Passengers on the British railway and underground must 'mind the gap' because it's dangerous not to. In a state of embarking or disembarking, passengers must stay aware of the small but significant space separating the stationary from the moving. The contemporary practices of writing and reading are in constant motion, and the phrase 'mind the gap' captures an essential aspect of the way language and literature progress as they pass through any number of social, technical, and political exchanges. 'Minding the gap' also suggests an awareness of the always shifting distance between the expected and the unexpected, the ordinary and the impossible, the familiar and unimagined. This book includes chapters on writing non-fiction, media and genre, and also addresses elements of identity, culture and linguistics in fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction as contributors consider the gaps that exist between the self as writer, as reader and as editor or mentor. The volume adopts the following key themes: new gaps for creative writing in the academy writing in new genres, media and forms exploring the creative process and narrative strategies across disciplines. Although the contributors are composed of academics and post-graduate students from Australia and New Zealand, the book will be of international appeal to general readers interested in the changing landscape of creative writing.
About the Author: Thom Conroy is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University and a fiction writer whose historical novel The Naturalist was published with Random House in 2014. His work has also appeared in various journals in the US and New Zealand, including New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Sport, and Landfall. His fiction has been recognized by Best American Short Stories 2012 and has won various other awards, including the Katherine Ann Porter Prize in Fiction and the Sunday Star Times Short Fiction Competition. Gail Pittaway is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media Arts at Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton, New Zealand. She is currently an advisory editor for the online journal TEXT, and a founding co-editor of the online literary magazine Meniscus, having also been a member of the executive committee of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs since 2004. In addition to co-editing issues of Meniscus and special issues of TEXT, she has edited several anthologies of student creative writing, as well as an historical collection of writings associated with gardens (Writers in the Gardens, 2006). Gail regularly publishes poetry, fiction, academic papers and articles for TEXT and New Writing journals.