‘We are making a boat, love’ is a bookish multimodal experiment-in-the-making that works with/into/because Ania Walwicz’s Boat (1989) and as an exemplar of Eades’s écriture matière (2015). In this work we boat build a corpus of experimental reflective and material writing that makes visible an extended and always present but often forgotten archive of creativecritical writing in this place named Australia.

‘We are making a boat, love’ is also a long boat, where all 266 pages of the book Boat pass through the hands of writers and artists in a slow making now and into the future. We have a map. It is Boat. We find each other in our extended kinship networks, make a constellation of intimates (Bergman, 2013), find each other through invitation, word of mouth, and within our research community of practice.

‘“Very communitas”: Testing a hypothesis in creative writing, methodologically’ examines the concept of communitas in practice (as a loanword from cultural anthropology and social sciences), what it is and what it can offer creative writing, to test whether it might apply to different creative practice settings. Specifically for this essay, the setting is WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program) and the research project examining WrICE as the object of its enquiry (Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled ‘Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds, Encounter and Exchange’).

Communitas brings together people and communities to ‘orchestrate the ecstasy of ‘togetherness itself’.

In ‘Collaborative effervescence through communitas’ a posse of graduate students, a gamut of walking writers, and an ensemble of diarologists explore the idea of communitas, ‘togetherness itself’ (Edith Turner), through a daisy chain of gifts: digital voice, live chorus, satellite offerings, testimony, wit(h)nessing, oversharing, listening, and secular ritual. In their essay-in-response, Jack Madin and Ed Service also known as SHOUSE (who ‘unleash collective experience through rave music’), discuss communitas through ‘musicking’ (Christopher Small). The duo’s manifesto, tested globally at clubs and festivals (in the wake of their international anthem ‘Love Tonight’), offers music as a vehicle for the celebration and development of collective relationships.

Hot Hollers, the official non/fictionLab choir appears and performs from time to time at different gigs. The irreverant repertoire consists of songs such as ‘Kylie Does Workday’, ‘Dona Nobis AWAM’.