Threasa Meads

"Are we picking up the shattered pieces of our traumatised selves as we write? We know trauma, as Judith Herman observes, produces ‘profound and lasting changes in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory.’ Traumatic events ‘shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others’ and ‘cast the victim into a state of existential crisis.’"........................................................................................

This is a lyric essay about speculative nostalgia and grief.......................................................

Permalink here: http://cordite.org.au/essays/net-carries-water/

Liminality is not only transition but potentiality, not only "going to be" but also "what may be". (Turner 1978: 3)

The vast region of Gippsland in south-eastern Victoria is home to approximately 270,000 people, with many experiencing complex and entrenched disadvantage. Most of my students are first in family, and very few aspire to a career in writing, or even consider themselves creative; however, they are, on the whole, hungry for knowledge, bright, and engaged. Many have responded with startling creativity and enthusiasm to specific exercises designed to foster writing practice and reading as a writer, and most have flourished in a structured workshop environment that affirms workshop method and process as a learned skill. Drawing on personal reflection, anecdote, case study and research, including regional teaching and learning scholarship, Sally Kift’s ‘Transition Pedagogy’, Janelle Adsit’s ‘Threshold Concepts’ and Victor Turner’s ‘Liminal’, this paper reflects on some of the strategies employed in Federation University Australia’s first-year introductory creative writing course to conquer resistance to the notion of being creative, facilitate creative writing practice, and foster a culture of creative writing production.

Keywords:
Creative writing – Lyric essay – Heterotopia – The Walking Dead

Over the last two decades US lyric essayists have defined the lyric essay form (D’Agata & Tall 1997; Miller & Paola 2004; Seneca Review 2007; D’Agata 2015) to the point where the term ‘lyric essay’ has fallen out of favour (D’Agata 2015); yet, here in Australia, the form has yet to really find its place. By examining the parallels between the established conventions of the lyric essay and Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, ‘We might as well call it a boat’ seeks to demonstrate the complexities of this evolving form from an Australian context.

‘We might as well call it a boat’ creatively demonstrates the lyric essay as heterotopia. By adopting the lyric essay form to map itself as a heterotopic site, building on the form’s tradition to break with conventional linear structures, blend styles of writing, resist easy interpretation and its history as a vehicle for representing pain and trauma (Mintz 2011), it reveals the conventions and potential of the lyric essay with the intention of encouraging other writers to experiment with the form.

By locating the lyric essay as heterotopia, ‘We might as well call it a boat’ offers a model of the form as a site of juxtaposition, of otherness, of crisis, of non-conformance, of resistance and of transformation that adds to the still burgeoning discourse on the lyric essay in Australia, making a significant contribution to discourse on the essay in an Asia-Pacific context.

Bad fruit: [Paper in special issue: Life Writing...Performing Lives. Graham, Pamela and Hocking, Melanie (eds).]
Subject: Creativity; Writing; Pregnancy; Abortion

To cite this article: Meads, Threasa. Bad fruit: [Paper in special issue: Life Writing...Performing Lives. Graham, Pamela and Hocking, Melanie (eds).] [online]. LiNQ, Vol. 39, Dec 2012: 18-23. Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=201218711;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 0817-458X. [cited 14 Oct 14].

From my readings of a range of contemporary child-abuse survivor memoirs, I have discovered, as Samantha Weaver says in her memoir Saving Samantha, 'while their stories were extraordinary and moving, none of them told me what they'd done to recover from their traumas (2006, 259)'. However, while Weaver's and other texts in this genre are well-written and offer some therapeutic value, I do not gain aesthetic pleasure from reading their articulations of healing or an insight into the uniqueness and power of the processes that they have engaged in.

Driven by my desire to communicate my healing from child-abuse in a way that captures readers' imaginations, I am using magic realist narrative techniques to convey the 'ineffable' of my own trauma healing. As a practice-led researcher, my approach is interdisciplinary and employs multi-method techniques. A process I am engaging in to initially unveil the 'hidden stories' of my healing is the method of ekphrasis. This paper presents samples of my visual art and creative writing and discusses the relationship between the two and highlights ekphrasis' potential as a tool for articulating the 'ineffable' of healing from child-abuse.

A spiral, a magical realist labyrinth, a lyric essay, a mirror-maze, and a mandala, Mothsong celebrates art's capacity to facilitate and map posttraumatic growth. It is a testimony of healing from child abuse that peers into the chrysalis. Through poetic prose, visual image, ekphrasis, and intuitive enquiry, the author carries the lamp of art into the magical realist labyrinth of the wounded soul to unveil the terrifying and the sacred. In the spaces between a heartbeat, the stories of Lolah--who represents the author from the age of sixteen to the present--and January--her younger self--are entwined with the silken threads of "You" and other voices to sing a song of transformation. Mothsong creates a new myth for the moth as a symbol of the soul's urge to heal, and in so doing, goes far beyond elevating the beauty within darkness.

Nobody is a highly stylized memoir that employs the choose-your-own-adventure structure to illustrate the complexity of navigating trauma for both author and reader. Nobody invites you to closely share a young girl's brave journey of growing up in Australia in the eighties in a violent and abusive world. It transgresses the boundaries of literary traumatic representation to weave moments of sweetness and humor through a narrative where unexpected threads of beauty and darkness intersect, emphasizing the horrors of her environment. In conflating the labyrinth and maze, Nobody offers glimpses of the threads and juxtapositions that emerge when struggling to cope with traumatic memory. Nobody's second-person narration and choose-your-own-adventure form work seamlessly together with word and image to powerfully convey the intimate exchange that the author had with her fragmented selves while writing, and reveals the claustrophobia and confusion of PTSD. Nobody challenges readers to cross the threshold: it forces them to examine their position as voyeuristic consumers of trauma and asks them to recognize their essential role as participant-witnesses. Through facilitating readers uncomfortable engagement with the text, Nobody challenges them to see the threads of complicity connecting individuals and communities to the ongoing issues of domestic violence and child sexual abuse.