Francesca’s paper ‘Writing as curatus: archival practices, encounter and response’ has been published as part of the conference proceedings for Encounters: Refereed Conference Papers of the 17th Annual AAWP Conference, Geelong, Victoria, November 2012.

ABSTRACT: ‘This paper sets out some preliminary thoughts on how one might conceive of a body of practice in creative writing as both writing and research. In so doing, I propose three different approaches to archival practice (encounter and response) as a suggested form of curatus. I will draw on my own work to exemplify what I am proposing, namely: archive as ‘first place’ – those ‘embodiments of mind and psyche that belong to the first experience and first mapping’ (Malouf 1985, 10); archive as residue, as a way of ‘working through’ in order to compose new work that is creative and generative; and archive as experience, a way of exploring the possibilities and limitations of the imagination.’

At the same conference her sister Hephzibah Rendle-Short published her paper ‘What do you want of me?’. It took the same photograph of her father as a pivot for her paper as did Francesca.

Image: My father reading, image taken from found 35mm slide, c. 1958, Sheffield, UK