'A Tale of Two Slippers' : Uncanny parody, power and the performance of writing

In this combined critical and creative work, my experimental short story ‘A Tale of Two Slippers’ (in which a character escapes a text to kill her author) is framed through an introduction in which cultural studies theory and reflections on practice-led research provide insights into how parody and the performance of writing can work uncannily and generatively to resist the power relations embedded in conventions of genre and the author/text binary. The key focus is on parody, and its uncannily doubled discourse (Barfield and Tew, 2002), which combines with the added critical edge of metafiction and ontological/textual slippage, to explore the creative potential of Australian cultural engagement with hegemonic conventions of judgement and genre, and to consider the subversive edge that writing from the margins might bring to this endeavour

Memo to Shanghai

The short experimental auto-fiction work "Memo to Shanghai" engages in a creative and generative dialogue with Isaac Julien's art work 'Ten Thousand Waves'. Julien's piece is an immersive film installation first exhibited in Europe in 2010, and displayed at the John Curtin Gallery as part of an exhibition of Julien's work in 2022. 'Memo to Shanghai' responds to 'Ten Thousand Waves' representation of Shanghai through memories of travel in Shanghai and the subsequently formulated retrospective lens of the Covid 19 pandemic, exploring how the latter can produce a radically altered sense of place, self, memory. and the cross cultural encounter. 'Memo to Shanghai' was written and performed by the author as a part of the 2022 event, 'A Thousand Words: Curtin Writers’ Response to Isaac Julien' held and recorded at the John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University, Wester Australia in March 2022 and then released for public online viewing. The work is viewable at the 26 min mark of the video recording