The Near and The Far: stories from the Asia-Pacific, David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short (eds) From 21 of the best writers in the Asia-Pacific region comes a collection about finding connections where you least expect them. A wonderful advance review by Sonia Nair in Books + Publishing: ‘Born out of WrICE—a program of reciprocal residencies…
Category: Essays
Not/Knot Father: Alzheimer’s, Nonfiction and Writing the Father
ABSTRACT of this work is as follows: Alzheimer’s disease or AD is characterised by neurofibrillary knots, or tangles, and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. Nerve cells waste away and wither and eventually decay and die. AD is a state of atrophy, degeneration, and negation. It is about not thinking right, about not being able to…
Give breath a chance
As part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge’s (AWW) commitment to diversity, there was a focus on lesbian/queer women writers during October 2015. Francesca’s mini essay ‘Give breath a chance’ was the final piece in a series of four. ‘I look up the words permissive and rebel, wonder what one might look like… Permissive rebel….
Poetic Cartography, Love, and Loss
This work is in two pieces: the essay or “an intervention as paradox” Poetic Cartography, Love, and Loss and artefact A Matter of View: (From a Book of Annotations). Denis Wood writes of this work in Katy?, an introduction of sorts: ‘Rendle-Short’s “Poetic Cartography, Love and Loss” is exemplary. A writer of essays, memoir, and fiction,…
Essaying the fabpod
An improvised experimental collaborative account of the uncertain cultural life and futures of the fabpod, as of August 21, 2014. The associated ibook (i.e. Apple only) is available for download. How might the affordances of the essay as a writing practice be brought to bear within a workshop framework of collaborative improvisation, in response to…
On Drawing (Essaying) Nonfiction
‘On Drawing (Essaying) Nonfiction: As a Set of Seven Instructions’ is published in The Essay Review, University of Iowa, Iowa City. “Drawing is a common language beyond dialect, idiom, parlance, vernacular, or idiolect. It is like music. It touches us in the same way poetry touches us. It expresses the inexpressible, that which is seen…
My father’s body: On creation, evolution, Alzheimer’s disease
The essay ‘My father’s body’ has been reprinted in NewSouth Books The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 eds Jane McCredie and Natasha Mitchell. It is to be launched in November 2013. ‘Last Sunday I went to church to be with my father, to say goodbye. As I looked in from the vestibule, I could…
Field guide to writing a father
Francesca’s ‘Field guide to writing a father: piecing together a relationship’ published by Overland Literary Journal is now online (#210 Autumn 2013). Read more here. Image: My father in the car, Buderim, 2008
Father work: just gladwrap
Francesca’s paper presented at the Byron Bay ‘Ethical Imaginations‘ conference as part of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference in Byron Bay in November 2011 is online. This was a fully refereed conference. ‘Close up, the writing dissolves. Close up, this discontinous narrative of fragments and half-stories becomes distorted — don’t matter to matter hits…
Beastly and beautiful
‘In 1975, when I was fifteen and in grade 10, my mother told a reporter from the Courier-Mail that the books I was reading in high school would teach me, in her words, ‘to be a permissive rebel’. Her comments appeared in the paper the next day: ‘Mrs. Angel Rendle-Short, of Brookfield, said yesterday that…
‘Loose thinking’
Abstract: This paper explores the idea of writing an eisegesis as part of a creative doctorate. Not that its more commonly named cousin, the exegesis, is not such a bad way to describe, in general terms, what is being written when writing ‘the other bit’ of a creative writing higher degree dissertation, but it has…
My father’s body in nine drawings
This requiem for her father in nine drawings complements a photo-essay Francesca wrote for Overland entitled My father’s body: creation, evolution and Alzheimer’s disease. 1 ‘My father is not yet dead. People who knew him say there is a likeness in this drawing. I can still see him breathing, can you? I still feel warmth…
francesca rendle-short 