This special issue of TEXT seeks to investigate peripheral visions of past, present and future;of figures and forms, fractures and erasures. Inspired by the AAWP’s 2018 annual conference held in Perth, Western Australia, we invited writers and scholars to think deeply and broadly about the purpose and potential of writing of all kinds. Authors were encouraged to tackle, for example, unconventional wisdom, unsettled perspectives, lapsed borders—that which is beyond and outside the accepted or obvious. By this means, we hoped that various worlds, ideas, fictions and verities would emerge, compete, coalesce, fragment and challenge.
During a period of elevated consciousness, when countless voices vie for attention, we believe there is a need for vibrant and rigorous scrutiny of writing’s potential to interrupt, corrupt and disrupt, as well as to rouse, revivify and heal—in other words, for writing that explores and encourages various forms of peripheral vision.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleUsing Dickinson’s poetic example, this paper contemplates language as ‘an edge that never arrives’.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThe creative writing classroom is one place in which the act of reading for the purpose of writing brings a distinctive charge to the study of Australian literature.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThis paper explores the challenges facing settler writers who wish to respectfully acknowledge the sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThis essay asks: what are the ethics of representing birds in fiction?
- Special Issues: scholarly articleOur essay argues the benefits of duoethnography for creative arts research.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThis research looks at how, on an intra-personal level, journaling, poetry writing and self-prescribed bibliotherapy boded well for recovery from breast cancer surgery.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleApproaches to creative activity grounded in embodiment have the potential to enhance creative writing practices by focusing on the embodied dimensions of writing practice and the writing workshop.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThis paper investigates an enigmatic past through autoethnographic research and writing devoted to nineteenth-century London surgeon Isaac Baker Brown and his family, with reference to the medical condition vulvodynia.
- Special issues: creative worksJames is a weirdo – a dirty little weasel. He’s Gene’s grandson, he’s blood, but she stakes no claim. Without warning, he throws the cat in the spit roast.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleResponding to a gap in rubric construction practice, this paper discusses a research project where students moved from being rubric users to being central participants in collaborative design.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThis article focuses on what are commonly seen as peripheral aspects of the doctorate; that is, aspects of candidature that lie beyond, and outside of, the core work.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleEntering the digital storyworld of Deakinopolis is about imaginatively entering an alternative fictional storyworld that largely presents as factual, an experience that mirrors tertiary learners’ realities.