Journeys to and from the table: hunger and plenishing
Hsu-Ming Teo

When I reflect on my own experience of WrICE, I realise that lacuna is the dominant theme: lacunae of knowledge, connections, relationships, experiences, stories. This chapter starts filling in some of these lacunae through a creative engagement with the WrICE team using the ‘techniques of gift exchange’ or ‘acrossness’ developed by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short. This consists of the following steps. 

The invitation: I will contact each of the WrICE team to ask if they are tempted to participate. The invitation is a safe space; it is absolutely fine for invitees to say no for whatever reason.  

The gift: I will send participants a little gift as an entry point into conversation.

The table: holding 1:1 zoom conversations of 1-2 hours with each participant. This will be the raw data for my contribution. 

Acrossness: this is my encounter, discovery, and co-creation.

Afterward: I hope to have filled in some of my lacunae of knowledge, connections, relationships, experiences, stories, collaborating and ‘writing in the company of’ my fellow WrICE team members.

12 Beginnings
David Carlin

A creative/critical essay in and of 12 beginnings, aiming to tease out the contours of questions emerging through the practice of a central element of the WrICE writers’ residency model: the round-table presentations of work-in-progress. Across a series of vignettes, it asks: how can 12 writers—who begin, more-or-less, as strangers, from different backgrounds, languages, worldviews—enact 12 conversations as 12 threads of beginning one threaded or entangled conversation? Through its form, it seeks to describe the sense both of difference-in-repetition and accretion that characterises, so it argues, the WrICE round-table process. It seeks to place the reader in intimate proximity to the space of that process, to highlight its affective flows and its atmosphere of uncertainty, risk and reciprocal vulnerability. The WrICE model situates itself in opposition to conventional Anglocentric norms of creative writing ‘workshopping’, through eschewing the patriarchal role of the ‘teacher/workshop leader’ as privileged expert. What then becomes the role and experience of the ‘facilitator’, in this attempt to play against received hierarchies and pedagogical dynamics? What are the inherent tensions? Where are the blindspots? This chapter draws upon reflections from my shifting personal experience as one of the devisors and writer/facilitators of the model, coming from a settler Anglo-Celtic background in so-called Australia, into a pan-Asian context. It incorporates multiple perspectives of WrICE writer participants and writer/facilitators from across eight years of the residency program (2014-2020), drawn from interviews and focus groups conducted as part of a research project. These voices are placed in the context of ideas drawn from theorists and scholars working across a range of disciplines, including Sarah Ahmed, Conchitina Cruz, Ghassan Hage, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Martin Nakata, Kathleen Stewart, and others.

Coming to the table
Melody Ellis

To come to the table is to show up with a certain willingness. It is often used to refer to the process of coming to complex negotiations or fraught discussions or indeed to indicate who does and does not have a seat at such a table. In the context of our practice-led research project, and of Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE), the table has particular resonance as a site of gathering and sharing. This chapter riffs on the table as a site of encounter and exchange. From the personal and the anecdotal to the conceptual and the theoretical I will consider tables of collaboration, hosting, uncertainty, experimentation, questioning, attempting, and dreaming otherwise. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and others, this chapter considers what happens in, through and around the table. Exploring hospitality, hosting, being fed (both physically but also psychically, creatively), the things we hunger for, the world we long for, and the table/s we might set as a way towards that world.

Preposition campfire
Francesca Rendle-Short

The idea to preposition campfire is prompted by a Welcome to Country and the cooking of kangaroo tails on Boonwurrung Country that occurred during a WrICE residency in 2018. It is a way of thinking about enacting and/or embodying cultural exchange creativecritically. This spark, this coming together, and this writing about the idea of encounter, activates cultural exchange as a relational practice, the making of clearings, space, and camps, a ‘breathing space […] a chance to voice things that cut across’ (Alvin Pang), and fire as a poetic. If we think about WrICE methods that we have developed where we demonstrate what it is we are doing by doing/enacting what it is we are doing and what we are thinking, then this creativecritical writing, as an outpouring of the WrICE residency experience, becomes chapter as ‘campfire’. It considers what breathing space might mean, how to ‘voice things’, to ‘cut across’, the value of slow practice and felt experience, and the making and exchange of culture through back-and-forth. The unfolding chapter is a process of writing story in a clearing of sorts, of listening to and acting on new knowledges, bringing to life trust and belief in the process. Specifically, it reflects on WrICE at a micro/granular level through the prism of a WrICE digital residency conducted during COVID in 2021 that incorporated ‘campfire’ into its design (inspired by the earlier Welcome to Country and cooking of tails in 2018): the interstitial spaces of radically unstructured reflection and conversation, the process and act of fire itself as poetry, and then what came after. It will draw on the author’s own experience as one of the writer-facilitators as well as transcripts of writer interviews. The finished work reflects in form a set of polyvocal ‘breathing space’ conversations, asides, creativecritical notes that weave between and through, across and beyond.

Indigenous relationality, the Asia-Pacific “region”, and the permeability of Australia’s constructed borders
Eugenia Flynn

This essay is grounded in Indigenous notions of relationality and considers relations of collaboration and solidarity between Indigenous Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. Positioning “Asia-Pacific” as both physical and non-physical region, this essay makes visible the relationships of solidarity between Indigenous Australia and peoples of the Asia-Pacific region – both those who live and work within the region and those who live and work in diaspora communities within the constructed borders of “Australia”. Through an analysis of collaborative creative writing and literary projects, this paper extends upon Harsha Walia’s (2013) Undoing Border Imperialism to highlight creative writing and literature as sites of solidarity and collaboration that affirm the permeability of so-called Australia’s borders.

Home and the horizon of the world
Michelle Aung Thin

 In And our faces, my heart, brief as photos, John Berger evokes home as a vertical axis, enabling a person to see the world as a horizon from a fixed place. By contrast, historian Sunil S. Amrith writes of the Bay of Bengal as a region defined, ‘by mobility’ where homes might be traced along the trajectory of a sailing ship. In this piece, I set these two spatial metaphors next to three indirectly related stories of ‘diasporic intimacy’ to ask how do metaphors that shape understandings of ‘from’ or ‘home’ account for fluidity, mobility and displacement in the Asia Pacific region. 

Back to the future(s): being Hmong now, being Hmong then
Michele Lee

There are only 4000 Hmong people in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, as at the end of September 2023, recorded a total national population of 26,821,557. Thus, within this number, Hmong people are statistically invisible. I’m a Hmong-Australian playwright and screenwriter—the only one in Australia as far as I know, and I’m often explaining to journalists (and everyone really) who the Hmong are, why we came here to Australia from Laos, and what the Secret War is. In this chapter, I use a critically autoethnographic approach to explore how my plays and screenplays question and negotiate being Hmong in Australia by examining my play Chu’s Party (2024). Chu’s Party is a somewhat fantasy biography of a moment that never happened in my Dad’s life, and Chu’s Party is a reflection on the Australia that I would grow up in, and Chu’s Party is an update to the iconic beloved Australian play, Don’s Party (1971), by Australian playwright David Williamson. But instead of a cast of white characters attending the titular election party in Melbourne for the 1969 federal election, mine are a cast of mainly international students including Hmong student characters. And who happen to be hosting a fictionalised party in Canberra for the 1975 federal election, and Canberra is where I was born and grew up. As the night unfolds, will Mr Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party return to government? Will these students go back home to the Asian region as intended? And how does countenancing a Hmong-Australian past help me think about Hmong futures? Hmong-American scholars Rican Vue and Kaozong N. Mouavangsou argue for a Hmong epistemology which ‘highlights thinking from within HMong  positions’ (2021: 269) and my writing rethinks one way in which Hmong people might know the past to know who we are now and later.

breaking the iron WrICE bowl
Alvin Pang

A series of affiliated textual and visual fragments reflects on how erstwhile Singaporean poet and editor Alvin Pang’s experiences with the WrICE program—as participant, facilitator, co-designer, advocate and research advisory group member—have changed and estranged his creative practice in its relations to ideas of home, place, community, creativity, memory and silence. Testing Pang’s ideas of creativity as being characterised by fluid energies in confluence and writing as an entangled endeavour of con-verse-action, this series considers if it is in dissolution and refusal, as much as continuity and connection, that a writer's oeuvre resonates with the possibilities WrICE presents.

Translating Power: The WrICE Process
Lily Rose Tope

My interest here is not the overt use of power as found in governance but in its covert forms.  The covert use of power, usually referred to as oblique or opaque, is usually almost invisible and often connotes deception, regarded as euphemistic covers for overt power (Gaventa 1982, Tadros 2009, Bhuvaneswari 2012, and Hurtado and Paccacerqua 2015,).  The deception has been unmasked by “translating” power.  Translation is loosely defined as communicating from a source language to a target language.  The translation of power here emanates from its unseen use, therefore invisible, to one that has been revealed and now discernible.I am interested in power that is accidental, unintentional, situational and functional.  I surmise that many aspects of human relationships—emotional, cultural, even spiritual-- are sites of power, undetected and often accepted. This does seem to imply that power relations are inevitable despite good intentions.  This leads me to ask if it is possible to negotiate power so that it does more good than harm, if there is a way to defang an otherwise one-sided relationship or a superior-inferior equation. WrICE, a writers’ residency program, founded in 2013 by Professor David Carlin and Professor Francesca Rendle-Short of RMIT University in Melbourne has brought together an Asia Pacific community of writers through creative writing.  It operates on the principles of equity and cultural inclusivity, and advocates a safe space for creative expression.  There is no “prominence” agenda in its residencies, sessions are often teacher-less, and notions such as uncertainty and not-knowing ease intellectual burdens and encourage acceptance. Will this most ideal writers’ residency escape the effects of power relations?  Or are there invisible sites of power that are easily elided by goodwill and the best intentions?

What is voice?
Roanna Gonsalves

What is voice? The term voice means different things to different people. In Creative Writing, the term has a certain fuzziness to it that is enabling, constraining and provocative. Drawing on the work of Arundhati Roy, Gerard Genette and bell hooks, my essay seeks to explore the idea of ‘voice’ in the situated context of Creative Writing practice in the Asia Pacific region. The questions I aim to address include: Who is seeing? Does it matter if this is different from who is speaking? Who is telling the story? Does it matter if this is different from whose story is being told? I’m interested in exploring how the two different aspects of voice, i.e. the voice of the writer and the voice of the narrator / character / persona created by the writer, may be understood and interrogated by scrutinising the silences and erasures that surround them, the desire or refusal to hear and to be heard, the ability and inclination to comply with or resist dominant power structures in literature and in life.

Sundered Seeking: Tales, Trust and Time in Literary Translation
Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Translation’s ecology, originating in one cultural context, is nurtured in another, and thus shaped by different aesthetic values, goals, and spiritual perspectives. This essay, drawing from medieval Indic translation practices, offers some provocations on how these historical concepts challenge and can enrich contemporary translation methods. It critiques the Western emphasis on equivalence that cannot capture the diverse ways literary texts are transmitted. The essay begins with tales of translation from various world cultures, including the Sanskrit rasa theory of aesthetics.  Arguments move to Indic languages, such as Hindi, which use the term "anuvad" (where "anu" means ‘following or source’ and "vad" means ‘discourse’), highlighting how translated texts contain ‘thick ‘ in-text interpretations and commentaries, not just equivalence. This questions authorship, ownership, interrelations between languages and powerplay in the evolution of the translation. Anuvad can develop into "samvad," or ‘consultations’ that foster deeper societal dialogues and shared understandings. The essay also introduces concepts from Sanskrit poetics like "sahridaya" (the empowered empathetic reader), "dhwani" (suggestion), "vakroti" (the text’s word-world) and “sphota”  (creativity bursting out) to speculate about how this can inflect contemporary practice. The final section wades into the dynamics of dualism inherent in the act of translation: power relations versus communion.  Perhaps we need to generate  larger spaces for respect, resistance and trust to create more inclusivity for writer(s), translator(s) and readers? But how can this be achieved? By probing the ethics and vulnerability at each stage could translation become a more exploratory process,  allowing radical aesthetics to emerge?  Could enquiry into translation’s three times: origin, remaking and future reading create a more mindful engagement with the text? Ultimately, perhaps the essay asks open-armed if the creator-translator can unself herself --for translation is a visceral and spiritual questing, a graced transformation of the text, the act of translation and the translator. It’s a sundered seeking. 

Angay-angay: Learning the Art of Reciprocal Creation in Collaborative Writing  
Marjorie Evasco

What happens when young writers, trying to write again in their mother tongue, are brought together to listen to, learn from, and interact with fishermen who are community elders of Bohol’s coastal fishing communities, in a workshop designed to open up a new immersive cultural space for creating literature together, based on the experiences and knowledge of their elders? How would their writings embody the way their imagination has been inspired and instructed by their elders’ stories of living wisely and sustainably with the Bohol Sea and with the uncertainties wrought by the climate emergency? As a writer who teaches creative writing, I was inspired to design and facilitate the “Bohol Sea: Life and Livelihood of Fishermen” project by Chennai naturalist-educator-writer Yuvan Aves, whose concept of a “curriculum for belonging” to the land, seas, rivers, and air as a counterforce to the “curriculum of ex-habitation” naturalized by colonial education, resonated with my search for pedagogies of resistance to and refusal of continuing forms of epistemicide in the Philippines. With similarly-inspired Boholano writers, we embarked on Dagat Bohol: Kinabuhi ug Panginabuhi sa Mananagat to explore how new forms of cultural immersion for young writers, and generative practices of collaborative writing, can enrich the cultural and ecological literacy of their imagination. We wanted to learn how these young writers would create literature in the language of their local communities, retrieving and reaffirming the value of the tried-and-tested wisdom and knowledge systems of artisanal fishermen, who are often, if not always, taken for granted and marginalized in society. The first Dagat Bohol project was conducted in the port-town of Jagna, northeast of Bohol in 2023. The participants were two master artisanal fishermen and six young junior and senior high writers. Our project team facilitated and participated in the process. This presentation shares the Dagat Bohol experience and what we gleaned from the process.