The callout: ‘How Life Gets In’
We are told that when you’re doing a PhD, ‘everything’ is the PhD … But is it?
We are five PhD and ECR researchers engaging with practice research across poetry, prose, playwriting, screenwriting, podcasting, and essaying, and we are interested in what happens when the academy and life collide.
How does your practice change, inform, and permeate your PhD?
How does your PhD permeate, inform, or change your practice?
For this special edition of Creative Matters we invited HDRs and ECRs to submit their creative and critical responses to the prompt: How Life Gets In.
This issue is by and for HDRs and ECRs.
A Special Edition
How Life Gets In is the inaugural HDR/ECR edition of Creative Matters. As an editorial team we thought deeply about the focus of our call for papers. Reflecting on our own candidatures we noted our PhD research happened as part of our everyday lives and was often shaped, enhanced, and subsumed by it.
We wondered if our shared experiences were true for other HDRs and ECRs? How/had they incorporated their scholarship into their lives, their lives into their scholarship? Could excellent work emerge from the quotidian?
As the guest editorial team we had creative freedom on the curation of this edition. Given the publication is not peer-reviewed, it was up to us to decide the nature of the review process. Since this would be an issue dedicated to the creative works of HDRs and ECRs, we wanted each person submitting to know their work had been thoughtfully engaged with, and to provide them with the kind of careful, critical feedback we would want for our own work. It was also important to us that this special edition contained a broad cross-section of research, practice and practitioners. Our aim was to publish all or most of the submissions we received, and we were deliberately generous with the parameters of our terms, regarding format, word length, and time for submission.
In response to our call out, the whole brea(d)th of life was received, in many forms: poetry; essays; interviews; photography; screenplays; memoir; auto-fiction; song, and mixed media. Some submissions brought lightness and playfulness with genre. Then there were those that sought new pathways and modes of expression; and those that engaged with and for others. All of it was the kind of work that heals, breathes, and all too often gives way—to the PhD, to relationships, to life.
The Process
As we all know, PhD-ing can be a lonely and isolating experience. Working with others on this project has been a joyful change to the solitude of study life. Listening to each other’s thoughts and observations about the submissions, and reflections on the creative process in general has greatly expanded our own inner creative lives and our research practice skills.
Importantly, reading the works of our peers and hearing their stories reminded us we don’t have to do it alone.
The work we received surprised and delighted us in the way it responded to our callout and in its conversation. Many pieces were deeply personal and shone a light into potent moments of life. Themes included time, trauma, art, memory, caring for self and others (children, family, friends), sport, motherhood, fan fiction, mental illness, and ageing.
Our editorial approach has been thoughtful, rigorous, and based on a foundation of generosity and support. We wanted to make ethical editorial decisions for those who had entrusted us with their work. The process was entirely transparent and collaborative; we learned from the groups’ shared experiences and took collective editorial responsibility. Finding consensus, sharing workloads, and writing as a collective was also rewarding. In all this, the Editor of Creative Matters has been a knowledgeable and supportive guide to those of us unfamiliar with the protocols of putting together an edition.
We believe that as a result of our collaborative approach and the way in which we designed the callout, submission and feedback process, some rich discoveries emerged around individual creative processes and research. We hope that the way we worked proves useful for future HDR editing teams and for academic publishing more broadly, as a collaborative mode of working that is responsive and flexible. We hope our contributors felt the care and engagement we brought to their individual works and to this special edition.
The Life
Finding the many bridges between life experience and the PhD process can offer new ways of approaching research, which can have a positive impact on what research can look like. This special edition of Creative Matters holds multifarious writing and research, and we hope this representation may enliven and inspire other HDRs and ECRs to think differently about what a researcher is.
The blurring of lines between life, work and creative practice permeates through the contributions of this issue, as the authors weave their experiences of life into the textures of their research.
A creative arts PhD is a beautiful thing, one of the best things I have ever undertaken, Dani Netherclift notes in her essay, ‘A Gathering’, while in their experimental work, ‘Insanity Helps’, Indyana Horobin observes, The project is everything, and yet life continues, like plants growing from gutters, when everything should be washed away. Anne Carson examines synchronicity in depth in her essay and comments on the similarities between creative practice and synchronicity, how they blur the distinction between work and the rest of life.
We hope fellow ECRs and HDRs find solidarity and solace in seeing how other scholars have traced the paths of their research.
Statement from the Editor
Smiljana Glisovic
This is the first Creative Matters issue that has invited HDR candidates to guest edit an entire edition. The DDCA wanted to see what kind of interest the opportunity would yield, and the kind of benefit it would bring to both contributors and the guest editors. We sent out an invitation to participate to the DDCA members and welcomed anyone that expressed an interest in editing. From there, the six of us simply started a conversation and paid attention to the unfolding process.
As it turned out this editorial team came with a lot of experience, as creative practitioners and researchers. This meant they confidently took the reins and I was fortunate to be allowed on the sidelines to observe their process. The conversations in the editorial meetings were not dissimilar to those that typically happen on any creative practice research assessment panel or peer-review process. The attention this group of editors paid each of the contributing pieces was committed, informed and rigorous. I was privileged to observe the questions that arose for the editors, to see how they resolved those questions, the critical capacities they expressed and their process of formulating language appropriate to communicate back to the contributors.
From the contributors, I’ve received feedback that this has been a very valuable experience for them, and I imagine the skills that have been collectively honed by the editorial team will also enrich the editor’s attention to their own work and development of their PhDs.
We hope you enjoy this collection of works which are so varied and challenging and honest and artful. This is a wonderful insight into the spaces being explored by current HDR and ECR cohorts in the creative arts.
Given the high calibre of the works submitted, the approach taken in the editorial process, and the generally rich experience, the DDCA has been inspired to support an annual peer-reviewed HDR + ECR edition of Creative Matters. In the coming year we will formalise the process, refine the details and offer the opportunity again in 2025. We are so grateful to this inaugural editorial team, Carina Böhm, Didem Caia, Clare Carlin, Emilie Collyer, Ruth Fogarty for sparking this new venture for future HDRs and ECRs in the creative arts.
The editorial team of this edition are five creative writing PhD candidates/recent graduates: a screenwriter, a socially engaged theatre maker, a novelist, a playwright, and a digital journalist.
Carina Böhm is a screenwriter, PhD candidate at the University of South Australia and the name of a body that listens to many stories.
Didem Caia is a multi-disciplinary artist with a playwriting practice. A current PhD candidate, Didem is researching embodied writing methods with CALD storytellers in Australia.
Clare Carlin is a PhD candidate at RMIT, writer, and editor of Pieced Work.
Emilie Collyer is a practitioner and researcher who writes across forms. She is a recent PhD graduate from RMIT where she investigated feminist creative practice.
Ruth Fogarty is a PhD candidate exploring women’s empathetic interventions in true crime. She is a Walkley Award-winning digital journalist, with an interest in empathy and ethics in nonfiction storytelling.