David Carlin
David Carlin's books include The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (Rose Metal Press 2019—collaboratively written with Nicole Walker), 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press 2019—collaboratively written with the MECO Network), as well as two previous books of literary nonfiction, the memoir/biographyThe Abyssinian Contortionist (UWAP, 2015) and memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There (Scribe, 2010). He co-edited two cross-cultural anthologies of Asian and Australian writers, The Near and the Far, Vol I and Vol II (with Francesca Rendle-Short, Scribe 2016, 2019), and co-edited Performing Digital (Routledge, 2015), about the Circus Oz Living Archive project he led.
David's essays have been published widely, including in Hunger Mountain, Overland, Meanjin, LitHub, Terrain.org, Essay Daily, Griffith Review and Westerly, and he has written and directed for film, theatre, circus and radio. He received the Patricia Hackett Prize in 2019 for his essay, 'Love Lane' and has been awarded grant funding from Australian Research Council, Australia Council for the Arts, Harold Mitchell Foundation, Australian Film Commission, Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and others, as well as a Varuna Fellowship. His feature-length radiophonic essay with Kyla Brettle, Making Up: 11 Scenes from a Bangkok Hotel (2015), won four Gold and Silver awards at the 2016 New York Festivals Awards.
Co-President of the NonfictioNOW Conference, the world’s leading conference in literary nonfiction, David is Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, where he is a co-founder of both WrICE (the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program) and the non/fictionLab.
David's essays have been published widely, including in Hunger Mountain, Overland, Meanjin, LitHub, Terrain.org, Essay Daily, Griffith Review and Westerly, and he has written and directed for film, theatre, circus and radio. He received the Patricia Hackett Prize in 2019 for his essay, 'Love Lane' and has been awarded grant funding from Australian Research Council, Australia Council for the Arts, Harold Mitchell Foundation, Australian Film Commission, Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and others, as well as a Varuna Fellowship. His feature-length radiophonic essay with Kyla Brettle, Making Up: 11 Scenes from a Bangkok Hotel (2015), won four Gold and Silver awards at the 2016 New York Festivals Awards.
Co-President of the NonfictioNOW Conference, the world’s leading conference in literary nonfiction, David is Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, where he is a co-founder of both WrICE (the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program) and the non/fictionLab.
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Books by David Carlin
It’s a sweltering night in Kuala Lumpur, and a journalist is protesting in a city on the edge of meltdown. It’s post-9/11 San Francisco, and a woman meets her foster child, who provokes painful reminders of her past. It’s contemporary Bangkok, and a writer’s encounter with ladyboy culture prompts him to explore gender boundaries. And high in Queensland’s Border Ranges, a boy prone to getting lost is having six tiny silver bells pinned to his chest …
The Near and The Far is what results when award-winning writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces, and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program — a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers — this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
Featuring fiction and nonfiction from Cate Kennedy, Melissa Lucashenko, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Musa, and many more, this collection bridges the distances between Asia, Australia, and the world.
'This meticulously curated mix of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry explore place, culture and identity in luminous and inventive ways ... The anthology attests to the important work that can result from writers immersing themselves in a place so unlike their home, where fresh collaborations are forged and new ways of thinking divulged.'
BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER
Twenty-five years later, Sosina has conjured herself a new life in a far-off country: Australia. She has rescued one brother and lost another. She has travelled the world as a professional contortionist. She can bounce-juggle eight balls on a block of marble.
Sosina is able to juggle worlds and stories, too, and by luck — which is something Sosina is not short of — she has a friend, David Carlin, who is a writer.
Following his acclaimed memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There, David brings us his ‘not-me’ book, travelling to Addis Ababa where he discovers ways of living so different to his own and confronts his Western fantasies and fears. Through Sosina’s story he shows us that, with risk and enough momentum, life — whom we befriend, where we end up, how we come to see ourselves — is never predictable.
The Near and The Far is what results when award-wining writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program - a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers - this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
"These stories - by some of the region's brightest stars - burn so compellingly, you can almost feel heat from the pages" - Benjamin Law
"What a pleasure to read such a diverse group of strong writers ... setting down their truths, while learning others" - Sophie Cunningham
Creative Works by David Carlin
This is the in-between season. May in northern Finland, when the snow has not yet finished melting. The thick, white crusts on lakes and rivers bruise violet in the sunlight. Out of sight, underneath, water flows, cannibalising winter’s skin. What looks solid isn’t. There’s not so many places you can walk.
[opening] Between the train tracks by the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, a yellow line on the platform marks where you should stand behind. Less than a step away another yellow line marks where you should stand behind if a train approaches the other side of the platform. To get to the platform you have to walk across a first set of tracks but there is a place to do this a little to one side of the gate that caps the path from the hotel. The woman at the hotel desk said that to board the train headed west through Flagstaff and across the desert towards L.A., you had to cross that first set of tracks to reach the narrow platform. She hadn’t said anything about when was best to do this, so three of us who were keen went out and stood there. I took my suitcase to board the train. The others were there to see me off. Having had a kind of nervous breakdown, I was fleeing at the end of the first day from a writers’ residency I had organized, leaving them all behind to get to know each other and make themselves raw and vulnerable together so as to make breakthroughs in the difficult and painful process of writing...
In this lush and layered production, acclaimed creative nonfiction writer David Carlin and award-winning audio feature maker and sound designer Kyla Brettle collaborate to bring you a playful radiophonic mix that irreverently dons the tropes of 'storytelling' to dance the fictional divide between the essay and documentary forms.
How might the affordances of the essay as a writing practice be brought to bear within a workshop framework of collaborative improvisation, in response to an urban architectural model structure? This is the question that motivated this experiment, which took place in 2014 in Melbourne, in and around an innovative architectural design artefact, the Fabpod (RMIT 2012).
Authors: David Carlin, Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, Adrian Miles, Kyla Brettle, Annie Fergusson, Brigid Magner, Alvin Pang, Francesca Rendle-Short and Shanti Sumartojo
Scholarly Works by David Carlin
Here we bring together etymologies and theoretical topographies to problematize the intriguing situation of ‘nonfiction now’.
It’s a sweltering night in Kuala Lumpur, and a journalist is protesting in a city on the edge of meltdown. It’s post-9/11 San Francisco, and a woman meets her foster child, who provokes painful reminders of her past. It’s contemporary Bangkok, and a writer’s encounter with ladyboy culture prompts him to explore gender boundaries. And high in Queensland’s Border Ranges, a boy prone to getting lost is having six tiny silver bells pinned to his chest …
The Near and The Far is what results when award-winning writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces, and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange program — a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers — this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
Featuring fiction and nonfiction from Cate Kennedy, Melissa Lucashenko, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Musa, and many more, this collection bridges the distances between Asia, Australia, and the world.
'This meticulously curated mix of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry explore place, culture and identity in luminous and inventive ways ... The anthology attests to the important work that can result from writers immersing themselves in a place so unlike their home, where fresh collaborations are forged and new ways of thinking divulged.'
BOOKSELLER+PUBLISHER
Twenty-five years later, Sosina has conjured herself a new life in a far-off country: Australia. She has rescued one brother and lost another. She has travelled the world as a professional contortionist. She can bounce-juggle eight balls on a block of marble.
Sosina is able to juggle worlds and stories, too, and by luck — which is something Sosina is not short of — she has a friend, David Carlin, who is a writer.
Following his acclaimed memoir Our Father Who Wasn’t There, David brings us his ‘not-me’ book, travelling to Addis Ababa where he discovers ways of living so different to his own and confronts his Western fantasies and fears. Through Sosina’s story he shows us that, with risk and enough momentum, life — whom we befriend, where we end up, how we come to see ourselves — is never predictable.
The Near and The Far is what results when award-wining writers from Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Hong Kong share places, spaces and ideas. Emerging from the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program - a unique series of residencies, workshops, and dialogues between writers - this collection is a map of art and adventure, ideas and influences.
"These stories - by some of the region's brightest stars - burn so compellingly, you can almost feel heat from the pages" - Benjamin Law
"What a pleasure to read such a diverse group of strong writers ... setting down their truths, while learning others" - Sophie Cunningham
This is the in-between season. May in northern Finland, when the snow has not yet finished melting. The thick, white crusts on lakes and rivers bruise violet in the sunlight. Out of sight, underneath, water flows, cannibalising winter’s skin. What looks solid isn’t. There’s not so many places you can walk.
[opening] Between the train tracks by the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, a yellow line on the platform marks where you should stand behind. Less than a step away another yellow line marks where you should stand behind if a train approaches the other side of the platform. To get to the platform you have to walk across a first set of tracks but there is a place to do this a little to one side of the gate that caps the path from the hotel. The woman at the hotel desk said that to board the train headed west through Flagstaff and across the desert towards L.A., you had to cross that first set of tracks to reach the narrow platform. She hadn’t said anything about when was best to do this, so three of us who were keen went out and stood there. I took my suitcase to board the train. The others were there to see me off. Having had a kind of nervous breakdown, I was fleeing at the end of the first day from a writers’ residency I had organized, leaving them all behind to get to know each other and make themselves raw and vulnerable together so as to make breakthroughs in the difficult and painful process of writing...
In this lush and layered production, acclaimed creative nonfiction writer David Carlin and award-winning audio feature maker and sound designer Kyla Brettle collaborate to bring you a playful radiophonic mix that irreverently dons the tropes of 'storytelling' to dance the fictional divide between the essay and documentary forms.
How might the affordances of the essay as a writing practice be brought to bear within a workshop framework of collaborative improvisation, in response to an urban architectural model structure? This is the question that motivated this experiment, which took place in 2014 in Melbourne, in and around an innovative architectural design artefact, the Fabpod (RMIT 2012).
Authors: David Carlin, Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, Adrian Miles, Kyla Brettle, Annie Fergusson, Brigid Magner, Alvin Pang, Francesca Rendle-Short and Shanti Sumartojo
Here we bring together etymologies and theoretical topographies to problematize the intriguing situation of ‘nonfiction now’.
Scholar/practitioners in the fields of creative arts and design are increasingly looking to locate their creative practice within a research context that leads to the development of new insights, processes and approaches. Motel was a trans- disciplinary practice-based research collaboration between a group of scholar/practitioners: three filmmakers and two interior designers from RMIT University. The project aimed to explore the innovative potential the academy affords to situate filmmaking and interior design practices outside usual industrial/commercial contexts so as to create what Geuens (2007) calls a ‘differential space’ of film production.
The Motel research group used techniques of reflective practice—reflection-in- action and reflection-on-action (Schön 1983)—to analyse shifts in practice and conceptual frameworks brought about by the constraints applied to the collaborative project. These constraints came from a set of collaborative 'rules' applied to the production process which, among other things, altered the usual hierarchical relationship between design and film, which privileges the director and his/her vision. In Motel the interior designers called a halt to the machinery of production, demanding an examination of established practices. The traditional A4 film scripts were tilted sideways and exploded, laid out alongside each other like patients in a ward, and new intimate relationships were formed. Exactly what was interior and what was exterior came into question. The space of an Australian motel room, and the space of filmmaking itself was interrogated, dissected, made new. The resulting triptych of short films is only one of the media objects to have resulted from this innovative collaboration.
and interior designers. This raised work substantial questions in relation to the role of ‘interior’ within each of
the films made through the collaboration. Where and how was interior defined and located? What sort of interior
relations existed within each of the screenplays? And how might these be represented relative to the various filmic
instruments of camera, set, lighting, sound, etc?’
The paper describes and critiques the film-based operations and processes used by the three writer/directors, two
interior designers, sound team and cinematographer in the production of interiors within the recent triptych of short
films titled Motel.
transition activities piloted by The Belonging Project in collaboration with a creatively
oriented academic program in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.
Through qualitative research, this case study demonstrates the importance of adopting Kift,
Nelson and Clarke’s (2010, p. 6) notion of transition “as a process, not an event.” This paper
argues that a sustained program of low cost transition activities that bridge the formal and
informal curriculum fosters an essential ”sense of belonging” among first year students. It
provides a successful example of an approach that embeds essential social and academic
literacies while facilitating positive social, cultural, and academic transitions.
longitudinal learning and teaching research project seeking to develop and define
a new approach to student engagement. In this project, the concept of belonging is
used as a tactic to engage both staff and students in the School of Media and
Communication at RMIT University as part of the project’s aim to improve the
student experience. This paper maps the way in which we use belonging – defined
in relation to the educational experience – as a point of departure to achieve this
outcome. Having established our definition of belonging and its purpose in our
project, we then discuss some key results of focus groups with students, outlining
the way in which students navigate issues of transition, interdisciplinarity, and
notions of space and place, in their relationship to university and campus life.
In the Belonging Project narrative model (the model), each student’s sense of identity and belonging is built incrementally across the three years of their undergraduate degree program. In first year students establish a strong disciplinary and professional
base within their program cohort. In second year, students build on this disciplinary base, becoming more aware of their place within an interdisciplinary community (a wider school cohort). In third year,
they are supported to test their disciplinary and interdisciplinary identity and knowledge by working in a wider world of intercultural and global links and experiences.