My creative-based research incorporated learning how to construct a longform lyric essay. This piece tracks the ways in which it is particularly pertinent for the protean forms of the lyric essay to record and embed life as it occurs into the work. The course of my candidature, which is almost at an end, was at times tumultuous both within and without the structures attending to my scholarly work: I had a change of principal supervisor 14 months in, and then in 2023, I had a meeting with my associate supervisor that almost derailed me. I also experienced significant family trauma and loss, and this was on top of the Covid-19 lockdowns and having primary school aged children and a marriage to navigate around my studies. Yet, it was at times the circumstances of life itself that came to inform my practice, whether enfolding trauma in white space, or stopping work altogether at times, to working in a fragmented fashion that suited my project even as it at times became practically necessary.
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Dani Netherclift is a writer and poet living on un-ceded Taungurung lands in the Victoria High Country, surrounded by mountains. She lives with her husband, son and daughter and is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Deakin University. Her area of research is the lyric essay and its intersections with white space, elegy and the body. Her first book, Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies is being published by Upswell Publishing in late 2024.