Life Writing (CWRI30013)

Life writing offers us a powerful entry point into exploring families, bodies, relationships, time, and place and can bring to the page experiences and stories that have been ignored, silenced or forgotten. In the examination and writing of lived experiences and life narratives we can begin to understand our worlds, explore difference and subjectivity, and to tell our own intertwined and relational life stories.

In this subject we pay particular attention to experimental forms of life writing and to queer, indigenous, disabled, and feminist scholarship and writing lineages here and elsewhere. We will be reading, thinking and talking about identity and representation (including self-representation), writing the body, thinking through time and linearity in relation to narrative, power and ethics, the complexities of memory, and the possibilities afforded by different forms of life writing, which include autobiography, essays, memoirs, biographies, diaries, letters, family histories, zines, poetry, etc.

The work we do in this subject is trauma informed and grounded in creative and experimental research, writing, and reading practices. Over the semester we will practice a range of writing and research techniques which include mapping, weaving, writing letters to our future selves, working with archives and special collections, playing with genre and hybrid forms, and working with objects as holders of memory and story to support the production of a folio of original life writing and a critical reflection.