Silver Linings and Incompleteness

By PRS Melbourne HDR Candidate Didem Caia

Two terms were woven throughout the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference held on the 26 November: silver linings and incompleteness. What should have been an in-person series of events over the course of a few days on the Sunshine Coast was scaled back to fit the personal screens of the attendees. The daylong event meaningfully engaged a quorum of scholars, writers, teachers and enthusiastic arts workers and these words became an unlikely anchor.

The program included a curated series of conversations about the intersection of COVID and creativity, panel discussions on publishing, writing and editing and a rigorous AGM dedicated to forward thinking and imagining. The conference closed with the launch of the Incompleteness Book II: Writing Back & Thinking Forward. The book is a compilation of written work from a range of creative research scholars in response to a call for new writing that responded to ‘incomplete’ states, senses and stories in our global pandemic.

Two pieces from non/fictionLabbers Peta Murray and Didem Caia appear in this edition. Peta contributed a second series of “new words for testing times” in her COVIDICTIONARY 2. This glossary includes words such as horrorscoping and solacious. (Grab a copy of the book to learn their meanings.) Didem responded to the idea of incompleteness in a short poem titled Thrip like fingertips (P. 11) which examines the scatters and jitters present in the body when attempting to use the hands to make writing.  

The book offers an alchemy of anxiety, transforming collective experiences into a miscellany of micro-accounts. For more information, or to order a copy, see: Incompleteness Book II - Writing Back & Thinking Forward.