The Australian Association of Writing Programs

I do agree with your position questioning the lack of embodiment in electronic writing fora. I too have often questioned the role of this network. After attendin the annual conferences I find that many of the most generative and thought provoking conversations between postgrads occur over drinks, cuppas and otherwise socially.There is often a reticence to speak in the public fora where Academics can overpower the student with years of built up theories and knowledge.

So I have always looked to this forumfor a continuation of the collegiality engendered at AAWP, when we all return to our various States, Territories, Faculties and Institutions. After all we seem to share the same emotional trajectories throughout periods of our candidatures. Yet each time I notice that a student wants to have a "water-cooler whinge" a well meaning academic steps us and states the bleeding obvious... the mantra of just do it, which we already hear in our regular  supervision sessions. Are supervisors so inured to the publish or perish pressure that they have actually forgotten the emotional fragility of the novice candidate?

I am also quite sure that in the same way post-grads feel discouraged to commit their thoughts to print in electronic forums we are similarly loathe to voice our ideas within the annual Conference sessions where established academics can damp down basic discussion by calling upon years of expertise and theorising. I had always hoped this forum would allow for just such sharing of flawed/faulty and 'new to us' discoveries without fear of rejection or humiliation.

As for why we don't write and feel safer just popping by and reading the blogs... I can't even hazard a guess. perhaps as you say we need provocation to get up a head of steam.

Perhaps we just need to  take what we need at that moment, like your dvice Vahri to exagerate ( I prefer) emphasise, when elements in the creative process generate challenges. But we cannot all just take. For a forum to work we all must commit to sharing also. Then and only then can we become a more vibrant forum less reliant on the poor old guest editors and more self-sustaining.

Keep provoking... I'm listening!

My comment earlier today that attributed dampening down of student "water cooler whinges" to AAWP academics was incorrect. The actual comments arose last year from another post-grad who is obviously more advanced along the thetical/exegetical  journey than many of us.

I was and am, simply trying to discern why this forum is not buzzing as many other web blog sites and my own Institutions' Discussion Fora. Perhaps this is because we offer our courses via OUA and off-campus and he tyranny of distnace is felt more accutely. Not being an on-campus student this remains merely a hypothesis. 

And just to do a final attempt at damage control, so many of the AAWP members of the Academy have been nothing short of encouraging in their dealings with me and fellow post-grads. Perhaps my feelings emerge from the structural changes at the AAWP last year where PhD presentations were interspersed with the  refereed presntations, which worked well for students being mentored in their own research opportunities and grants but perhaps less well for those doing straight Doctoral studies, minus the extra public research training.

I have also been to Conferences where  there are separate PhD scholar colloquia, and I have witnessed both positives and negatives associated with this structure.There are no easy answers to the provocations and musings posed by these fora.

Just by the by, can I recommend an excellent book on Women in Higher Education (in the US): The Woman Question and Higher Education: Perspectives on Knowledge Production in America. i Ann Mari May (ed) 2008.  The text asks many interesting questions for both men and women 'choosing' to sudy with the new ERA HCA cluster and disciplines, particularly in the current global fiscal crisis.

I think you are right, Vahri, about people feeling more willing to contribute to a forum like APWN if there has been some prior 'embodied' interchanges with members of the group to help build trust. Dunno what we can do about that, given that the next AAWP isn't till the end of the year! Perhaps those of us who met at the last one can just talk amongst ourselves for a while? Let's hope your strategy of deliberate provocation works.

I'll go out on a limb here and try for an empathic response on the subject of memoir writing.

Last week I travelled to my uncle's funeral in Taree and I took the direct route recommended by google maps, along the Armidale-Kempsey road. The gravel sections began soon after the turnoff. I'm wary of unsealed roads, having skidded on them in the past. Warning signs proclaimed: 'very narrow road', 'slip areas',  'falling rocks do not stop', 'caution - logging trucks entering'. I felt very vulnerable sealed in my car with the windows up, the radio on, and the airconditioner going - I felt like I was too divorced from the outside risks to be sufficiently wary. So I turned off the radio and the airconditioner and wound down the windows.  But it got worse - so scary that I was driving along with my mouth open in terror. I was perched on the edge of a mountain, with a dizzying drop on one side of my ridiculously narrow ribbon of a road, a tiny ant negotiating blind corners with no way to turn back, nowhere to stop and hyperventilate, the only option to continue onwards, to the end.

This uncle whose funeral I was travelling toward wasn't someone I knew particularly well. I was going for my mother's sake. She died in November 2006 and the part of my creative nonfiction manuscript that I am currently working on involves reliving the experience of caring for her as she succumbed to cancer.  This morning as I had my shower I was remembering the hour I spent on the precipices of the Kempsey Road and my tense, terrified awareness that there was no way out of the journey - and realised that I am feeling much the same way about writing this memoir.

I hope this reply doesn't come across as a version of the supervisory 'just do it' [please imagine empathetic tone and gesture at this point] but i'd like to share my experiences of the value of AAWP conferences and, well, just doing it. i've attended two, one as a post grad (06) and one as a recent graduate (08). given that i travelled from Perth, i wanted to present something to make my long journey more worthwhile, and threw myself into the thick of it without the supportive framework of colleagues, institution, friends. mine was very much a 'fake it till you make it' approach, and i'm hoping to make the transition from the former to the latter without attracting too much attention, so i can then make out as if i'd made it all along.

My first contribution was research on structure and methodology in the writing exegesis, a tired and tedious topic to those who no longer had to concern themselves with it, apparently, but the feedback i received from reviewers who read the work as i attempted to prepare it for TEXT enabled me to produce something more developed for my thesis. the reseach remains unpublished (except on ADT: http://adt.ecu.edu.au/adt-public/adt-ECU2008.0015.html) but i will return to the kernel of value here this year. this process was one i couldn't extract from my supervisor.

My second contribution was research on collaborative writing and digital technologies, and grew directly out of an APWN group workshop on the online publishing process. my approach was a sceptical one, along the lines of my first blog 'What is the point of an online writers network?' which is not to suggest that the APWN workshop was not useful, it was, but the greatest value for me was as a provocation to further work. this paper will be published in an ebook that's growing out of the conference.

So my point is that despite the usual rejections and ego-batterings, there is slow but sure, i won't go so far as to say progress, but a direction. by building on the scraps that somehow manage to stand up in the public forum, i'm creating something valuable. it's not a house or even a hovel yet, more like a papier mache pinata, made of flour and water and newspaper.

Thanks Janene, the journey sure seems like that, and being a PhDer I often feel isolated in my own little capsule cut off from the 'real world' with the terrain around appearing hostile, challenging, frigtening and insurmountable often all at the same time.  I guess I need to look skywards to see that the peak of the mountain is near, and have the bravery to look over that cliff and downwards to see just how far I have travelled.

I guess if doing a PhDwere easy everybody would have one, and hey that happened to me once before when I was so thrilled to get into a Uni (from the wrong side of the Yarra River, or wrong postcode as they say now), when it was argues that everybody could  complete the B.A. There was a horrid backlash time when mostly non-Humanities graduates, derided the Arts Degree by saying it's only use  was to hang in the loo along with the poster of the Desiderata.

I guess, since the seventies, I am always in seige mentality, as there  appears to be wave upon wave of backlash and patronising through academic/public intellectuals commentaries and from the so called "Hard" disciplines or old "boys-networks".

I have just read a great book edited by Ann Mari May, entitled "The Woman Question" and Higher Education: Perspectives on Gender and Knowledge Production in America."  Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. 2008

And before all you blokes go... "here she goes again with that hoary old feminist rave", it has much to say about those of you who choose to study/practice in the "soft" subjects, particularly Arts and Humanities, about contagious effeminancy and the effect on your career as "serious knowledge producers".

Combine all this with the turf wars between the G8s and the ATN Unis over the Bradley Review into Higher Education and the constant rallying cry from us CHASS (Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) members to ensure the ERA research output measures maintain the status (and points/dollars) attribultable to creative works, I guess it explains why I feel constantly drawn to battle lines.

Welcome to the serious side of having a PhD in a Creative Arts field and the relevancy of future employment outside the commercial or literary market... now don't even get me started on the notion of literary texts versus popular. Just come up to ASAL in Canberra (in my paper is accepted) in July.

Keep blooging everyone, it does filter into the greymatter and nourish the left-side of the brain.

Yes, the windy mountain trip could be applied to the PhD experience as a whole, and of course it's fine for you to do that, but what I was alluding to was actually the process of writing a memoir about a painful subject. Once the commitment to the journey is made, you just have to wend your way round those those hairpin bends of memory even though you can't be sure what incidents will rise to top of mind; you have to traverse those high ledges of emotional fragility and take the risk of plunging to the vale of sadness below etc. etc. I'm sorry to be so ridiculously melodramatic about it - would it surprise you to know that having got through the worst, which was delving into my diaries and bringing that time back to full consciousness, that I'm well on the way to crafting it into something worth reading and not feeling so bad after all?