Ronnie Scott’s research while affiliated with RMIT University and other places

What kinds of comics were sold and procured from Australia's zine fairs, comics fairs and market days in 2022? The research team for Folio, a comics oral history project, visited Australian zine fairs, comics fairs and market days between February and October 2022 at a time when many such marketplaces had resumed trade for the first time after 2 years of COVID lockdowns. The research team identified 144 comics that were clearly identifiable as being published in 2022, and then investigated this cross-section of Australia's comics life in 2022, finding a frequent focus on COVID; mental health, disability and chronic illness; online life; place; and climate disaster. Beyond the documentation of these comics and themes from an important but easily-missed quadrant of Australian comics publishing, the research team considers this comics environment – with its links to other publishing cultures, its incorporation of anomalies – for its research potential.

What can formalist comics studies contribute to creative writing practice? This consideration of an experience in unconsciously applying comics thinking to creative writing shows how notions familiar to comics studies can enrich creative writing. The essay articulates the challenges of writing contemporary gay male “post-crisis” fiction, which troubles the foundations of many representational strategies familiar to creative writers, raising questions about the relationship between what can be shown and what can be known. In comics, where spatialised relationships are foregrounded and help guide representational strategies such as focalisation and description, these foundations become decentred and malleable. Yet, rather than using comics thinking to resolve problems in creative writing – the temptation of applied practice – this paper shows how looking at representational strategies across media can allow challenges to constitute a piece of creative writing and therefore stop being problems to be “solved” but rather to be negotiated within a particular work. The discussion contributes to comics studies and creative writing through highlighting echoes and distortions between the two linked disciplines; theory and method from one creative discipline may be formally applied to another, but the benefits of using cognate disciplines to “think through” problems can also be indirect and discursive.

This creative writing research takes as its basis both the plurality of time and the plurality of queerness and attempts to locate a hybrid form that allows six creative writers to explore the relationship between their individual practices and time: bringing them together into a reflexive space that allows them to be read together while holding them apart. By investigating an area of making and thinking composed of individual strategies, questions, challenges, contradictions, problems, logics, the writers discover in, first, the discrete space of the case study and, second, the critical space of the collaborative essay that queerness and time may meet on the shared ground of form; that form is a site for both creative and political/representational activity; and that a multiplicity of times and spaces, particular to each researcher and articulated specifically here, is not just the medium in which the work is made but fundamental to its content, elaboration, potentiality, and reception.

How should creative writers, including HIV-negative writers, think through HIV as a livable illness? What is the potential for writing gay fiction in an era of ‘post-crisis’? This creative writing research draws links between literary modernism’s roots in crisis and the roots of contemporary gay realist fiction in the AIDS crisis. It suggests these origins place similar demands on writers to re-conceive elements of fiction. This paper, primarily, outlines challenges of representing HIV in contemporary fiction, and then suggests that contemporary HIV’s history of crisis provides ways to address these challenges, that the challenges may be productive. Because HIV in contemporary life is doubly invisible – viral loads may be undetectable, and the ongoing crisis can be understood as marginal or tactically historicised – aspects of creative writing after antiretrovirals exist in conversation with uncertainty, including elements that are otherwise put to representative use. By looking at some examples of post-crisis writing in contemporary gay realist fiction, the paper establishes the potential for HIV-positive representations to shift fiction-writing practice, bringing aspects of the novel such as time, metaphor and textual representation towards an aesthetics of post-crisis.

What is the relationship between the substance of a novel and the surface through which it's expressed? In this paper, three researchers who write fiction, edit fiction, teach creative writing and research creative writing methodologies share revisions to their "first pages"-whether these are the first pages written in a novel project, or the introductory material of their final publications-to consider how the "micro" act of line-editing the sentence signposts more "macro" motivations and associations. In particular, they trace the political and artistic considerations that go into their individual conceptions of authenticity and voice, teasing out the specific questions arising in the context of their own processes which have enabled them to shape the ethics and aesthetics of their novels. This paper aims to contribute to creative writing methodology-a process of thinking, reading, writing, reflecting, and editing-by exposing the relationship in three varied examples between developmental work, intention, point-of-view and voice. Through three case studies that trace works in progress to their final, edited forms, it explores knowledges contained in final fictional works, asking how they are developed through line editing and copyediting and localised in the sentence. Writing in Practice 107

This paper examines the Megg, Mogg and Owl stories of Simon Hanselmann, an Australian artist whose serialized comics both depict acts of contemporary roguery committed by a group of friends in an inner city sharehouse and test the generic limits of its own storytelling conventions, thereby becoming contemporary instances of “rogue texts.” The paper positions the adventures of Megg, a witch, Mogg, her familiar, Owl, their housemate, and associated characters including Booger and Werewolf Jones as contemporary variations of both the Australian genre of grunge fiction and the broad international tradition of rogue literature. It shows how Megg, Mogg, Owl and their friends use the structure of the sharehouse to make their own rules, undertake illegal behaviour, and respond to the strictures of mainstream society, which alongside legal restrictions include normative restrictions on gender and behaviour. It shows the sharehouse as a response to their economic, as well as cultural and social conditions. The paper then shows how Megg and particularly Owl come up against the limitations of the permissiveness and apparent security of their “rogue” society, and respond by beginning to “go rogue” from the group. Meanwhile, the text itself, rather than advancing through time, goes over the same chronology and reinscribes it from new angles, becoming revisionist and re-creative, perhaps behaving roguishly against the affordances of episodic, vignette form. The paper argues that Simon Hanselmann’s Megg, Mogg and Owl comics can be understood as contemporary rogue texts, showing characters responding to social and generic limits and expressing them through a restless and innovative comics text.

Examining legacy effects through three case studies: Arcade Publications (2007–12), The Lifted Brow (est. 2007), The Bowen Street Press (est. 2016).

This paper investigates approaches to authorship in The Long Weekend in Alice Springs (2013), a graphic adaptation by the Australian artist Joshua Santospirito of a psychoanalytic essay by Craig San Roque (2004). Because the subject of both essay and adapted text is the ability of stories to have lasting effects over time in a space of crisis, this unusual adaptation establishes itself as an unusual site of authorship, whereby multiple authorships create a complicated authority, and stories themselves are shown to be significant. Through its variable positioning of the different roles undertaken by the author, the adaptation struggles with the ongoing challenge of appropriating Indigenous storytelling and suggests a possible way to discuss these stories from the outside. Through analysing paratextual materials and the work itself, this paper shows how nonfiction comics can both convey stories and separate themselves from stories through destabilising notions of creation and authorship.

What does it mean to write the city? And how do you write the city if you live on the streets? This chapter explores the implications of writing (and editing) the city through a collaborative creative project that non/fictionLab at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University has developed in Melbourne in conjunction with STREAT, a social enterprise that provides homeless youth and young people who are experiencing severe disadvantage with supported pathways from living on the street to a sustainable livelihood. As an experiment in applied creative writing, #STREATstories aims to foster a meaningful sense of belonging and connection through the making and distribution of place-based urban stories and poetic expression as a way to create prospects for social change. If we take maps to be representative documents, this case study asks: what is the potential for the act of mapping through a process of collaboration, and the maps themselves, to reconfigure representations of homelessness? Furthermore, if we explore the ways this project might be expanded, transferred and shared, what are the implications for who is represented, how they are represented and how the material outcomes are received by varied audiences? Through facilitating workshops, collecting stories and ‘composing’ the stories into material artefacts, we have explored both the potential for shared storytelling to positively affect participants and their communities—and the potential for applied creative writing to enrich the aims of social enterprise itself.