Explorations in Creative Writing

by Kevin Brophy

This set of reflective essays about the writing life examines the poetics and politics of reading as a writer, teaching and learning about writing in an academic or informal setting, and pacing oneself through writing projects. Academic investigations about the medieval concept of the writer and the novelization of the poem accompany more practical discussions about keeping a writer's sketchbook and conducting research. The growth of creative writing programs and the particular role of the artist in Australian society is explored.

256 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

See also: Kevin Brophy for the Irish novelist and English Language tutor.

Professor Kevin Brophy is a poet and novelist. He has had twelve books published. From 1980 to 1994 he edited the small press literary journal Going Down Swinging. His poems and essays have been anthologised in Best Australian Poems 2004, 2006, 2007, 2011 and Best Australian Essays 2009 (Black Inc.), Australian Poetry since 1788 (UNSW Press 2011), Best Australian Essays: a ten-year collection (Black Inc 2011), the MacQuarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (Allen & Unwin 2009), the Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009), The Road South (Five islands, 2007), New Music: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Five Islands 2001), Family Ties: Australian Poems of the Family (Oxford 1999), My Secret Life (Melbourne Festival of Poetry 1999), Daughters and Fathers (UQP 1997) and other publications. His book, Creativity, was shortlisted for the NSW Premiers Nonfiction Literary Award in 1999. He was awarded the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry in 2005. He was co-winner of the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay in 2009.
Kevin Brophy is a regular reviewer for Reading Time, the journal of the Children's Book Council of Australia, and has contributed Book Notes for the Council of Adult Education Reading Groups. He has been awarded Australia Council for the Arts grants in 1974, 1986 and 2005. He has been awarded Arts Victoria project grants in 1996 and 2003. In 2010 he co-edited Nth Degree (Arcade), an anthology of new writing from Australian creative-writing students. His latest book of essays is Patterns of Creativity (Rodopi Press 2009). His latest collection of poetry is Radar (Walleah Press 2012). See an interview in Verityla with Brophy and co-author Nathan Curnow and review in Aus.Poetry.org. Kevin's article, 'Art and Evolution: A Partnership in Excess' has been included in the 10 Year Anniversary edition of the international journal, New Writing.

Kevin Brophy is a life member of Writing Victoria, patron the Melbourne Poets Union, a member of the publishing executive of Five Islands Press, and co-editor of the on-line journal of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, TEXT. He is a founding member of Lines to Time, an association devoted to providing poetry at the funerals of those who would otherwise die without recognition or ceremony. He was a member of the Executive of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs 2001-2008. He has been a board member of Going Down Swinging, four times a judge for the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, and through Hit & Miss, the publisher of chapbooks by Melbourne poets.

Reviews

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far very exciting in terms of what it is to be a writer. Fvourite lines so far - 'Writers are peculiarly subjective to language. For many of them the world is one long and complex sentence not yet ended.' Yes! 20/2/2013 and approx 1 month of living with this book at work lunch breaks and night time reading roughly one page at a time since thats all I can deal with before crashing not because its boring - went through a sticky middle patch because I was reading it wanting to explore creative writing through someone else's eyes, not get into literary discussions, which to be fair, you have to if you are going to explore creative writing. Something this exploration probably showed me was my limitations in thinking about creative writing. I realised I don't want to think about it theoretically, I just want to write stuff, which forces me to think more about how I think about writing, particularly about how, what and why I don't think about it - and does that matter? I have thought about why I want/need to write, and what it is I want to say, roughly, and about how writing is ultimately about communication and communication comes down to content. I don't want to do it for its own sake no matter how much I love the process. For someone thinking about how writing fits into their life and into the environment they inhabit therefore I would say this is worth reading because of its scope. It explores creative writing from a range of perspectives, from intensely personal to scholarly. There were also two sentences apart from the one that starts this response that I have copied and will glue into my journal simply because they said things that made me feel less alone in my writing and in my reading, because they were things I thought only I believed - one is 'Writing, the sort of writing that matters, has something to do with never having thought about how to make a living from it, ...' and the other is 'One of the great problems here for ..... creative writers, is that it is often only other writers who can see how many hours and weeks, indeed years of research could have gone into the choice of a single word in a sentence that takes less than a few seconds to read.'