We thought we knew what summer was

Background This work sits within the field of Creative Writing; specifically the sub-field of contemporary essay practice. The development of the lyric essay (D’Agata and Tall 1997) as an affective, poetic turn within nonfiction, away from narrative and discursive argument, has opened up fertile grounds for experiments in form and process. At the same time, in the context of catastrophic climate change, scholars such as Haraway (2016), Tsing (2015) and Van Dooren (2014) have asked how new modes of composition and new provisional assemblages can suggest ways to testify and respond to what we are collectively facing. Contribution 'We thought we knew what summer was' is a collaboratively written essay composed in response to the experience of the Black Summer 2019/20 fires in Australia. Using a novel technique of cross-over writing’ (Carlin et al 2019), previously developed through the 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder book project, this work expands the field of the contemporary lyric essay by showing how multiple authorial voices of testimony can knit into an affectively charged choric essay form. The scale and intensity of the lived experience of climate change, as represented by the mega-event of Black Summer, is conjured through the juxtaposition and meshing of multiple intimate observations and reflections. Significance This work is internationally significant in that it brings together an interdisciplinary group of award-winning and acclaimed novelists, essayists, poets, screen and performance writers and art historians, for a novel experiment in collective creative writing addressing climate change. It has been published in Axon: Creative Explorations, one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals focused on creativity and creative processes in creative writing, with a distinguished International Editorial Board including Gail Jones, Ross Gibson, Janet Turner-Hospital, Stephen Muecke and Andrew Melrose.