On the Holding of Spaces for Essaying Into

Background Lucinda Strahan, David Carlin and others have illustrated the value of expanded writing practices for creative and critical inquiry. The term ‘expanded’ comes from ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, wherein Rosalind Krauss argues for understanding sculptural practice beyond traditional three-dimensional objects on plinths. Similarly, expanded essays approach the essay as a mutable form. Playful, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, this expanded essay asks how we might hold ‘spaces’ of writing to think into collectively? Contribution This work was assembled for presentation at a public forum hosted by the non/fictionLab. An experiment in holding and articulating a ‘space of writing’, it was designed to explore how different nonfiction methods open new conceptual, affectual, embodied and ethical spaces. Bringing practices across poetry, theatre, sonic and visual arts towards the essayesque called for a hybrid form that allowed for ambiguous voicings of multiple contributors. In transposing the presentation for publication the form of a score was chosen. It includes refrains, solos, sound FX, duets and trios, and a coda. This choric approach allows enactment of the entwining and entanglement of many voices (including guests, Andy Jackson, Tina Stefanou and Khalid Warsame). Significance Researchers Melody Ellis and Peta Murray have explored expanded essaying in other fora, together and separately including ACCA’s Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt (2019) and Overlapping Writing (2021), RMIT Design Hub (All the Jewellery, 2019) and Bus Projects’ Walking in the Shape of Infinity (2021). ‘On the Holding of Spaces for Essaying Into’ was published in October 2021 by Cordite Poetry Review in an issue edited by Sarah Gorey and Elena Gomez. Cordite Publishing is listed on the Australian Registry of Cultural Organisations and the quarterly CPR is an Australian and internationally recognised journal of poetry, criticism and research.