Notes From Sick Rooms

Background: Capello’s “discursive autobiography” (2013) Smith and Watson’s “autobiographical interface” (2002) and Reufle’s (2006) “poetic erasure” are key influences on the mode and method of this work, that can also be situated within the field of feminist “autotheory” (Fournier 2021). This work addresses the problem of simultaneously representing and breaking with a toxic and gendered family narrative as part of an autobiographical writing project. It asks: how can I simultaneously write and refuse an ancestral narrative that is part of my identity? How is this identity embedded in social and historical discourses? How can experimenting with expanded writing practices unhook the autobiographical subject from these discursive constructions? Contribution: ‘Notes from Sick Rooms’ is a 32-page chapbook of palimpsestic poetic erasure. It appropriates fragments of word and image from historical texts to create a new literary-visual autobiographical work. The Victorian Nursing Manual Notes from Sick Rooms and historical photographs of colonial Australia are used as source material for a poetic autobiographical narrative that writer the subject at the interface of text and image. The semiotic play at this interface disrupts mimesis and enacts “the tension between assertion and denial of self” (Smith and Watson 2002). The material practices of cutting, pasting and rearranging historical texts expand the conventions of autobiographical writing as part of a strategy to unsettle historical discourses of illness, gender and colonialism. Contribution: This chapbook was published in September 2022 by Cordite Poetry Review 106 commissioned by editor Kent MacCarter. Cordite Poetry Review is a leading journal of poetry, criticism and research recognised nationally and internationally. Cordite Publishing is listed on the Australian Registry of Cultural Organisations.