EDITORIAL ISSUE 1

Abstract

Writing about writing(as practice, as process, as intervention); thinking about writing(how it’s taught at a tertiary level, its role in what might be called ‘politics’, and linking its field to other fields of intellectual engagement, thinking its ontology and impact): Australia, arguably, already leads the world in umpteen aspects of this work. For many years, TEXT journal, associated with the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), has been providing an erudite and rigorous forum for these questions and the work they demand.

In a changing landscape of higher education, of scholarly reach and fora for sharing ideas, cinder was cooked-up as a kind of wild, younger sibling of TEXT—to which it looks for inspiration, mentoring and points of resistance. As cinder’s editors, we saw a place for a journal welcoming shorter, pithier interventions on practices of ‘expressivity’ in the written, or textual form (with the all the variations on that which are intimated in our current moment). A cinder is an unstable node: a burning element that may peter out or start a veritable conflagration. In this way, (as well as its tongue-in-cheek reference to modes of promiscuity), cinder journal seeks to provide a site for burgeoning ideas—ones which may or may not be the origin of larger fires—because often with art and thought, we have to move forward into a hunch, a suspicion, and without a guarantee that the angle is productive or profitable. This is research, and so this inaugural issue of cinder includes work by six emerging scholars, most of whom are also practising writers as well as thinkers of writing. The writers here have responded to the review process—never easy—to hone their burgeoning hunch, idea, intervention, take and contribution. If these prove active—like embers with enough heat—we assume that these writers will write further into this vein, and that probably they will refine and extend the work, which may end up in a longer, more complex form in TEXT or in international journals, or which may simply inspire other practitioners, or provide a small, timely piece of a bigger puzzle in the ongoing work of writing, and keeping-on writing.