Professional creative practice

For many staff-members in the Faculty of Arts and Education, research takes the form of creative work such as visual arts, graphic design, photography, film-making, poetry, fiction, music and multimedia production.

The conceptual and practical work carried out in these areas leads to exhibitions, published works (such as fiction, memoir, poetry and non-fiction), installations, public performances and artistic products including documentaries, music and feature films. Teaching and research go together as staff engaged in creative work teach in the areas of their expertise.

Staff across the two Schools also engage in professional activities of many kinds, such as editing books and journals, writing book reviews for newspapers and magazines and making media appearances on radio and TV as experts on their areas of research and writing. In addition, many staff-members hold office on national and international boards and the executive committees of professional organisations.

The examples on this web-page offer a small sample of the many professional and creative activities of staff in the Faculty of Arts and Education.

Dr Gaylene Perry

Lecturer, Professional Writing and Literature

'The search has been called off for the night. The storm. Too dangerous for the police divers. They'll find Brad tomorrow.'

'Brad is still in the water. He will spend the night in the channel. The news strikes her as the worst so far. Life, death, these are ideas she cannot comprehend tonight, the reality of the words will not sink in. But the word drowning sinks in. And Brad in the water, left to drift in the dark, in the storm: that sinks in.'

On 2 January 1993 a devastating event changed Gaylene Perry and her family forever. On that day her father and one of her brothers drowned. Her father's body would be found first, but it would be a further three days before her brother's body was recovered.

In the hours following the news of the accident, the family came together to grieve and draw strength from each other. This is a powerful account of those hours.

'Midnight Water' is a portrait of a family coming to terms with agonising loss. Beautifully written, intimate and haunting, this is an extraordinary book about grief, but also about the power of love.

About the author:

Gaylene Perry is a lecturer in Professional Writing in the Faculty of Arts at Deakin University. She lectures in fiction writing and life writing. Midnight Water is her first book, and she has also published short stories, short works of memoir, feature articles, reviews, poems and academic essays and book chapters.

Gaylene's writing and research interests are focused on grief and trauma and resilience, and on ethical issues in creative writing.

Dr Justin Clemens

Lecturer, Psychoanalytic and Literary Studies

The Mundiad

'Let proscenium curtain rise upon
A flash nightclub, in which the woebegone
Swarm thick in smoke shot through with piercing beams
Of laser-lights that flicker with the dreams
Installed in flesh by years of television,
Commercial breaks, hormones, and indecision,
Until the Human Animal cries out
For touch whose satisfaction puts to rout
The very drives that drove it to this place
In its dull-witted mask without a face,
And leave it destituted and dismayed
In final, frantic efforts to Get Laid.'

'The Mundiad' is a mock epic poem in heroic couplets. Modeled on classical epics such as 'Virgil's Aeneid', 'Milton's Paradise Lost' and 'Pope's Rape of the Lock', yet set in modern times, the poem celebrates the detritus of everyday life: Kylie, pornography, new ageism, genetic engineering, IVF, screen culture and much more besides.

Reviving the ancient poetic ambition to speak differently about the things of this world, 'The Mundiad' is startlingly original - and very, very weird. This book is destined to be a cult classic.

About the Author:

Justin Clemens is the author of 'Ten Thousand Fcuking Monkeys', a book of sonnets; 'The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory'; and is co-editor of Alain Badiou's 'Infinite Thought'. He has also released a spoken-word CD, 'Melodrama'. He teaches Psychoanalytic and Literary Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Deakin University.