Honours student, Sally Evans
I completed Honours in Creative Writing in 2009, graduating with the University Medal for the Faculty of Creative Arts. My thesis examined the notion of authorship in poetry, and the individual, intentional and experiential basis that a reader presumes to govern a text. In essence, I argued that the authorial figure in a text is constructed from the text itself, not the other way around – that a collaborative text could still use the first-person ‘I’ or a computer-generated text can refer to human experiences that the program could never have. Ironically, the other component of my Honours project – a major collection of poetry – was hugely personal: a collection of short, observational relationship poems.
Having been offered a scholarship to undertake a PhD here at UOW, my forthcoming project will continue to examine the links between creative writing and computer technology – an interest that began in 2008 with a conference paper at ‘Poetry and the Trace’ in Melbourne, and was more clearly articulated in my Honours project. For my PhD, I want to develop a model of writing on the internet that is explicitly rhizomatic – part of an evolving network of connections rather than a fixed hierarchical structure between author and reader. Ideally, this will spark some new directions in my creative work, as well as providing an opportunity to learn more about the potential intersections of art and technology.
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