Molly Murn holds a Masters in Creative Arts, and is near completion of a PhD in Creative Writing at Flinders University. Her debut novel, Heart of the Grass Tree was published earlier this year by Penguin Random House (Vintage). Molly's poetry has won several awards including a commendation in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets. Molly was the recipient of a Varuna Publisher Fellowship and has worked as a lecturer in English and Creative writing and sessional academic teacher, and is a sub-editor for Transnational Literature.
Molly's Phd thesis is titled: Writing on Thresholds: An Australian Postcolonial Poetics Topic Summary: This project aims to investigate the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and to examine how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. Supervisors: Professor Jeri Kroll and Dr Patrick Allington
Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 2016
As John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’. 1 Perhaps drawing upon Donne’s refl... more As John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’. 1 Perhaps drawing upon Donne’s reflection, Syd Harrex has described his inheritance as islandic. His island-self was created in the Australian island State of Tasmania where he lived out his first three decades. Stories of shipwrecks and imagined maroonings shaped Syd’s boyhood games; his island childhood influenced not only by the visceral experience of living separate from the main, but also by the literature of islands, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Barrie’s The Coral Island, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In adulthood, Syd had a long association with Kangaroo Island in South Australia. It is in the tranquil town of Penneshaw that Syd’s more recent writing-self had found a place of solace, inspiration, and respite. Overlooking Backstairs Passage, the narrow body of water that separates the island that locals call KI from the South Australian mainland, Pen...
Abstract: This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figur... more Abstract: This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold asa point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative).
Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground.
This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poetics.
Keywords: Ali Cobby Eckermann; poetics; threshold.
Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 2016
As John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’. 1 Perhaps drawing upon Donne’s refl... more As John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’. 1 Perhaps drawing upon Donne’s reflection, Syd Harrex has described his inheritance as islandic. His island-self was created in the Australian island State of Tasmania where he lived out his first three decades. Stories of shipwrecks and imagined maroonings shaped Syd’s boyhood games; his island childhood influenced not only by the visceral experience of living separate from the main, but also by the literature of islands, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Barrie’s The Coral Island, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In adulthood, Syd had a long association with Kangaroo Island in South Australia. It is in the tranquil town of Penneshaw that Syd’s more recent writing-self had found a place of solace, inspiration, and respite. Overlooking Backstairs Passage, the narrow body of water that separates the island that locals call KI from the South Australian mainland, Pen...
Abstract: This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figur... more Abstract: This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold asa point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative).
Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground.
This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poetics.
Keywords: Ali Cobby Eckermann; poetics; threshold.
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Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and
spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground.
This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by
Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poetics.
Keywords: Ali Cobby Eckermann; poetics; threshold.
Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and
spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground.
This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by
Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poetics.
Keywords: Ali Cobby Eckermann; poetics; threshold.