Collaboration and Connection

Juvenilia scholarship typically privileges a lone child author writing without adult intervention. This essay explores questions about intergenerational authorship and juvenilia through a focus on Homes: A Refugee Story, a work of “creative non-fiction” produced through the collaboration of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and his former teacher Winnie Yeung. Homes chronicles the experience of al Rabeeah in Syria prior to his emigration with his family to Canada as a young teen. The essay authors draw on a joint interview they conducted with al Rabeeah and Yeung, who characterized their mode of collaborating as one between the young “storyteller” and adult “writer,” and discussed how they negotiated their roles in light of questions regarding agency, privacy, ethics, and trauma. The essay concludes by suggesting that fluid definitions of child writing and child agency may be particularly important when it comes to trauma narratives.

Cultivating care: Exploring the patchy Anthropocene in four community gardens in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>This thesis responds to the idea that storytelling and gardening are two practices that can be used to re-frame human action within the Anthropocene. Eight gardeners from four community gardens in Wellington City, Aotearoa New Zealand were interviewed. Alongside the interviewees, the author gardened at each of the community gardens from late autumn to early summer 2019. The interviews and field notes have been written up as creative non-fiction essays to form the majority of this thesis. Three major themes are explored through these essays; the patchy Anthropocene (a concept proposed by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing), the lively multispecies entanglements present at each of the community gardens, and the importance of care.</p>

Cultivating care: Exploring the patchy Anthropocene in four community gardens in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>This thesis responds to the idea that storytelling and gardening are two practices that can be used to re-frame human action within the Anthropocene. Eight gardeners from four community gardens in Wellington City, Aotearoa New Zealand were interviewed. Alongside the interviewees, the author gardened at each of the community gardens from late autumn to early summer 2019. The interviews and field notes have been written up as creative non-fiction essays to form the majority of this thesis. Three major themes are explored through these essays; the patchy Anthropocene (a concept proposed by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing), the lively multispecies entanglements present at each of the community gardens, and the importance of care.</p>

The Cambridge Companion to Prose

This Companion provides an introduction to the craft of prose. It considers the technical aspects of style that contribute to the art of prose, examining the constituent parts of prose through a widening lens, from the smallest details of punctuation and wording to style more broadly conceived. The book is concerned not only with prose fiction but with creative non-fiction, a growing area of interest for readers and aspiring writers. Written by internationally-renowned critics, novelists and biographers, the essays provide readers and writers with ways of understanding the workings of prose. They are exemplary of good critical practice, pleasurable reading for their own sake, and both informative and inspirational for practising writers. The Cambridge Companion to Prose will serve as a key resource for students of English literature and of creative writing.

Refusing to Kill My Darlings

This is a creative non-fiction essay that explains why the writer rejects the aphoristic advice given to so many writers: "kill your darlings."

Creative Non-fiction and Poetry

This chapter considers Woolf’s significant influence on feminist writers working in the essay, creative non-fiction, and poetry. Woolf’s radical transformation of narrative design is emphasized. Woolf developed an aesthetic of patterning, repetition, and decentralization that transformed not only fiction, but also creative non-fiction and poetry. In Woolf’s work, every life is exquisitely enclosed in an overall pattern of life and death, of colour and light and movement, over which no single consciousness is master. Woolf’s method suffuses the work of writers such as Susan Sontag, Rebecca Solnit, Leslie Jamison, and Eula Biss, among others. It revolutionizes our ideas not only about the nature of perception, but also about the construction of reality, narrative, and the self.