Writing the Ghost Train
AAWP 20th Annual Conference
Sunday 29 November to Tuesday 1 December 2015
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne
DRAFT SCHEDULE
Pre-conference: Saturday 28 November
12.00 - 1.00 pm Conference Registration ATC Foyer
1.00 - 4.30 pm Ghost trails (A & B)
A. Encounter or re-encounter Melbourne (information available at registration)
B. Checking exhibitions (ATC 103 / Foyer; AMDC Level 3 foyer)
6.00 pm Executive Meeting
7.00 pm Executive informal dinner somewhere quiet
Day one: Sunday 29 November
8.45 – 9.15 A. Conference Registration ATC foyer
B. Exhibitions open:
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Elizabeth Colbert: Once upon a time (ATC 103)
Caren Florance: Vitreous syneresi: I see you sometimes (ATC 103)
Natalie Rose Dyer: In red ink (ATC 103)
Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye: Gas (ATC foyer)
9.15 – 9.30 Welcome to Swinburne and thanks: ATC 101 (DH, DA, JB)
9.30 – 10.00 Welcome to country: Aunty Joy Wandin-Murphy: ATC 101
10.00 – 11.00 Keynote: Tony Birch: ATC 101
11.00 -11.30 Morning Tea & CHAPTER ONE WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT & READING (11.15 AMDC)
11.30 – 1.00 Session A (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
A1 Hauntologies: War, loss, violence, writing
Marion May Campbell: Transgeneric writing as ghost traffic in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina
Molly Murn: Writing on thresholds: A poetics
Zana Bell: Embossed into the land: a hauntological exercise
Amelia Walker: Creative title
A2 Revision
Dominique Hecq: Marguerite Duras’ phantom archive
Paul Magee: What Eliot, Pound and Hemingway cut out
Lucy Neave: Ghosts of the archive: Intangible acts of composition and their traces
Eleanor Limprecht: Coercive archives
A3 The muse, her avatars and manifestations
Owen Bullock and Niloofar Fanaiyan: Warp and weft: Aesthetics of the poem as an artefact of
experience in time
Simon West: The book of my memory: Writing and memory in Dante and Wordsworth
Caitling Mailing: Refracting theory: Creative writing through collage in ecocriticism and ecopoetry
Jordan Williams: Swimming with the sacred: An adaptation of Kenneth Slessor’s poem Beach Burial
A4 Reckoning with the dead
Donna Lee Brien: Remaking the dead, reanimating the past: surveying the undertaker’s memoir
Kira Legaan: Remembering trauma: The ghost of self-adaptation
Rachel Le Rossignol: Haunting shades of dead writers
Lara Bardsley: Rewriting the past; making peace with our ancestral ghosts: A personal narrative
A5 Ghosts in the nursery
Julienne van Loon: Personal histories of play: The novelist, the scientist and the mathematician
Christine Hill: Playing with ghosts in the nursery
Julia Prendergast: Like clay
1.00 – 2.00 Lunch + Launch (Jen Webb)
2.00 – 3.30 Session B (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
B1 Vanishing points, history and countermemory
Shady Cosgrove and Joshua Lobb: Writing the (othered) self: cultural exchange and creative writing
pedagogy
Gail Pittaway: The ghost of Sigurd the Volsung in Eketahuna
Irene Waters: Time Travel: Memories, Identity and memoir
Myles (Idoko) Ojabo: Imbricating remodelled themes of slave history into fiction
B2 Anaphoric imaginaries
Debra Adelaide: Working by association, linking the real with the imagined, the memory with the
artefact, the archive with the avatar
Natalie Pirotta: Re-making Anna Karenina: Death, desire and dripping paint
Sue Pyke: Spawn of Wuthering Heights: the pleasures in reading and writing Wuthering Heights
Ariella van Luyn: Treading air: The ethics of using historical fiction to explore women’s sexuality in
the interwar period
B3 Rescripting texts and contexts
Hester Joyce: The poetics of screenwriting in scene text
Houman Zandi-zadeth: Siyavash-Khani: to tell the untold
Louise Satwell: Re-crafting the screenplay—a fictocritical approach
Rose Lucas: Under the Ice: The creative dialectic of poetry and the visual image
B4 Restorying selves: History, honour, ethics
James Vicars: Creative constructions and textual transformations in the writing of lives
Di Murray: The Unreliable itinerary
Ruth Learner: From desire to hope to desire
Amy Matthews: Lion hunt: Turning family histories into magic realist fiction
B5 The crossroads of destinies
Rachel Morley: Creative ecologies: a pedagogical response to challenges in creative arts scholarship
Kroll, Jeri: Bringing to life the ghost of the ideal work: Hypotexts, hypertexts and re-crafting the
creative writing doctorate.
Belinda Hilton and Chantelle Bayes: Waiting at the station—getting off the PhD line
3.30 – 4.30 Afternoon Tea + Launch (Karina Quinn)
4.30 – 5.30 Session C (1, 2, 3, 4,5) Panels
C1 Creativity and re-writing history: Eugen Bacon with Denise Beckton and Leanne Dodd
C2 Archives, counter-archives, anti-archives
Rina Bruisma: Carillion
Harriett Gaffney: Nomad fictions and unsettling settlement
Bambi Ward: Identity issues of a second generation Holocaust survivor: The role of art therapy in
facilitating the writing of family secrets
C3 Rewriting, remaking and rediscovering screenwriting practice—when the screenwriter becomes
practitioner-researcher: Craig Batty with Suya Lee, Louise Sawtell, Stephen Scullery and Stayci Taylor
C4 Ghost-writers and refashioned selves: Sue Gillett with Christie Nieman and Mary Pomfret
C5 Apparitions and dictions of dislocation
Lillian Allen: Family baggage: The lingering legacy of ancestral stories of migration
Hasti Abbasi Narinabad: Dislocation and the idea of happiness in two Australian and Persian selected
novels and its embodiment in The borders
Roanna Gonsalves: The survival of the friendliest: Learning to be a writer in contemporary India
Delia Allen: The fiction of recent history: Telling a good story or telling like it is
6.00 – 7. 30 Spectral harmonies (Session D): Hawthorn Town Hall
Paul Punshon {TBA}
Owen Bullock, Monica Carrol, Jen Crawford & Paul Munden: Ghost…fragments…
Indigo Perry & Andrew Darling: Entwinement
Dan Disney: either, Orpheus
Paul Punshon {TBA}
7.30 – 8.30 Cocktail party
Day two: Monday 30 November
8.45 – 9.00 Conference Registration Design Factory AMDC foyer
9.00 – 10.00 Keynote speaker: Katharine Coles: The ghost in the machine AMDC 301
10.00 – 11.30 Session E (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
E1 A spooky lexicon of histories
Josie Arnold: A narrative conversation with Azar Nafisi arising from ‘The Republic of Imagination’.
Athia Bakirtzidis Singh: Rewriting truth or fiction in Oral history
Sue Bond: A shark in the garden: An adoptee memoir
Irene Waters: Remembering ghosts from the past
E2 Ghost stories, love stories, new stories—reconfiguring David Foster Wallace for the Australian
Academy: Tony McMahon with Joshua Barnes, Mitch Cunningham, Matilda Douglas-Henry and
Jonathan Laskovsky. Moderator: Tony McMahon
E3 Uncanny encounters
Shane Strange: Curating fragments: Found ekphrasis vols. 1 & 2
Elizabeth Colbert: Once upon a time revisited
Owen Bullock, Lucinda McKnight and Ruby Todd: The light touch: exploring a semiotics of ethics and
grace
Benjamin Laird: A speculative computing approach in writing biographical poetry
E4 Mutant forms
Rebecca Croser: Chronotopic hybridity in the contemporary campus novel: The Secret History
Christopher Mallon: Interpreting the real images of Hannah Wilkes
Michael Kitson: Flesh Eatin’, Soul Stealin’, Vegies From Outer Space: A poetics of the killer plant from
another world.
Thom Conroy: American cancer
E5 Australasian literary journalism and creative nonfiction: Looking back; moving ahead (panel)
Willa McDonald: Tracing the origins: Developing an historical database of Australian literary
journalism
Matthew Ricketson: Literary journalism in Australia: the present
Sue Joseph: Defining a genre and looking forwards: finding a place for Australian literary journalism
and creative nonfiction globally
11.30 – 12.00 Morning tea & Conference Registration AMD foyer
12.00 – 1.30 Session F (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
F1 Dwellers outward-bound
Antonia Strakosch: Into the unknown: Writing third-generation holocaust fiction
Amy Matthews: Travels through the kingdom of night: Writing about the history of the Holocaust in
End of the Night Girl and Navigating the Kingdom of Night.
Catherine McKinnon: Once upon the enchanted jungle
F2 Fallacy, fear and the appreciation of influence
Ben Smith: The mirror and the mask: The simulacrum of memory and the self as text
Luke Johnson: Reading through the mirror stage
Andrew Lilley: Acts and Aphanisis in the Fiction of Don DeLillo
Nathan Smale: Cathartic crossovers: Reader transaction and literature therapy
F3 Hosting ghosts
Liam Burke: Haunted by the source: how a practice-based approach to teaching adaptation can
encourage students to embrace post-structuralist approaches
Sandra Symons: The narrative power of photography
Stayci Taylor: Ghostbusting in screenwriting: Rewriting the corrective culture of script development
Michael Kitson: Aussie car crash genre and Mad Max rebooted
F4 Phantom limbs: Figments of selves, poetry, philosophy
Dan Disney: Phantasmagoric elegies? A late guide to wandering
Paul Munden and Paul Hetherington: Poetry Reloaded: The pros and cons
Brentley Frazer: Greener pastures
Moya Costello: Fanning hallucinating: Murray Bail, Harriet Chandler, a mirror soul and me
F5 I am not me and other impersonations
John Weldon: What does pre-requisite free really mean in the case of first year professional and
creative writing students?
Amelia Walker: Recollecting the self as an-other: Why creative knowledges matter in academia
Lisa Smithies: How does a writer’s brain do creative writing?
Gyps Curmi: Kelly 4 Shannon 4eva More
Lunch 1.30.00-2.30 + Launches (Jean Webb & Paul Hetherington, Owen Bullock)
2.30 – 4.00 Session G (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
G1 Words can kill: History, histories, herstories
Rachel Franks and Monica Galassi: A war on words: reading conflict in the writings of Miles Franklin
Alison Owens: I write dead people: the ethical and practical challenges of resurrecting the dead for
historical fiction
Grazina Pranauskas: Contesting postwar and Soviet Lithuanian identity in Australia (1940s-1990s)
Natalie Kon-Yu: Writing from without: Woman, critic, author
G2 Recovering narratives, rediscovering texts, breathing voices anew
Rebecca Styles: Rewriting history: Family narratives and historical events
Suzanne Hermanoczki: A graphic journey: The arrival home for Shaun Tan’s immigrant
Jen Crawford: The foreigner lives within: Rereading Ming Cher’s rewritten Spider boys.
Christy Collins: No history is mute: Incorporating historical events in a fictional narrative
G3 Infinite combinations and invocations
Camilla Nelson: What is a novel in the digital age?
Julian Novitz: The ghost of the book: ebooks as an intermediary technology
Barrie Wayne Sherwood: Charles Bovary’s hat
G4 The invention of legacy
Ann McCulloch: A poet re-imagining his past
Rebecca Waese: Dramatic modes in the representation of history in Gould’s Book of Fish and
Glissando
Christine Owen: Daughters and rewriting the historical subject
Jillian Adams: Reinterpreting the 1950’s Australian housewife: Food writing, memoir and memory
G5 Revoking things
Scott Brook: Funemployed in the City of literature
Nigel Krauth and Ross Watkins: Radicalising the scholarly paper: The precipice of a paradigm shift in
the form of the journal article
Peta Murray: (Es)say what? Queering the performance essay
Anthony Eaton, Paul Hetherington & Shane Strange: Exploring the intersections of creative and
academic life among Australian academic creative writing practitioners
4.00-4.30 Afternoon Tea + Launch (Gerrit Bos).
4.30 – 6.00 Session H (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
H1 Recursive incursions
Stephen Abblitt: Insistences: Queer futurity and the inexhaustible work of mourning José Esteban
Muñoz
Nike Sulway: Uchronic, or queer in no time: Wilful subjects in historical fiction
Anna Gibbs: Writing into images: Conflicted places and the colonial encounter
Cathryn Perazzo: Surface tension
H2 Of palimpsests and substrata
Danielle Clode: Terres Australes: Re-writing Australia’s French history
Monica Carrol and Adam Dickerson: Paraphrase, rewriting, and power: Ghosts of the genealogy of
paraphrase
Katy Watson-Kell: Reimagining a Melbourne icon: Jules Lefebvre’s Chloe
Nicole Anae: Rewriting the wreck of the SS Admella
H3 Swans of trespass and other laments
Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett: Embedding, embellishing and embarrassing: Brian Williams
‘misremembers
Anna Denejkina: Autoethnography and the journalist: An ethical comparison
Carolyn Rickett, Paul Race and Jill Gordon: Swimming in a sea of hypocrisy? The ethical trespass of
David Rieff’s memoir
Karen Gibson: Celebrity-based fiction: The slippage of meaning over time
H4 Spectres, selves and simulacra
Gaylene Cabris: A hypertextuality of sex, self and place
Dominique Hecq: The revenant: Duras’ rewriting of love and loss REMOVE IF NEEDED
Caren Florance: Retinal persistence: Performing the text
Rebecca Croser: Little bliss
H5 Hosting the body politic
Michael Richardson: Ghosts in the political machine: Speechwriters, leaders and the recrafting of
identity
Patrick Mullins: A liberal view: On the unpublished autobiography of Sir William Mc Mahon
Mitchell Welch: Fragments from a haunted house; or art at no arms’ length
6.30 – 7. 30 Poetry at The Glenferrie (K Coles, M Farrell, K Quinn, A Jackson, A Walwicz & you)
8.00 Conference Dinner: The Glenferrie Hotel
Day three: Tuesday 1 December
8.45 – 9. 00 Conference Registration AMDC open foyer
9.00 – 10.00 Plenary: Poetic judgment: Findings from ARC Discovery Project number 13100402.
Panelists: Kevin Brohpy, Monica Carrol, Paul Magee, Jen Webb (Session I)
10.00 – 11.30 Session J (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
J1 TBA The grain of silence
Zana Bell: Biding with ghosts; listening to silences
Gabrielle Ryan: Singing shadows: Resurrecting ghosts
Lynda Hawryluck: The weight of rain: Making meaning of mourning through poetry
Marlyn McInnerney: The shooter’s woman
J2 And their trade knows no bounds
Gay Lynch: Nailing ghosts for creative purpose: The suicide of Adam Lindsay Gordon
Marie Cook: Narrative informed by an historical medical discourse
Kerrie Davies: Revisiting Bertha Lawson, Henry Lawson’s wife
J3 Rescripting tales, seeing things
Wendy Dunn: Rewriting, interpreting and adapting the gaps and silences in historical fiction.
Catherine Padmore: The paradox of writing the dead
Mandy Hager: Finding Héloise: Researching and reimagining the life of 12th century French nun
Héloïse d’Argenteuil
Kelly Gardiner: (Re)writing past lives
J4 Living with ghosts
Karina Quinn: Writing and reading trauma: Refusing to heal the wound
Rachel Robertson: Gaps and layers: The lyric essay and family history
Esther Packard Hill: Negotiating gender performativity: Sisters in literature and embodied gender
regulation
Kelly Malone: Unframing poetry: Performance writing
J5 Traces of Haunting
Jessica Seymour: Holme’s girls: Genderbending and feminising the canon in ‘Elementary’
Sherryl Clark: Fascinated or haunted? Why we continue to write and rewrite faily tales
Lauren Briggs: Why Harper Lee, not Thea Astley? International Literature in Australian Young Adult
Fiction
11.30 – 12.00 Morning Tea
12.00 – 1.00 AGM (AMDC 301)
1.00 – 2.00 Lunch
2.00- 3.00 Session K (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
K1 Transmission, mediation, recreation
Hart Cohen and Rachel Morley: The re-mediations of a complex narrative: TGH Strehlow’s journey to
Horseshoe Bend
Eleanor Hogan: Ernestine’s boxes: Reading hypotext as text STREAM
Peter Anderson: Making fiction: Some (re)arrangements
K2 The blood and sweat of ghosts
Enza Gandolfo: Working class ghosts: Challenges of writing recent history
Natalie Rose Dyer: Ghostly red ink: Hélène Cixous’ voice of milk and blood
Brooke Maggs: Riding the ghost train between the stations; no platforms for me
K3 Phantasmagoric realities
Lianne Boadbent: Photographs furnish evidence: retrieving women’s stories through the haunting of
imagery
Steven Paul Lansky: Archiving Jack Acid
K4 Marks, signatures, affects
Shari Kocher: Matri-liminal bodies: Immersion and empathy in Dorothy Porter’s Crete and Anne
Carson’s ‘The anthropology of water’
Andy Jackson: Re-embodied poetics: Recognising Bodily Difference within poetry
K5 Asynchronous dialogues
Margaret Hickey: A return to the land
Jay Ludowyke: Artefact Animism: crafting a connection to Carpathia
3.00 - 4.00 Publishing and your Phd: Strategies and tactics (Session L). Panelists: Julia Prendergast,
Karina Quinn, Jesse Seymour. Moderator Ross Watkins
4.00 - 5.00 Keynote Speaker: Lia Hills (AMDC 301)
5.00 – 6.30 Ghosting the ghost: After conference drinks AMDC foyer