PhD: Encounters with the self across playwriting and screenwriting

Hmong-Australian writer Michele Lee, a 2016 WrICE Fellow, joins this project as a PhD candidate working in creative practice research. Michele is looking at her ongoing creative practice as a playwright and screenwriter who is constantly in an exchange with Australian-ness and Asia-ness in her writing. Her research gives a focussed picture, from the inside, of issues facing an Asian-Australian writer making writing in this region.

‘Slipping-as-being is the ever-constant feeling of being split between selves. It is a highly subjective experience and makes itself obvious in what I write, how I write. And I feel split-ness as a writer, as a person. When I say ‘selves’, it has a few meanings and it could relate to autobiography as a mode of writing, it could relate to the self as a character/s, and it could relate to the self as a formal, tonal or felt strategy in my writing. Through a creative practice research methodology that is intimate and autoethnographic, I explore how my plays and screenplays are underpinned by slipping-as-being and the ways in which this expands what autobiographic writing can do for playwriting and screenwriting.’ (Michele Lee) 

From Michele Lee's How do I let you die? development 2021, image by Eugyeene Teh