NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

A Beginner’s Mind: From Ball-Hating HDR to Basketball Coach

BY JENNY HEDLEY – In this reflective essay, a time-poor single mother and PhD candidate accidentally takes on the role of basketball coach as she seeks to achieve balance between scholastics and life.

Drawing on her practice-based research methods, she seeks an intellectual and embodied understanding of basketball to help her understand how to coach a sport that she has never before played. Ultimately, it is the guise of the beginner’s mind that allows her to risk failure both on the court and in the books, as she operates from a place of belief in potentiality and acts as her own best coach. 

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Jenny Hedley is a neurodivergent writer, critic, digital creator and PhD candidate whose work appears in Overland Literary Journal, TEXT Journal, Westerly Magazine, Rabbit, Archer Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Crawlspace, DIAGRAM, Mascara Literary Review, The Suburban Review, Verity La, the anthologies Admissions: Voices within Mental Health and Verge.

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Palimpsest Series

BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration

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Practice.

BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined

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A Gathering.

BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric

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Insanity Helps

BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It

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Literally In

BY KENDREA RHODES – This work is an audiovisual expression of the messiness of being me. A visual artist, a

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Editorial
BY Carina Böhm, Didem Caia, Clare Carlin, Emilie Collyer, Ruth Fogarty
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practice research
BY JOSHUA IP – The interrogation of practice is a common task faced by practice-based researchers. As a PhD candidate the Practice Research Symposium programme in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT, focusing on the discipline of Creative Writing, I have attempted to interrogate my wide-ranging practice as poet, editor and literary organiser for the past six years.
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How life gets in: poem and essay
BY ANNE M. CARSON – Disrupting, interrupting and sometimes derailing study in both welcome and unwelcome ways; life gets into PhD projects in a plethora of ways, so much so that there often seems to be no hard boundary between them. This essay uses the example of synchronicity as one way that ‘life gets in’.
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Palimpsest Series
BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration from the concept of a palimpsest and the work of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
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Between – Cabbage Tree Creek, April-July 2023
BY MICHAEL DONEMAN – Between is a reflection on loss and renewal. It interweaves personal, cultural, and environmental stories near the country where I live, by a waterway at the edge of the Boondall Wetlands called Cabbage Tree Creek.
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Write, stitch, unpick
BY CLAIRE WELLESLEY-SMITH – The use of textile as a creative recording method alongside my PhD (2023, The Open University) extended a practice I began in 2013. Stitch Journal is a long length of linen cloth, pieces added in sections.
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‘Where a language is opening’
BY SUSIE CAMPBELL – Before an unexpected brush with serious illness, the journey of my PhD research project seemed clear. I set out to engage with the avant-garde Modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein in order to draw on her experimental approach to language for my own processual model of poetic practice.
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Practice.
BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined through the process of undertaking PhD creative writing practice research.
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A Gathering.
BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric essay, is written with the conventions of the lyric essay, utilising white space, non-linearity, image, archive, fragment, association and braiding.
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Insanity Helps
BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It is styled as an interview with the self and is punctuated by interactions between the interviewers which descend into hostile conversations.
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My Life IS my PhD Research
BY JENNY HICKINBOTHAM – Life didn’t GET IN to my PhD research, my life IS my PhD research.
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Literally In
BY KENDREA RHODES – This work is an audiovisual expression of the messiness of being me. A visual artist, a writer, doctoral researcher, and a psychiatric survivor.
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Writing Life: reflections on parenting, poetry and practice-based research
BY ISABELLA G. MEAD – This creative response to ‘How Life Gets In’ details my experience maintaining a creative practice while also being a PhD candidate and a parent to young children.
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How voluntary assisted dying turbo-charged my doctorate
BY LAINIE ANDERSON – Life didn’t get in the way of my PhD. Death did. Or more specifically, it was South Australia’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill (2020).
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Degrees of Separation
BY DANTE DeBONO – ‘Degrees of separation’ is a reflective consideration of the ways in which creators navigate the complexity of their internal writing processes as unique configurations of their lived experiences.
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