The Role of the Examiner: Scholar, Reviewer, Critic, Judge, Mentor

ONLIN

From the Mother Workshops: A mixed genre project

The author's observations of her mother's cremation

The New Fringe Dwellers: The Problem of Ethnicity in Recent Australian Children's Picture Books

See articl

A or C: Can we assess creative work fairly?

Assessment is of prime concern to students and their teachers. Marks affect students psychologically; more to the point, in our 'clever country,' students know that what appears on their transcript might determine whether they are granted a job interview. To complicate matters, teachers in our sceptical century have found assessment in many arts subjects problematic, especially those where the quality of the argument and the expression itself are the issues. In the case of creative writing, students produce and are therefore in charge of the content to some degree; they are personally involved in what comes from their own imaginations. Teachers also function as individual readers with their own tastes and prejudices

Uneasy Bedfellows: Assessing the creative thesis and its exegesis

Since creative writing is being formalised in coherent programs and assessment methods are under scrutiny, we must mediate the problematic relationship between this new discipline and the academy more effectively. Honours and postgraduate theses with a creative component are a growing industry in Australian universities. Students write fiction, poetry and drama as well as theorise their practice. Some create picture books and scrutinise the visual and verbal narratives. Students question their own efforts, however, in a manner that varies from literary critics. Whatever "ism" postgraduates favour, they have one thing in common. They are aware during the process of creation of how their understanding of what literature is affects their work. They make conscious decisions based on their critical formulations. Or do they

Why Cows? Irish Landscape Art

Poetr

Creative Writing as Research and the Dilemma of Accreditation: How do we prove the value of what we do?

What kind of cultural capital is writing? This paper explores the complexities of this situation, including the conundrum of research equivalence, canvasses the responses to this dilemma from other arts disciplines, and then proposes a strategy for evaluating the diverse types of discourse teachers and students of writing programs in Australia produce

The Exegesis and the Gentle Reader/Writer

ONLIN

Imagination and Marketability: What do writers do for a living?

If recent statistics are reliable, most Australian writers pursue their craft as a vocation, not as a means to a living wage. These statistics might not dampen the enthusiasm of students who might be years away from facing their implications, yet virtually all teachers of creative writing who have ever freelanced or tried to supplement their incomes in a meaningful way by publishing, realise the seriousness of them. This paper will first canvass the reasons students enrol in writing topics, then consider how realistic their aims are in light of current publishing practice and finally focus on three successful writers for young people to evaluate those aims in the light of professional experience