Tag 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

Call for Papers: TEXT Special Issue “Use Your Allusion – Intertextuality in Twenty-First Century Writing”

This special issue of TEXT seeks to publish scholarly papers and creative works concerned with and inspired by the theme of intertextuality. We are seeking creative works and scholarship that consciously respond to this tension, reflecting on or engaging in acts of allusion, rewriting and reimagining. In our contemporary moment of environmental, political and existential crisis, it is necessary to ask what purpose ‘writing back’ serves and how it might be done, especially in decolonising contexts.
 
Editors: Dr Aidan Coleman, (Southern Cross University), Associate Professor Melanie Duckworth (Østfold University College) and Associate Professor Adelle Sefton-Rowston (Charles Darwin University).

Abstracts for scholarly papers and creative work EOIs should be sent by 10 April 2026.

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

Angular shapes painted navy blue, yellow, pink and white intersect on a wooden board.

TEXT (Vol 29, No 1) April 2025 edition 

TEXT (Vol 29, No 1) includes scholarly contributors from Australia, New Zealand and the United States: Carrie Tiffany reflects on the mechanical intertext in relation to her award-winning novel Exploded View; Lilian Roberts explores Nachträglichkeit in poetic autobiography; Anders Villani contributes new thinking on trauma and poetics in Kate Lilley’s Tilt and his own collection, Totality; Patricia Webb discusses the inclusion of social justice themed texts in writing courses; Annabel Wilson reads for re-arrangement in Lynn Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away; Ruth Jackson writes on walking and travel writing in Ethiopia; Marija Pericic looks at sumazdat reading practices within the Soviet Union (USSR); Shelley-Anne Smith considers emotional contagion and embodied empathy in literary posthumanism; and Soren Tai Smith writes on self-shedding and decreativity in Kafka and Weil.

This issue also includes prose and poetry by Caitlyn Stone, Jacqueline Exbroyat (trans. Patricia Worth), Brid-Áine Parnell, Ian C. Smith, David Thomas Henrey Wright, Nat Kassel, Inez Baranay, Yuxin Zhao, Rebekah Clarkson, Shady Cosgrove, Gay Lynch, Julia Prendergast, Billie Travalini, Cassandra Atherton, Dominique Hecq, Jen Webb, Katrina Finlayson, Eugen Bacon, Paul Hetherington, Owen Bullock, Jessie Seymour, Martin Langford, Annabel Wilson, Verity Oswin, Beth Spencer, Ella Jeffrey, and Les Wicks.

And in our reviews section, Samuel J. Cox reviews Contemporary Preoccupations in the Australian Novel by Nicholas Burns and Louise Klee (eds.), Tarla Klamer reviews Leaf by Anne Elvey & Ways to Say Goodbye by Anne Kellas, Andrew Leggett reivews Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq, Philip Harvey reviews Lands of Likeness & Dark-Land by Kevin Hart, Jake Sandtner reviews Juice by Tim Winton, Jodi Vial reviews Flight by Shady Cosgrove, Colin Dray reviews A to Z of Creative Writing Methods by Deborah Wardle et al. (eds.), Amanda Tink reviews Raging Grace by Andy Jackson, Esther Ottoway and Kerri Shying (eds.), Denise Beckton reviews Thinning by Inga Simpson & Something About Alaska by JA Cooper, Moya Costello reviews The Season by Helen Garner, Carolyn Booth reviews Images of Water by Eugen Bacon (ed.), Jen Webb reviews Mishearing by David Musgrave and we publish a letter to the editors from James Shea and Grant Caldwell in response to Owen Bullock’s review of The Routledge Global Haiku Reader (TEXT Vol 28, No 2).

Read this and other issues via the TEXT website here. 

Call for Papers: Text Special Issue

Call for Papers, TEXT Special issue: ‘Isn’t it Romantic’, inspired by the RWA 2024 academic symposium

Romance is a powerhouse genre, a $1.4 billion dollar industry in 2022 (The National Herald). Sales of romance print books increased 52% in the 12-months ending May 2023 (Global Newswire) and according to Nielsen BookScan in Australia the ‘Romance and Sagas’ genre more than tripled in sales 2017-2023, showing an increase of 230%, while New Zealand saw a 270% increase in the same period. Popular Romance Studies is of growing scholarly interest and there are increasing numbers of Higher Degree Research students in the field, particularly doing Creative Writing PhDs. This is a call for papers inspired by the themes of the academic symposium hosted by Flinders University and Assemblage Centre of Creative Arts at the Romance Writers of Australia conference in August 2024. We invite scholarship on popular romance fiction in all its incarnations, including its intersections with colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, power, disability, and queerness, and explorations of genre and subgenre. Both scholarly articles and creative work will be considered. 

Papers are encouraged, but not limited, to explore the following:

  • Popular romance fiction tropes 
  • Popular romance fiction and questions of genre/subgenre 
  • Romance fiction and colonialism  
  • Romance fiction and race 
  • Romance fiction and gender 
  • Romance fiction and sexuality 
  • Romance fiction and dis/ability  
  • Romance fiction and queerness 

Abstract Submissions

Abstracts for scholarly papers should be 200 words in length and sent to the editors at degreesoflove@flinders.onmicrosoft.com with the subject line:‘EOI for Isn’t It Romantic Special Issue of TEXT Journal.’

Scholarly papers should be 6,000 – 8,000 words as per TEXT guidelines (including endnotes). Please include a brief biography with your abstract (100 words max, in TEXT style) and ensure that you include your email address for reply. 

EOI for Creative Submissions

Creative submissions will also be considered for this Special Issue. Final prose works would be 2,000 – 3,000 words. Creative EOIs should include a short synopsis/description of the proposed work, its relation to the theme and focus of the Special Issue, and a 200 – 300 word (10 – 20 lines) creative sample. 

EOIs should be sent to the editors atdegreesoflove@flinders.onmicrosoft.com with the subject line:‘Creative Submission EOI for Isn’t It Romantic Special Issue of TEXT Journal.’ Please include a brief biography with your abstract (100 words max, in TEXT style) and ensure that you include your email address for reply. 

Deadline for Abstracts and EOIs: Friday, 6th September 2024

Deadline for completed, accepted works: Friday, 1st November 2024

We welcome early submissions

References 

Bhowmik, Ananyaa. “Era of Romance: Exploring the Unprecedented Boom in the Popularity of Romance Novles.” The National Herald, 2023. Retrieved June 1st, 2024, from thenationalherald.com.  

Baur, Erick. “From Laggard to Leader: Record Sales of Romance Books Reflect Next Generation of Contemporary Readers.” GlobeNewswire, 2023. Retrieved June 1st, 2024, from globenewswire.com. 

Program for the RWA ‘Trope Actually’ academic symposium: 

https://willorganise.eventsair.com/2024-romance-writers-of-australia/friday-workshops