A Third Space: Giving Voice to Works in Progress

Background: This work sits within the Creative Writing sub-field of Reflective Practice (Candy, 2020). Talking about writing isn’t writing (Saunders, 2022) but the turn towards reflection and away from workshopping opens up fertile ground for conversations around process and practice – particularly valuable when the chosen mode is long-form non-traditional research outputs, namely novels. Le Guin (1986) articulates how writers are expected not to speak about their works-in-progress; Prose (2006) identifies the way conversations in real life do not mirror those in books. How might digital methods enable us to listen and, having listened, reply? Contribution: This collaboratively written essay addresses questions of the collective detailing the asynchronous audio method developed by RMIT’s NovelLab research group to give ‘voice’ to novels in progress. The pandemic particularly affected female academics (Minello, 2020; Frederickson, 2020) and women writers. We six mid-life, mid-career novelists, with professional practices and career responsibilities, came together post-COVID to reconsider what it might meant to be present as peers in a community of practice. This essay shares our collective experience, from articulating what we did and didn’t want in a writing group, to adopting audio recordings as our preferred method. We recognise these as creating a ‘third space’ (Packer, 2014); offering a way of actively listening (Lindgren, 2016) to others, ourselves, and our works in progress. Significance: This work brings together established novelists to theorise and disseminate an asynchronous model arising from an experimental method through a funded partnership. It is published alongside a distinguished line-up that includes a companion piece by Associate Professor Brigid Magner and Linda Daley in the Sydney Review of Books, recognised nationally and internationally as one of the country’s leading literary journals focused on literary studies and creative practice.