Sending love love

RESEARCH BACKGROUND When Donna Haraway talks about the necessity of ‘staying with the trouble’ she’s talking about making ‘hot compost piles’, the requirement of pulling each other into unexpected collaborations and combinations. Couple that with Jacques Derrida’s call to exclaim ‘yes, yes’ as a signature of promise and memory ‘conditioning a commitment’ – you can’t say no to yes – and Peck’s notion of love as both ‘an intention and an action’, this poetry suite in three acts troubles dystopic texts. It asks what does it mean to love through the troubling of books, books that are difficult to read or even to approach, that trouble our reading, writing, and our archives? RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION ‘Sending love love’ is an exemplar of collaborative writing practice of making and re-making. It re-writes (or ‘re-rights’/’re-rites’) text through a variety of methods – desire-lines, trust, black out text, erasure, cutting up, interventions, the aside, marginalia, call-and-response, poetic exchange, sending and receiving, diffraction (Cixous, Murray, Strahan, Eades, Stravanger, Barad). It asks: how do we (re)ad books that upset us? How do we enter the space of the page? Make it new, free it up? RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE ‘Sending love love’ as a collaborative work was developed as part of the inaugural 2022 John Rowe Writers-in-Residence in the Discipline of English at the University of Sydney: ‘Writing Bodies and Lives’. The focus of the residency was that reading and writing contemporary Australian literature is fundamental to understanding and engaging with the major themes and issues shaping Australian lived experience. As residents, the invited authors Eades and Rendle-Short brought together years of collaborative experience and innovative approaches focussed on ‘ways to write the body’, language and embodiment, ‘prepositional and queer thinking’, and community building. The opportunity to write for Rabbit Collaborations revealed what can happen when writers play.