The Long Story
Much recent writing in New Zealand has called for a revision of how we tell stories of place, from Alex Calder’s The Settler's Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand (2011), to Tony Ballantyne’s on-going arguments for the need to think beyond – or beneath – the nation and to be “more attentive to questions of place and space, connection and conflict, and the abiding importance of the locality” (2012). The Christchurch earthquakes and rebuild have brought these questions to the forefront in very real and practical ways, and re-inscribed how important and how complex thinking about place needs to be. The imminent deadline for Treaty settlement negotiations has also re-invigorated debates about local histories from Māori perspectives.
At the same time, a number of recent creative publications in New Zealand have taken up the form of the personal essay as a way of re-engaging locale, ranging from the 2013 Pacific Highways issue of Griffith Review to the 2012 “My Auckland” issue of Landfall; from Steve Braunias’s Civilization: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012) to Martin Edmond’s The Place of Stones (2013) and the new Bridget Williams Books Texts series. At the same time, a number of academic disciplines, such as anthropology, cultural geography, literature, and history, have stressed the importance of located personal experience as a crucial site for critical reflection and political engagement.
We are interested in bringing these conversations together and exploring questions around the potential of personal essay forms for allowing new narratives and arguments to emerge. The colloquium will not consist of a series of academic papers or creative readings; rather, it will be a day-long conversation within which to explore the following key questions:
1. How might the form of the personal essay enable new writing about place that does not fall back into older nationalist and/or nostalgic models?
2. How might we talk about the relationships between mobility, migration, and place?
3. What is the relationship between personal memory and cultural memory, and how might the personal essay be helpful for exploring this?
4. How does formal experimentation in nonfiction forms allow for new representations and interventions?
5. Can we think more precisely about the use of the first-person persona in the personal essay?
6. What might emerge from a conversation about the experience of writing in this form?
In order to generate discussion, participants will speak to these questions in relation to their own past, present or future work (whatever form that takes). The day will be divided into three parts: theories of place; essaying place; and, future directions and conversations.
At the same time, a number of recent creative publications in New Zealand have taken up the form of the personal essay as a way of re-engaging locale, ranging from the 2013 Pacific Highways issue of Griffith Review to the 2012 “My Auckland” issue of Landfall; from Steve Braunias’s Civilization: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012) to Martin Edmond’s The Place of Stones (2013) and the new Bridget Williams Books Texts series. At the same time, a number of academic disciplines, such as anthropology, cultural geography, literature, and history, have stressed the importance of located personal experience as a crucial site for critical reflection and political engagement.
We are interested in bringing these conversations together and exploring questions around the potential of personal essay forms for allowing new narratives and arguments to emerge. The colloquium will not consist of a series of academic papers or creative readings; rather, it will be a day-long conversation within which to explore the following key questions:
1. How might the form of the personal essay enable new writing about place that does not fall back into older nationalist and/or nostalgic models?
2. How might we talk about the relationships between mobility, migration, and place?
3. What is the relationship between personal memory and cultural memory, and how might the personal essay be helpful for exploring this?
4. How does formal experimentation in nonfiction forms allow for new representations and interventions?
5. Can we think more precisely about the use of the first-person persona in the personal essay?
6. What might emerge from a conversation about the experience of writing in this form?
In order to generate discussion, participants will speak to these questions in relation to their own past, present or future work (whatever form that takes). The day will be divided into three parts: theories of place; essaying place; and, future directions and conversations.