On the Holding of Spaces for Essaying Into

By , , , and | 31 October 2021
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CODA TWO

Melody with echo (Andy)
‘How did we end up here?’ a friend said in another telephone conversation recently. And it’s like that.

It’s a putting oneself into a space of deliberate uncertainty. Stepping into the unknown. A practicing in that space. Training. It’s about thinking provisionally. Speaking small. Not for all.

It’s about languaging. Being attentive to words, to meaning. To the meaning that can be smuggled in however unwittingly. It’s about taking seriously (which might have nothing whatsoever to do with being serious).

Recently I have been thinking about this as an ethics. I have been thinking of it as an ethic against violence particularly. Violence in its myriad guises.

I want to know how to write in-and-with this time. In-and-with the specific challenges of environmental degradation, ongoing inequalities, a global pandemic … of paranoias big and small. Of hard borders and lockdowns. McKenzie Wark writes ‘I started to ask about what might constitute theory for the Anthropocene.’ And it boils down to something like that for me too.

I want to say that I think it might be possible to train in uncertainty methodologically via essaying. That to do so might benefit us as we navigate the uncertainty of these times as deftly off the page as on it.

I want to venture that in coming together, in writing – and enacting – collectively we might find the courage and nourishment to continue on doing and being and thinking and feeling and protesting and dreaming and resisting and loving and rebelling and failing and succeeding and faltering and uttering in these times.

*zapping from mosquito light

AFTERWORD (sic)

All
This essay was made, variously, on unceded Boon Wurrung, Waddawurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, and Wurundjeri Country. We extend our respects to the ancestors and Elders of these lands as well as to the custodians of the land and waters across Australia more broadly.

A version of this piece was performed as part of the non/fictionLab Public Forum Series on Thursday, 26 August 2021. Together, we, the writers and makers of this text, bring practices in and across poetry, essay writing, theatre, sonic and visual arts towards the essayesque.

*revving engine

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Melody Ellis is a writer and academic of Greek, Anglo-Celtic and German descent living on unceded Boon Wurrung country in the south of Melbourne. She teaches creative writing and literary theory in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, where she is a member of the non/fictionLab research group. She comes from a background in the visual arts and is interested in interdisciplinary, experimental, collective, and fictocritical approaches to writing.

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Andy Jackson is a poet and creative writing teacher, and was awarded the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellowship. He has been shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award and the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. Andy has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal, and his latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the 2022 ALS Gold Medal.

http://amongtheregulars.wordpress.com/

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Tina Stefanou is an Australian-Greek artist based on Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field.

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Peta Murray is a writer-performer and late blooming academic in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her experience as theatre-maker informs her research on the role of arts-based practices as modes of inquiry and cultural activism. She is the author of plays (Wallflowering, Salt), blogposts (mmmmycorona), and multi-modal works of live art and diarological science. Her current focus is the making of HERD, a queer cantata with wreckedALLprods.

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Khalid Warsame is a writer and arts–worker. His essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications. He has appeared as a facilitator and guest artist at writers’ festivals and his work has recently appeared in the anthologies New Australian Fiction (KYD), Growing Up African in Australia (Black Inc.) and in After Australia (Affirm Press).

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