Green encounters: critically creative inter/actions with-and-in ecologies of crisis

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to ongoing dialogues in creative writing research relating to three areas of inquiry: writing as a way of knowing; collaboration and communities of practice; and writing in response to environmental crises. We connect these areas by articulating insights from a collaborative arts-based research project on the theme of green encounters. We associate green with what is often problematically referred to as nature – plants, trees, animals, fungus, landforms, waterways, weather, and more, as well as rawness, naïveté, the unknown, rottenness, death, and the unworldly. Through methods of poetic inquiry, we produced ethical, creative, and critical texts demonstrating a diversity of responses to environmental crises made available through creative inquiry. This article offers a distinct articulation of the pressures and tensions inherent to humans’ relationships with the more-than-human, while interrogating our own precarity as early career researchers as linked to the contingencies of living things. With reference to Félix Guattari’s ecosophical theory, we recognise academia as a part of the mental ecology wherein need currently exists to nurture diversity and evolve praxes for sustainability. Towards this end, we highlight the value of creative arts-based collaborations for generating knowledge about ways we can face multiform ecological and other crises.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative research
• creative-critical research
• environmental writing
• writing as research
• higher degree by research
• ecology

Acknowledgements

We respectfully acknowledge the Kaurna People and their Elders past and present, who are the First Nations’ traditional owners of the land where CCRWC meetings are held. We recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with the lands and waters, and acknowledge that they are of continuing importance to the Kaurna people living today. We also acknowledge First Nations peoples across Australia where we wrote this paper, their Elders, ancestors, cultures, and heritage.

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre at the University of South Australia. Authors Dante DeBono, Simon-Peter Telford and Chloe Cannell were supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarships.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shannon Sandford

Shannon Sandford is a casual teacher and researcher at Flinders University and the University of South Australia. Her PhD thesis, Drawing Digital: Exploring the Subjects and Spaces of Autobiographical Webcomics (Flinders University, 2022), examines autobiographical webcomics as an urgent and emerging form of self-representation that captures new trends in contemporary Life Writing studies. Shannon is the inaugural Transnational Literature Fellow at Flinders University, researching second- and third-generation migration stories in Australian graphic narratives. Her research has been published in On_Culture, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Textual Practice, and Journal of Australian Studies (forthcoming).

Chloe Cannell

Chloe Cannell is a completing PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of South Australia. Her thesis explores representations of intersectional LGBTQIA + characters in contemporary young adult fiction. She has been published in TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, hNiTRO: Non-Traditional Research Outputs, Writing From Below and Art/Research International. From 2018 to 2020 she worked on the organising committee for the South Australian Gender, Sex and Sexualities Postgraduate and ECR Conference.

Stefanija Rozitis

Stefanija (Stef) Rozitis (they/them) is a higher degree student researching the experiences of early childhood teachers and educators. Their work as a teacher and volunteer work in various activist roles have given them a passion for social justice, as well as the environment. It is Stef’s belief that education needs climate-humanities (literature, poetry, history) as well as STEM to create narratives of hopeful futures and explore the social and ethical implications of these. Their varied experiences and fluid social identity have given them a passion for transformative knowledge production.

Anneliese Abela

Anneliese Abela is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of South Australia. Her creative pieces and news articles have been published both in print and online, and her research focuses on WWI history, Australian war literature, and the power of fiction in recapturing the past. She has recently finished her first historical novel: a tale of friendship, grief, and survival amidst the futility of war.

Dante DeBono

Dante DeBono is a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia with the goal of promoting social inclusivity and equality through work focussed on diversifying queer representation in research and creative outputs. Her current thesis is focused on the queer potential of revisionist adaptations in fiction. She has been on the central committee for the Gender, Sex and Sexualities Conference since 2021, and is an advisory team member for the UniSA Oral History Hub.

Lyndal Hordacre Kobayashi

Lyndal Hordacre Kobayashi is a PhD candidate in the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures at the University of South Australia. She has worked as a visual artist for 30 years with 15 years in Europe and Japan, and is now using her background in the arts to encourage monolingual research participants to explore their lived experiences with language/s. Lyndal lives in the Adelaide Hills, where she writes, works as a transpersonal art therapist, and cares for her youngest daughter with Down Syndrome.

Simon-Peter Telford

Simon-Peter Telford is a writer and poet from South Australia. He is a PhD candidate and teaches Creative Writing at the University of South Australia, where his research involves writing existential fiction for the Anthropocene.

Heather McGinn

Heather Briony McGinn is a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia with a research focus on Beat Studies and feminist literary criticism. In the first year of her postgraduate research she developed l’écriture kinesthésique, a corporeal-based creative writing methodology.

Belinda Lees

Belinda Lees is a PhD candidate researching screenwriting under the supervision of Prof Craig Batty and Dr Amelia Walker through the University of South Australia. She previously completed an MA in screenwriting at Cornwall’s Falmouth University. Since then, she has had short films and a feature titled The Clearing produced by John Finnegan’s screenwriting podcast The Script Department. Belinda has contributed around twenty comic children’s plays to Australia’s leading children’s literary magazine The School Magazine. She is a past winner of the Todhunter Literary Award, which she won for a one-act absurdist play. She works as an educator in a secondary school, teaching media and literature to senior students, where she draws on her credentials in performing arts, literature, media, and screenwriting.

Aden Burg

Aden Burg is an Adelaide-based creative writer who graduated from the University of South Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing. His detective short story, ‘No Return’, was published in the 2018 edition of the University of South Australia’s creative writing anthology series Piping Shrike. Aden’s passion is reading and writing fast-paced stories with unusual characters, a proclivity that bleeds into his research specialty of creative writing and visual storytelling in manga.

Evan Jarrett

Evan Jarrett is an Honours Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of South Australia. His work explores how fictional world-making can communicate the complex intersections between climate change, class, and the multiplicity of place. Evan was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and has long been fascinated with how places impact him, physically, emotionally, and, on a deeper level, spiritually. He frequently wonders, with the multitudes of ways in which climate change is impacting on places across the world, how people from different backgrounds and in different situations will be shaped by climate change themselves, and how they may respond to this.

Lily Roberts

Lily May Roberts (she/her) is a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) student at UniSA focusing on auto-ethnographic poetic practice. She was born and raised in Adelaide and her work concentrates on recovery from trauma and addiction through an engagement with the sensory and the spiritual. Lily is especially interested in exploring how poetry crosses over with mindfulness, the phenomenology of the embodied poet, and the development of an ecological method of relating that encourages systems-thinking for situating the self. Further down the track, she is interested in cultivating her own poetry therapy approach for recovering addicts and sexual assault survivors. Lily was awarded the Cecil Teesdale Smith Literary Award in 2021.

Eugene Tabios

Eugene Tabios is an emerging writer currently undertaking his Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Linguistics at the University of South Australia. In 2016, his 100-word story, ‘Christmas Eve’, won fourth place in Sobrang Short Stories and his later, even shorter piece, ‘The Fateful Day’, written under his penname Placido Penitorpe, received publication in The Best of Sobrang Short Stories. When he moved from the Philippines to Australia, Eugene decided to pursue a career in humanities. Since then, he has dedicated himself to discovering new things, studying their intricacies, embracing their fleetingness, and putting them in writing, guided by his self-coined mantra to ‘observe and preserve’.

Alex Dunkin

Dr Alex Dunkin is an author, publisher and academic in professional and creative writing. His novels include Coming Out Catholic, Homebody, and Fair Day. He is the founder of the micropublishing label Buon-Cattivi Press, primarily publishing emerging writers and experimental forms of literature. He currently runs the new Green: A Blue Feet Anthology mentorship programme that develops for publication short creative fiction by higher degree research students. He tutors undergraduate courses in professional writing and creative short-form writing with a focus on preparation for writing in professional industry settings. He has worked as a journalist and reviewer with ongoing contributions to publications such as Glam Adelaide. He is passionate about creating pathways and lasting connections between the worlds of academia and creative industries.

Amelia Walker

Dr Amelia Walker is a poet and lecturer in creative writing at the University of South Australia. She is the author of four poetry collections and three poetry teaching resource books in Macmillan's All You Need to Teach series. Her research writing operates across the nexus of critically creative, embodied and collaborative research methodologies. She is chief investigator on ‘Invisible Walls’, an Australia-Korea Foundation funded project focused on building intercultural connections between Korea and Australia by pairing Korean and Australian poets for fly-free literary exchanges using interpreted video-conferencing and poetry in translation.