestions, please get in touch.

Watch this space as important information will be posted from April 1^st — the first call for papers.

Contact: Dominique Hecq, dhecq@swin.edu.au

The AAWP has launched its Facebook page, making it easier than ever to keep in touch – just ‘Like us’! While there is still a group page for postgraduate discussions, the new Facebook page makes it easy to stay in the loop with conferences, opportunities and developments within the writing discipline and the writing world. To go to the new page, click on the image below.