Reading and Writing for Change

Amelia Walker lectures in Creative Writing at the University of South Australia, on Kaurna Yerta, Australia. Her research engages poetry and related creative practices to raise subjugated knowledges and provide new insights into social, cultural, political, and ecological challenges of our times. Her fifth poetry collection is forthcoming in 2023.

• Foreword by award-winning creative writer and academic Paul Collis1. Introduction2. On story, narratives, metaphor, and thinking: reigniting forgotten connections3. Disentangling power from privilege, capital, and hegemony4. Story and ideology: how power operates with and in texts that reflect and reinforce existing injustices5. Towards agency through stories as re-presentation and poiesis as re-creation6. Whose stories matter? How literary canons regulate access to creative writing as an Arendtian ‘space of appearance’7. Strategies of ‘writing back’ to destabilise canonical power8. Not just who, but how: literary aesthetics and notions about merit as sites of struggle9. Story and the ‘politics of aesthetics’ on macro levels: form, structure, and narrative order10. Story and the ‘politics of aesthetics’ on micro levels: grammar, style, and figurative devices11. Risks of recuperation and the need for ongoing self-revaluation in and through creative writing, story, and poiesis12. To be continued: new directions in and for creative writing as a site of struggleAppendix one: glossary of terms used in specific ways within this bookList of Works Cited

In this timely and thought-provoking book, Amelia Walker problematises and disrupts western cultural assumptions about creative practice, persuasively arguing that it is only by embracing a more open and diverse understanding of what “creative writing” might mean that socially and politically engaged writers may begin to effect change.