Editorial Issue 1

Editorial When we write about writing, we are asking questions about practice, process, and intervention; about how it’s taught at a tertiary level; its role in what might be called ‘politics’, or finding ways of linking the field of creative writing research to other fields of intellectual engagement—thinking its ontology and impact. Australia, arguably, already leads the world in umpteen aspects of this work, and for many years, TEXT journal, associated with the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), has been providing an erudite and rigorous forum for these questions and the work they demand. In a changing landscape of higher education, of scholarly reach and fora for sharing ideas, c i n d e r was cooked-up as a kind of wild, younger sibling of TEXT—to which it looks for inspiration, mentoring and points of resistance. As c i n d e r ’s editors, we saw a place for a journal welcoming shorter, pithier interventions on practices of ‘expressivity’ in the written, or textual form. A cinder is an unstable node: a burning element that may peter out or start a veritable conflagration. In this way, c i n d e r journal seeks to provide a site for burgeoning ideas—ones which may or may not be the origin of larger fires— because often with art and thought, we have to move forward into a hunch, a suspicion, and without a guarantee that the angle is productive or profitable. This is research, and so this inaugural issue of c i n d e r includes work by six emerging scholars, most of whom are also practising writers as well as thinkers of writing. The writers here have responded to the review process—never easy— to hone their burgeoning idea, intervention, take and contribution. If these prove active—like embers with enough heat—we assume that these writers will write further into this vein, and that probably they will refine and extend the work, which may end up in a longer, more complex form in TEXT or in international journals, or which may simply inspire other practitioners, or provide a small, timely piece of a bigger puzzle in the ongoing work of writing, and keeping-on writing. Articles in this issue have tended to cluster around the notions of genre (its effectivity, suitableness, impact and nuance), specificities of craft, and contexts of and strategies for change—whether constructive or dismantling—and their relation to writing. Many of the authors are working on PhD dissertations and creative works. They live and breathe in the thick of these real problems, and they report from the scene of writing. Some articles here emerged after the 2017 AAWP Annual Conference Climates of Change with Flinders University in Adelaide, where the issue’s CFP was initially circulated. As we move forward into the (always) unseen future of what a journal will be, we have the steady and soft intention that one issue of c i n d e r each year will be primarily (but not exclusively) sourced from emerging scholars from the cinder 2 annual AAWP meeting (the upcoming one being held in Perth this coming late November). A second annual issue will then be more open, gathered around a negotiated theme, and seeking to provide a forum for reworked and excellent Honours or Masters thesis material, seminar papers and other emerging contributions from the scholarly community of writing programs around Australasia. If you are involved with a writing program (as a supervisor, for example), please let your students know that there is a place for their works. Scholarship in writing is being done everywhere, and it can be daring and teetering, startling and brilliant. Sometimes it undervalues its own importance, and so CINDER hopes to disabuse such thinkers of their insignificance and accompany them in refining and preparing their ideas for a discerning readership of fellows. We would like to thank (with breathless gratitude) all the anonymous reviewers who made this issue possible: the double and sometimes triple blind-refereeing of papers in a style and tone that models the courtesy and seriousness that make us proud to be professionals in this field. This issue, we are also delighted to have a commissioned piece of creative work from Ruby Todd, whose novel is forthcoming with Giramondo in 2019. Thank you, Ruby, for responding to our invitation. We will seek writers of all kinds for these features in futures issues. We would finally like to thank the AAWP, for welcoming our moving forward with this initiative, TEXT journal for being the best older sibling ever, and Writing and Literature at Deakin University for the funding that enabled the all the labour required to make a journal appear as a whole and autonomous entity in the digital world. The Deakin Library and their Open Source Journal experts have also tirelessly assisted us in the back-end of this endeavour. Thank you, Josipa! The CFP for Issue 2 is emerging as we go ‘to press’. We welcome papers speaking to mostly-open theme and which might also be able to articulate a thematic or atmospheric link to c i n d e r ’s brief and acronym (attached here, and on our about page) Please send papers to cinder@deakin.edu.au by September 20th, 2018, for consideration for Issue 2. Thanks for reading. Thanks for reviewing (if you did), and thanks, especially, to our authors here. Might this be part of a long career of strong writing and generous thinking. Hayley Elliott-Ryan & Antonia Pont (Managing Editors, 2018) cinder 3 c i n d e r | creative interventions & new directions in expressive research 1. a flameless but live coal; an ember 2. a means by which fire disseminates and renews itself '...the words “another voice” recall not only the complex multiplicity of people, they “call,” they “ask for” another voice: “another voice, again, yet another voice.” It is a desire, an order, a prayer or a promise, as you wish...' Jacques Derrida, Cinders, p. 9-10 'The whole problem of Method becomes the following: How to extract our true thoughts from the rule of chance? That is: How make a true thought into an adequate idea, linked to other adequate ideas? We set out from a true idea.' Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, p. 134