projects
The Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange or WrICE brings together Australian and Asia-Pacific writers for collaborative residencies in Asia and Australia.
At the heart of WrICE is a simple idea: to give writers of different backgrounds and levels of experience a chance to step outside their familiar writing practices and contexts and connect deeply with writers from different cultures and across generations through an immersive residency program. WrICE is a respectful and generative space for reflection, conversation, creative sharing, and surprise.
Since its inception in 2014, WrICE has brought together over 90 writers from 15 countries across the Asia-Pacific: South Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, West Timor, Timor Leste and Australia. For the first five years, WrICE was held as a series of in-person residential writing retreats and public events in various cities and settings across Asia and in Australia. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted WrICE to be held digitally from 2020-2022. In 2023, an Indigenous-led WrICE residency conceived, curated and facilitated by the project’s Artist Fellows Ali Cobby Eckermann and Dicky Senda took place in Kupang and Mollo in West Timor.
The WrICE program (2014-2018) was produced by the non/fictionLab at RMIT University with the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund (Australia). From 2020-2022 WrICE residencies were conducted as a partnership between RMIT’s non/fictionLab and Sing Lit Station (Singapore). From 2021-2024, the WrICE program has been conducted in parallel with the Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures research project.
WrICE was conceived and directed by Francesca Rendle-Short and David Carlin, who have since been joined on the WrICE team over the years by Ali Barker, Clare Renner, Penny Johnson, Alvin Pang, Sreedhevi Iyer, Bernice Chauly, Joshua Ip, Charlene Shepherdson, Michelle Aung Thin, Lily Rose Tope, Melody Ellis, Daryl Qilin Yam and Emma Cupitt.
Image: The WrICE residency in 2018 in Yogyakarkta, Indonesia, held at the Greenhost Boutique Hotel.
Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds for Encounter and Exchange is a research project that looks to define and test a new model for ethical literary encounter and exchange in the Asia-Pacific region.
This research aims to elaborate, test, evaluate and communicate a new model for best practice in intercultural and transnational exchange for creative writers, a model based on principles and processes of ethical encounter and exchange through writing, listening and dialogue.
Building on and further developing the WrICE program of Asia-Pacific collaborative residencies, the project involves the staging of an experimental series of collaborative residencies and ‘CoLabs,’ each with a different design and premise. Each event in the series is evaluated and reflected upon using mixed methods to test the assumptions of the model, discover potential benefits for writers and their writing, and identify knots and further questions.
A highlight of the project is Tapun Ma Tatef (Circular Connections), an Indigenous-led WrICE residency conceived, curated and facilitated by the project’s Artist Fellows Ali Cobby Eckermann and Dicky Senda. This part of the research project looks at how the WrICE collaborative residency model can be reimagined and reshaped into a transnational Indigenous-led context.
The Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures research project is led by Professor David Carlin, Professor Francesca Rendle-Short, Dr Melody Ellis, Dr Michelle Aung Thin and Emma Cupitt, from RMIT University, Australia, in partnership with Professor Lily Rose Topé from University of the Philippines, and Artist Fellows Adjunct Professor Ali Cobby Eckermann (Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha) and Dicky Senda (Mollo, West Timor). Funded by the Australian Research Council, it runs from 2021 through 2025
Image: Smoking Ceremony as Welcome to Country by members of the Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation at the McCraith House, Dromana, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, Australia, WrICE Indonesia residency 2018, image Ali Barker
non/fictionLab has forged an ongoing relationship with STREAT led by Francesca Rendle-Short. The various collaborative creative projects they have been involved in connect city dwellers to each other and to the wider community through writing and storytelling. STREAT is a social enterprise dedicated to stopping youth disadvantage and homelessness ‘one meal at a time’.
The RMIT/STREAT Creative Inkubator or #STREATstories aimed to foster a meaningful sense of belonging and connection through the making and distribution of place-based urban stories and poetic expression as a way to create prospects for social change for city dwellers and their communities.
A collective storytelling project called DISRUPT was held as part of Melbourne Knowledge Week (20-26 May) inviting participants to take over a 20-metre wall to disrupt the streets with their dreams of the city. STREAT and non/fictionLab connected with Architects for Peace to deliver this project.
Various papers were written in conjunction with this #STREATstories project:
Rendle-Short, F. (2010), ‘If you don’t have skin, you’re not there: new literatures, hash tag poetry (#poetry) and writing students’, Strange Bedfellows: Refereed Conference Papers of the 15th Annual AAWP Conference
Rendle-Short, F. Scott, R., Taylor, T., Aung-Thin, M. (2017), ‘#STREATstories: Mapping a creative collaboration’, TEXT 21 (1): 1–15
Rendle-Short, F. Scott, R., Taylor, T., Aung-Thin, M. (2018), ‘No one wakes up wanting to be homeless: a case study in applied creative writing’, in Social capital and enterprise in the modern state, Palgrave Macmillan – Springer Nature, Cham, Switzerland
Quinn Eades and Francesca Rendle-Short have been working together collaboratively on different projects since 2015. They have always enjoyed intermingling their ideas, creative impulses (saying ‘yes yes’ to working on projects together), with an enthusiasm for making new and exciting — breathing-love — work.
In 2022 they were the John Rowe Writers-in-Residence at the University of Sydney.
‘Sending love’ is a collaborative exploration of what it means to love through the troubling of books — books that are difficult to read or even to approach, that trouble our reading, writing, and our archives. It is a meditative creative process of a project made for these times, a way of engaging freshly with troubled and troubling books, a practice of making and re-making, employing and engaging a plethora of creative methods: trust, care, kindness, erasure, cutting out, whiting out, folding, poetic exchange, matter and material (écriture matière) and so on. It plays and experiments with and queers a practice of making and re-making utopian and dystopian books through a variety of methods — desire-lines, trust, black out text, erasure, cutting up, interventions, the aside, marginalia, call-and-response, poetic exchange, sending and receiving. Imagine a root book, a book of love. Here is love here is yes here is coming to the page, to the texts that trouble us.
Their joint work has been presented in a variety of forums including Sending love love || in which we make a floating fragment root book of intensities, tendernesses and pressures || touching what troubles us in Rabbit Nonfiction Poetry, and We are making a boat, love: 30 years of experimental feminist writing in Australia in Text Special Issue.