CREATIVE WRITING AND ITS CONTEXTS
A SYMPOSIUM FOR DENNIS HASKELL
Hosted by the Westerly Centre and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) at The
University of Western Australia, 17-18 February, 2011.
Programme
Thursday February 17, 2011
Banquet Hall & Foyer, The University Club, UWA
5:00pm
5:10pm
5:30pm
6:30pm
7:30-9:30pm
~ Opening, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Western Australia, Professor
Alan Robson
~ Welcome to Country, Ben and Alf Taylor
~ ASAL President, Paul Genoni
~ Keynote address, Professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘Sound and Sensibility:
English Aesthetics and Minority American Identities’
~ Readings, Andrew Taylor, John Kinsella and Tony Curtis
~ Celebratory Function
Friday February 18, 2011
The University Club, UWA, Case Study Room
8:30-9:00am
REGISTRATION AND COFFEE
9:00-9:45 am
Welcome and Introduction – Chair: Tony Hughes-D’Aeth
Bruce Bennett
‘The Civilising Value of the Humanities’
SESSION 1 – ‘Asia and Australia’
9:45-11:15am
Chair: Kieran Dolin
Megan McKinlay
Kirpal Singh
Miriam Wei Wei Lo
‘Jumbled Island Paradigms: Travels With Dennis’
‘Australia-Asia Relations’
‘Poetry and the Problem of the Heart’
__________________________________________________________________________________
11:15-11:45am
MORNING TEA
SESSION 2 – ‘Creative Writing: Theory and Practice’
11:45-1:15pm
Chair: Brenda Walker
Isabela Banzon ‘The Appeal of the Ordinary’
Graeme Kinross-Smith ‘How Do I Know What I think Until I See What I Say?’
Ian Reid
‘Framing “Creative Writing’”
1:15-2.00pm
LUNCH
2.00-3:15pm
SESSION 3 – ‘Poetry and Poetics’ – Chair: Philip Mead
Geoff Page
Page Richards
Tony Curtis
‘Something to Celebrate: Australian Women Poets born since 1968’
‘The Lyric Impulse’
‘Father to son: threading the dark’
3:15-3:45pm
AFTERNOON TEA
3:45-5:00pm
SESSION 4 – ‘Australian Literary Studies’ – Chair: Paul Genoni
Anne Brewster/
Alf Taylor
‘Who’s Laughing? Reading Alf Taylor’s short stories’
Kim Scott
That Deadman Dance, a reading
Chris Wortham ‘An uncertain smile: humour in the poetry of Dennis Haskell’
5:00-6:00pm
BOOK LAUNCH
Dennis Haskell, Acts of Defiance: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2010)
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Creative Writing and its Contexts – Symposium for Dennis Haskell
17-18th February, 2011
ABSTRACTS
Thursday 17/1/2011
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘Sound and Sensibility: English Aesthetics and Minority American
Identities’
In Anglophone societies like the United States and Australia, the two components—ethnic and linguistic—often
are collapsed in the ear and imagination of non-Anglophone immigrant subjects as one and the same.
Learning/speaking the English language ‘like an American’ or Australian has served as a trope for a desired
transformation and assimilation forces. In the U.S. the ability to speak English is contractual in the rhetoric of
citizenship and also viewed as a means toward social and economic agency. The act of learning/speaking English is
both coerced and appropriative, the dynamics for stealing/losing the original immigrant language and itself the
original stolen from native speakers. English's difficulties that mute first-generation ethnic immigrants, whether in
the U.S. or Australia, track the physical challenge of changing subjectivities in the poems of the Hispanic
American writer Julia Alvarez and Korean American writers like Theresa Huk-Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. A
common sensibility expressive of tenderness toward the language itself threads these poems of identity crises
rising from the uneven contact zones between recent immigrant-refugee subjects and national collectivity. Such
deep-structured ‘feelingness’ toward the English language often figures English as Anglo female, as in Li-Young
Lee’s poems and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker and shapes a unity between content and form, the politics of
identity and pure being itself, suggesting that the Eros of English may offer an epiphany dissolving and resolving
the figure of the ‘foreign’ immigrant. The lecture will include audio-visual materials.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Friday 18/1/2011
Bruce Bennett, ‘The Civilising Value of the Humanities’
I will refer to the four topic areas of the symposium and Dennis's contribution to them. The paper will propose
that the humanities, and literary studies at their best, offer both a skills education and modes of self-knowledge
necessary to an advanced civilisation. In the hands of skilled and humane teachers and scholars, a literary
education offers ways to develop writing and reading skills while learning to ‘understand ourselves and others’ -the central function of the humanities. Along the way, many students will develop their emotional intelligence, a
sense of humour and some of the arts of rational conversation.
SESSION ONE – Australia and Asia
Megan McKinlay, ‘Jumbled Island Paradigms: Travels With Dennis’
When I first met Dennis Haskell, I was a floundering Asian Studies PhD student. I couldn't get a foothold on my
topic. My supervisor was about to abandon me. I was considering a job in the public service. ‘Talk to Dennis,’
someone said. ‘He knows everything about Asia.’ Some fifteen years later, I am still talking to Dennis about Asia.
In this paper, I reflect on the travels we have taken in the course of our research, writing, and teaching – literary
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and cultural journeys which have carried us from Yackandandah to Yokohama, into mainland China, and the
labyrinthine length and breadth of Southeast Asia – considering how the challenges and pleasures we have
encountered along the way speak to the notion of ‘Asia and Australia’ in a broad sense.
Kirpal Singh, ‘Australia-Asia Relations’ have always been bouncy and have been taking exciting tumbles
through the past several decades. The recent incidents with the Indians, especially in Victoria, have not done
much to alter this state, nor has the continued demonisation of Muslims and Islam in certain quarters of Australian
society. On the Asian side, most are totally ignorant of the REAL Australia and those who have some knowledge
are often not willing to come out and articulate their views and love for the great lucky country. We have, thus,
issues on both sides - whether its the unease of Paul Keating calling Malaysia ‘recalcitrant’ or of Asians viewing
Aussies as being too laid back, generally indifferent to Asian affairs and wanting only a good time while visiting
Asian countries.
I am going to explore some of these attitudes and the values associated with them, raising the point that we
need more academics and writers like Dennis Haskell who go out of the way to understand and then discuss the
many challenges and issues which beset the Asian-Australian connections. Literature is an excellent way forward
and the honest discussion of literary texts coming out from both continents will go a long way in helping mend or at least help alter - the uneasy relationship that has been an on-going feature for at least the past 40 years since
my first direct connection with Australia.
Miriam Wei Wei Lo, ‘Poetry and the Problem of the Heart’
My paper takes Dennis Haskell’s eloquent argument, in his recent Asialink essay, for the benefits of reading Asian
literatures as its starting point. I will explore the work of Singaporean poet Alvin Pang and of Australian poet
Lucy Dougan as a way of giving meaning to the terms ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia’ and then consider my own (AsianAustralian) poetry in relation to this. With this context in mind, I respond to Dennis’ essay by considering some
of the difficulties in the relationship between Capitalism and Art. How, for example, does the humanising
influence of literature co-exist with the tendency for businesses to put profit before people? Poetry illuminates
the human condition but can it solve the problem of the human heart?
SESSION TWO - Creative Writing, Theory and Practice
Isabela Banzon, ‘The Appeal of the Ordinary’
The word ‘ordinary’ in blurbs and other sources to describe the poems of Dennis Haskell stands out, particularly
to a non-Australian reader with little exposure to things Australian like myself. What is ordinary about his poems?
How is the ordinary connected to poetic art? With what means does he link the ordinary to the ‘unsayable’? In an
interview with Lucy Dougan, Haskell as poet remarks that the best reaction to poems is not literary criticism but
‘that sort of silence, a gasp before the applause.’ This paper will attempt to explore Haskell’s way with words,
described inversely as ‘extraordinary’, by giving voice to that silence through an account of how his poems are
mirrored in mine.
Graeme Kinross-Smith, ‘How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?’
In a cheeky, confessional, declarative, self-indulgent and ficto-critical reminiscence sown with readings of some of
his recent poetry and short fictions Graeme Kinross-Smith recalls the cultural climate that surrounded his
establishment of the nation’s first tertiary level creative writing stream at the Gordon Institute of Technology,
Geelong, in 1969.
Ian Reid, ‘Framing “Creative Writing”’
In the context of a symposium that builds on past achievements in the fields of literary study and practice with
which Dennis has been closely associated, I propose a short paper that will look at assumptions that have framed
(defined and positioned) ‘creative writing’ in Australian universities for more than a quarter of a century. My
intention is not to make this an historical conspectus, but rather to scrutinise the assumptions that usually
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distinguish the teaching of creative writing from the teaching of literary criticism, and to situate some current
curriculum practices (and their theoretical expression) in relation to those of two or three decades ago.
I would also sketch briefly a connection between such considerations and some interests that Dennis and I have
each pursued in our different ways, over many years, in neo-Romantic aspects of writing and reading in Australia.
SESSION THREE – Poetry and Poetics
Geoff Page, ‘Something to Celebrate: Australian Women Poets born since 1968’
Since Bronwyn Lea’s first collection, Flight Animals in 2001, there have been about thirty outstanding first books
by Australian women poets. Many of these were born in the years from 1968 to the mid-1970s. The youngest is
Sarah Holland-Batt (b.1982). This paper considers the likely influences on these poets, examines what they have
in common, both technically and thematically, notes their increasingly pre-eminent position in Australian poetry
today and then discusses the work of seven of them in more detail.
Page Richards, ‘The Lyric Impulse’
Drawing from historians and poets, this paper will briefly explore deep lyric impulses, including ‘irruption’ and
resistance, dislocation and mixed languages.
The lyric past offers frank and architectural ways of seeing how we find in language a layered pause between our
place and its sudden unrecognisableness. From the historically moving perspective of lyric, this paper will look at
several of Dennis Haskell’s poems and celebrate the lyric throb that they perpetuate and make new in his layering
and provocation of language.
Tony Curtis, ‘Father to son: threading the dark’
The poetry of Dennis Haskell's first collection, the beautifully titled Listening at Night.
SESSION FOUR - Australian Literary Studies
Anne Brewster and Alf Taylor, ‘Who’s Laughing? Reading Alf Taylor’s short stories’
This paper addresses the issue of humour in Aboriginal writing, referring briefly to Alexis Wright’s fiction and
Romaine Moreton’s poetry and, in more depth, the short fiction of Alf Taylor. I draw on and reconfigure Freud’s
model of humour and Bhabha’s model of postcolonial ambivalence in order to analyse the effects of Taylor’s
humour in a cross-cultural context.
Kim Scott, reading from That Deadman Dance
Chris Wortham, ‘An uncertain smile: humour in the poetry of Dennis Haskell’
Much Australian poetry is characterised by humour, but humour comes in many different shapes and sizes. The
humour of Dennis Haskell distinctive and also engaging in a variety of ways. This paper will seek to identify
Dennis's distinctive characteristics through discussion of a small group of representative poems drawn from
different stages in his career as a poet.
Creative Writing and its Contexts – Symposium for Dennis Haskell
17-18th February, 2011
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SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Isabela Banzon
Isabela Banzon teaches at the University of the Philippines. She researches poetry writing and Philippine literature
in English in context of other Philippine languages. Her published work includes a poetry collection Lola Coqueta
introduced by Dennis Haskell.
Bruce Bennett
Bruce Bennett is Emeritus Professor of the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force
Academy, Canberra. A Rhodes Scholar from Western Australia, he is a graduate of the Universities of Western
Australia, Oxford and London. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree of the University of New South
Wales in 2004 for his research and publications in Australian Literature. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia
and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
His books include The Literature of Western Australia (1979), An Australian Compass (1991), Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter
and his Poetry (1991), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998) with Jennifer Strauss, Australian Short Fiction: A
History (2002) and Homing In (2006). He is currently working on two Australian Research Council projects – on
Australian expatriate writers and the literatures of espionage.
Anne Brewster
Associate Professor Anne Brewster teaches at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Literary
Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996) and Aboriginal Women's Autobiography (1995). She co-edited,
with Angeline O’Neill and Rosemary van den Berg, an anthology of Australian Indigenous Writing, Those Who
Remain Will Always Remember (2000). She has widely published in journals and in edited collections including
Literary Theory and Criticism in English, ed David Carter (in press), Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the
Creative Arts, eds Roger Dean and Hazel Smith and The Racial Politics of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges, eds Barbara
Baird and Damien Riggs. She was the Regional Chair of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South Pacific and
Southeast Asian Region) for 2009-10.
Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis was born in Dublin, and studied literature at Essex University and Trinity College, Dublin. The Well
in the Rain: New & Selected Poems, is the latest of seven warmly received collections. Days Like These (with Theo
Dorgan and Paula Meehan) was published by Brooding Heron Press, in 2007. Two new collections are due out
shortly: Folk and An Elephant Called Rex: an A to Z of Poems for Children. A winner of the Irish National Poetry Prize,
he was also the 2003 recipient of the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia. Much in demand as a
teacher and reader, Curtis performs extensively throughout Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland and North
America. He has toured Australia four times, and been a friend and admirer of Dennis Haskell for over a decade.
He is a member of Aosdāna, the Irish academy of the arts.
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Crossing the Peninsula, received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published six
other books of poetry, the most recent Walking Backwards; three books of short stories; a memoir, Among the White
Moon Faces (American Book Award winner); two novels and a children’s novel (Princess Shawl, 2008; translated
into Chinese, 2009). Joss and Gold was welcomed by Rey Chow as an ‘elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim
among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.’ A recognized
postcolonial, American Studies, and feminist critic, she has published numerous critical studies, journal articles,
and edited/co-edited volumes, among them The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology (American
Book Award winner) and in 2008 Writing Singapore. Lim was awarded the Multiethnic Literatures of the United
States (MELUS) 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award, the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award, and the Chair
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Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong. She is currently professor of English at the University of
California, Santa Barbara.
Graeme Kinross-Smith
Graeme Kinross-Smith is a poet, writer of short fiction and novelist of long standing in the Australian literary
scene. He is also a photographer. He works in Melbourne, Geelong and Port Campbell and is the author of a
number of books including the best-selling Australia’s Writers and the widely set text, Writer: A Working Guide for
New Writers, as well as two books of poetry, Turn Left at Any Time With Care (with Jamie Grant) and If I Abscond:
New Poetry and Short Fictions. He is an Honorary Fellow in Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University.
His short fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories 2004 and 2005 and his poetry in The Best Australian Poems
2010.
John Kinsella
John Kinsella's most recent books are Divine Comedy: Journey Through a Regional Geography (UQP, 2008), Activist
Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (ed. Niall Lucy, 2010, Liverpool University Press), and Sand (with Robert
Drewe; Fremantle Press, 2010). He also recently edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (Penguin, 2009).
He is a Professorial Research Fellow at UWA and an Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge
University.
Megan McKinlay
Megan McKinlay is a lapsed academic and a practising poet and children’s writer. She has a PhD in Japanese
Literature (thanks, Dennis!) and has taught Australian Literature, Japanese Language and Creative Writing at
UWA and other tertiary institutions.
Miriam Wei Wei Lo
When she is not perfecting the fine art of child-rearing, or being a country housewife, or editing her husband's
sermons, or giving piano lessons, Miriam writes poems for her next book.
Geoff Page
Geoff Page is a Canberra-based poet who was born in 1940 on the Clarence River, NSW. He worked as an
English and History teacher in Canberra high schools and colleges for 38 years before retiring in 2011. He has also
been an honorary visiting fellow at ADFA (University of NSW) since the 1980s. He has reviewed Australian
poetry (mainly for the ABC and the Canberra Times) since the late 1960s. Geoff’s latest books are Agnostic Skies
(Five Islands Press), Seriatim (Salt) and 60 Classic Australian Poems (UNSW Press). His new and extended selected
poems is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in late 2011 or early 2012.
Ian Reid
Winthrop Professor Ian Reid has worked at UWA since 2007, leading a university-wide curriculum review and
reform project. He is a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators, the American Council of Learned Societies
and the Australian Institute of Management. The author of nine books and editor of many more, he has published
widely on Australian poetry and fiction, and on a range of other topics from cultural history and literary theory to
education policy. His work has been translated into several languages. He received an Antipodes award for the
title sequence of his poetry volume The Shifting Shore. His novel The End of Longing will be released in March to
coincide with his appearance in the Perth Festival Writers’ Week program.
Page Richards
Page Richards publishes on poetry, American literature, drama, and performance. Her work has appeared in the
Dalhousie Review, the Harvard Review, the Wascana Review, the Journal of Modern Languages, and ‘After thirty Falls’:
New Essays on John Berryman, among others. She is the author of Distancing English: A Chapter in the History of the
Inexpressible and Lightly Separate, a book of poems. She has studied and taught at Harvard University and Boston
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University, offering courses in poetry, drama, and creative writing. She is an Associate Professor at the
University of Hong Kong.
Kim Scott
Kim is a descendant of people indigenous to the south-east coast of Western Australia, and is proud to be one
among those who call themselves Noongar. Kim currently works at Curtin University and has a background in
education and arts. He is the author of three novels, True Country, Benang (joint winner of the Miles Franklin
Award, 2000) and That Deadman Dance as well as Kayang & Me with Hazel Brown, a recollection of their family
history.
Kirpal Singh
In the last several years, especially since the publication of his book Thinking Hats & Coloured Turbans: Creativity
Across Cultures (2004), Prof Kirpal Singh has come to be internationally recognised as a creativity guru, sought
after by MNCs, universities, governments, NGOs, NPOs to share his insights and train personnel in creative and
innovative thinking. Currently he is Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre at the Singapore Management
University - the Centre focuses on Diversity Education.
Alf Taylor
Alf Taylor is a prolific Nyoongah writer who has published two collections of poetry Singer Songwriter (1992) and
Winds (1994) and a collection of short stories, Long Time Now (2001), with Magabala books. His work has been
anthologised in Rimfire (2000) and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008).
Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor has published widely on Australian poetry over many years. The most recent volumes of his own
poetry are Collected Poems (2004) and The Unhaunting (2009), both published in the UK by Salt Publishing. He is a
Professor Emeritus at Edith Cowan University.
Chris Wortham
Chris Wortham is an Emeritus Professor of English at UWA and has also been a Senior Honorary Research Fellow
since his retirement five years ago. He has recently been reactivated in a part-time capacity as Professor of
Theatre Studies and English Literature at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Fremantle. He continues to
publish, with a co-edited book on early drama due to be published this month and a further co-edited book on
Perceptions of Terra Australis now in press. He continues to be a keen golfer in which capacity he is often Dennis
Haskell's partner in a subordinate role.
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