Tag: life writing

Binary Opposition

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Rashida Murphy Some years ago, a writer told me she didn’t believe in binary oppositions. This wealthy, white, well-connected woman, a theorist whose intense dislike of de Saussure was reflected in her work, argued that she did not have a structural advantage over an immigrant brown woman in publishing. Race and resources were not a factor in literary success and the real issue, she insisted, was talent. Then came the clincher—stories like yours are the flavour of the month, she said. For several years, I tried to believe the lofty ideal she had proposed. I focused on the real issue…

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Un/telling y/our story, part one

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Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. “I have never known how to tell a story” (Derrida 3). So Jacques Derrida declares in March 1984 as he fronts the crowd gathered at Yale University for his first of three lectures honouring the recently deceased Paul de Man, Derrida’s colleague and close friend. Least I’m not the only one, I think, my gaze floating from page to…

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Archival bots: My mother, my model for language

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Jenny Hedley During two stages in my life—at age seven and again in my twenties—I acted as surrogate speaker when head-and-neck cancer muted my mother’s voice. In the years between, we collaborated on so many creative projects that our voices often became enmeshed. I have perpetuated this mother–daughter entanglement eighteen years after her death by training a small language model (SLM) on a dataset of personal writing which includes her voice. Specifically, my JenAI language model’s ‘memoir’-tagged voice trained upon my unpublished manuscript ‘Hermit Crab Diary’ which weaves together my mother’s and my 2005–2007 diary entries with my contemporaneous reflections.…

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Barribugu mirana yiyura (The future is First Peoples)

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Anissa Jones Guwiyady’u gulbanga Gayan gayan Colin Gale, Dharug warunggad, ngayiridyi Native Title. (I’d like to dedicate this to Uncle Colin Gale, our Senior Dharug Elder and Native Title claimant.) Warami. Budyari Nhaady’unya. Yanyiminga muday Ngurrawa. (Welcome. Good to see you. Walk softly on Country with me.) When I see the word barribugu (future), I think of my grandchildren and their children. It is a place where I may just be a memory to them, someone special who makes them smile as they remember me, but it is also a place where I can dream that it will be better…

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