‘Parsing the Aside‘ was conceived after receiving an invitation from Martina Copley:

‘In this parsing exercise, a writer-and-academic is invited to respond in writing to the visual work of a visual-artist-and-student-academic in exhibition. What follows is an account of the process as writing experience, replete with pause, reflection, improvisation; considered reflexivity, digression, resistance, repetition, proposition, and echoes of ekphrasis.

‘If I had a dictionary. If we had plasticine. If we could dance. Oh if we could fly.’

Martina Copley offered up her creative work for this exercise, whose thinking and making was the stimulus for everything that followed – now she sings. / the moon is / nearly new.

‘Parsing the Aside’ is published in TEXT Special Issue 30: Creative Writing as Research IV, October 2015.

Image: Movement of the aside – note trail 2, Francesca Rendle-Short