I'm a writer, editor and academic. My first novel, The Asking Game (Transit Lounge, 2007), was a runner-up for the Vogel award and received an Aurealis honourable mention; an early extract from my second, The Art of Navigation (UWA, 2017), was shortlisted for a Conjure award. I've been managing editor of the Australian national book trade magazine, and commissioning editor for a trade publisher, as well as co-founding and running my own Melbourne micro-press.
'An interrogation of realism and the real, of the rip tide of memory, of the riddle of identity .... more 'An interrogation of realism and the real, of the rip tide of memory, of the riddle of identity ... ' Janette Turner Hospital
Best Australian Short Stories reprinted this early extract from my first novel (Black Inc, 2004: ... more Best Australian Short Stories reprinted this early extract from my first novel (Black Inc, 2004: pp 126–30).
'An interrogation of realism and the real, of the rip tide of memory, of the riddle of identity .... more 'An interrogation of realism and the real, of the rip tide of memory, of the riddle of identity ... ' Janette Turner Hospital
Best Australian Short Stories reprinted this early extract from my first novel (Black Inc, 2004: ... more Best Australian Short Stories reprinted this early extract from my first novel (Black Inc, 2004: pp 126–30).
Examining legacy effects through three case studies: the Lifted Brow, Arcade Publications & The B... more Examining legacy effects through three case studies: the Lifted Brow, Arcade Publications & The Bowen Street Press.
This article is an international collaboration of three creative writing tutors detailing our res... more This article is an international collaboration of three creative writing tutors detailing our responses and practices in shifting from in-class to online instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are three scholars working at three different institutions (University of British Columbia, RMIT University, and the University of Technology Sydney) across two countries (Canada and Australia). We present collective autoethnographic responses and offer a menu of pedagogical practices for designing courses and teaching creative writing online. While one tutor had sound pedagogical practice in blended teaching, making the transition to online course delivery seamless, two of the tutors had little experience with online teaching and course design so their shift to online teaching was seismic, which led to unexpected creative solutions. Our insights are reflected in our narratives and the personal experiences that we bring into this article. The result, as discussed in this article, demonst...
“What is the point of stories in such a moment”, asks author and critic James Bradley, writing ab... more “What is the point of stories in such a moment”, asks author and critic James Bradley, writing about climate extinction: Bradley emphasises that “climatologist James Hansen once said being a climate scientist was like screaming at people from behind a soundproof glass wall; being a writer concerned with these questions often feels frighteningly similar” (“Writing”). If the impact of climate change asks humans to think differently, to imagine differently, then surely writing—and reading—must change too? According to writer and geographer Samuel Miller-McDonald, “if you’re a writer, then you have to write about this”. But how are we to do that? Where might it be done already? Perhaps not in traditional (or even post-) Modernist modes. In the era of the Anthropocene I find myself turning to non-traditional, un-real models to write the slow violence and read the deep time that is where we can see our current climate catastrophe.At a “Writing in the Age of Extinction” workshop earlier this year Bradley and Jane Rawson advocated changing the language of “climate change”—rejecting such neutral terms—in the same way that I see the stories discussed here pushing against Modernity’s great narrative of progress.My research—as a reader and writer, is in the fantastic realm of speculative fiction; I have written in The Conversation about how this genre seems to be gaining literary popularity. There is no doubt that our current climate crisis has a part to play. As Margaret Atwood writes: “it’s not climate change, it’s everything change” (“Climate”). This “everything” must include literature. Kim Stanley Robinson is not the only one who sees “the models modern literary fiction has are so depleted, what they’re turning to now is our guys in disguise”. I am interested in two recent examples, which both use the strongly genre-associated time-travel trope, to consider how science-fiction concepts might work to re-imagine our “deranged” world (Ghosh), whether applied by genre writers or “our guys in disguise”. Can stories such as The Heavens by Sandra Newman and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” by Ted Chiang—which apply time travel, whether as an expression of fatalism or free will—help us conceive the current collapse: understand how it has come to pass, and imagine ways we might move through it?The Popularity of Time TravelIt seems to me that time as a notion and the narrative device, is key to any idea of writing through climate change. “Through” as in via, if the highly contested “cli-fi” category is considered a theme; and “through” as entering into and coming out the other side of this ecological end-game. Might time travel offer readers more than the realist perspective of sweeping multi-generational sagas? Time-travel books pose puzzles; they are well suited to “wicked” problems. Time-travel tales are designed to analyse the world in a way that it is not usually analysed—in accordance with Tim Parks’s criterion for great novels (Walton), and in keeping with Darko Suvin’s conception of science fiction as a literature of “cognitive estrangement”. To read, and write, a character who travels in “spacetime” asks something more of us than the emotional engagement of many Modernist tales of interiority—whether they belong to the new “literary middlebrow’” (Driscoll), or China Miéville’s Booker Prize–winning realist “litfic” (Crown).Sometimes, it is true, they ask too much, and do not answer enough. But what resolution is possible is realistic, in the context of this literally existential threat?There are many recent and recommended time-travel novels: Kate Atkinson’s 2013 Life after Life and Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2014 End of Days have main characters who are continually “reset”, exploring the idea of righting history—the more literary experiment concluding less optimistically. For Erpenbeck “only the inevitable is possible”. In her New York Times review Francine Prose likens Life after Life to writing itself: “Atkinson sharpens our awareness of the apparently limitless choices and decisions that a novelist must make on every page, and of what is gained and lost when the consequences of these choices are, like life, singular and final”. Andrew Sean Greer’s 2013 The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells also centres on the WorldWar(s), a natural-enough site to imagine divergent timelines, though he draws a different parallel. In Elan Mastai’s 2017 debut All Our Wrong Todays the reality that is remembered—though ultimately not missed, is more dystopic than our own time, as is also the way with Joyce Carol Oates’s 2018 The Hazards of Time Travel. Oates’s rather slight contribution to the subgenre still makes a clear point: “America is founded upon amnesia” (Oates, Hazards). So, too, is our current environment. We are living in a time created by a previous generation; the environmental consequence of our own actions will not be felt until after we are gone. What better way to write such a riddle than through the loop of time…
This article is a reflection on the author’s personal experience undertaking a corporate secondme... more This article is a reflection on the author’s personal experience undertaking a corporate secondment to the remote Aboriginal community of Aurukun in 2001–02, working on the Family Income Management Scheme. She analyses the history, context and possible motivations of such programs, and considers how likely they are to halt the severe social dysfunction currently manifest. Her discussion focuses on the role of individual ‘blow-ins’ in light of her own experience and explores some of the ways in which change might be achieved—within employees such as herself, at least.
Local authors present booksellers with more than just a sales opportunity, they can make the whol... more Local authors present booksellers with more than just a sales opportunity, they can make the whole relationship (the selling and the reading) more intimate, says Rose Michael.
I’ve only been here three years, so what would I know? I’ve only worked in four areas, how much h... more I’ve only been here three years, so what would I know? I’ve only worked in four areas, how much have I seen? Enough, surely—if the average tenure is eighteen months, as they said when I joined, then I’m practically an old hand. Enough to tell my story like any traveller, write up my notes like a true anthropologist. Or so I thought, until I started. Then I began to wonder. You could spend your whole life here and never get your head around how it works. Indeed, if you spent your life here you’d have no hope of ever getting your head around it: the longer you’re inside the Matrix, the harder it is to see.
This collaborative paper explores how the 'spec-fic' category may be responding to contemporary p... more This collaborative paper explores how the 'spec-fic' category may be responding to contemporary political and environmental challenges. It presents two case studies, in the personal writing and professional publishing experiences of authors Rose Michael and Cat Sparks, to consider the ways speculative fiction engages with real-world concerns. The paper acknowledges the genre's contested relationship to harder-to-categorise cross-genre or interstitial forms of non-realist fiction, as well as its obvious antecedents in science fiction and its arguable overlap with 'big L' literature. As creative practitioners and published authors who dis/identify with generic labels in different ways, the authors contend that the use, misuse, and abuse of genre conventions has been, and continues to be, personally and professionally productiveparticularly in a contemporary publishing landscape impacted by changes to technology and platforms that have transformed traditional relationships and roles.
Overwhelming catastrophic events have become part of the ‘new normal’ of climate change. This ess... more Overwhelming catastrophic events have become part of the ‘new normal’ of climate change. This essayistic, collaborative lived experience report by a group of writers, each of whom lived through Australia’s 2019—2020 Black Summer of catastrophic bushfires, demonstrates how the effects of shared but different proximate relations can produce an affective, care-ful account of the lived experience of climate change. Our project asks: how might a practical entanglement with others allow for a meaningful response to climate change? How might collaboration allow for a mode that places care at the centre of writing practice?
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fiction by rose michael
nonfiction by rose michael