Lyrebirds in the impasse

Background Within practices of contemporary (literary) nonfiction, there has been significant innovation in the past twenty years in intermeshing forms that have been called the lyric essay (Tall and D'Agata), the braided essay (Walker) and the hybrid essay. In my own work, I have been experimenting in essayistic memoir in two previous books focusing on negotiating spaces and atmospheres (Stewart) of uncertainty and difference. At the same time, nonrepresentational and posthumanist theory is dislodging questions of affect and creativity from traditional binaries of nature/culture, human/nonhuman and public/personal. Contribution This essay experiments with both lyric and braided essay strategies to locate the theoretical notion of the 'impasse' (Berlant) within a writer's creative 'crisis' in coming to a standstill with a book project. Further, it juxtaposes or embeds this suspended moment of quasi-stasis within a series of long, undirected walks that produce a series of encounters with lyrebirds, clouds, mulchers and other nonhuman compositional actors (in the Latourian sense). It attempts to engage a lyric intensity of description to suspend the action of the essay in the 'duration of the present' (Berlant): precarious and open-ended. Significance This essay was accepted for refereed publication for Sydney Review of Books, one of Australia's pre-eminent literary journals. Editor, Dr Catriona Menzies-Pike, wrote: 'Your essay is wonderful, and I'd be really honoured to publish it.' Leading Australian author Cate Kennedy described the essay as 'lovely and bittersweet...I was struck with your mention of public depression and our recognition of this as an ongoing collective state of mind. And by the imagery in the essay...' The essay was simultaneously accepted for publication in US literary journal, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments. It forms part of a larger ongoing project, a collection of experimental essays.