Categorising works by genre can be controversial in literature. Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro are two examples of writers who have been vocal in denouncing the genre their works have been boxed into. Yet genre is an essential part of the writing process, because specific language, styles and structures are used within different social contexts to communicate purpose. This paper is a practice-led study that analyses the evolution in genre of what became a memoir, to illustrate how experimenting with different genres shaped the final form, structure and genre of the piece. While genre did not dictate the writing process from the first time I sat down to write, communicating my purpose the way I intended depended on finding the right genre. I worked on the memoir over a few years, and in that time the text began as a short story and then morphed to poetry, an essay, and finally, to a memoir. Once a completed work is published, the labelling of that work is then out of the writer’s hands. Yet separate to the role genre plays in selling books, genre is key in text construction and a tool that writers have at their disposal during the writing process to enrich their work.
This paper surveys Australian literature regarding the publication of literary journals and the qualitative costs and benefits of their production. The survey was undertaken as part of a research project to develop a literary journal for Australia's Northern Territory, which has been without a substantial journal of its own since 2000. As part of the project, the researchers also surveyed public attitudes towards a literary journal, interviewed key industry stakeholders, and commenced business planning for a journal, all framed by the overview of literature. While only the literature review is reported on here, the attitude surveys, interviews, and business planning may form the subject of future papers. Called The Borderlands Project, the research was begun as part of a 2018 strategic arts project jointly funded by Arts NT and Charles Darwin University to develop a literary journal of the Northern Territory in three phases. This paper outlines the purpose of the project and describes preliminary results from the literature survey, including comments on funding, journal format, content, how to address the problem of prosumerism, and future directions for the research.
A new literary journal of the Northern Territory, Borderlands, launched an online pilot edition in 2019 and an online print edition in 2020. The publication comes twenty years after its predecessor, Northern Perspectives, ceased publishing due to losing its Australia Council funding and support from Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University). As the editors of the journal, in this article we analyse how we funded and published the journal’s pilot editions against the backdrop of precarious arts funding and a ravaged arts sector, due in part to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. We provide a cost breakdown of publishing the journal and analyse our approach and processes in order to offer some insight and transparency to stakeholders, patrons and others contemplating literary journal publishing. Despite the challenging landscape of arts funding in Australia, ultimately the benefits of pursuing literary publishing in the regions to foster regional writing as part of Australian literature are worth the obstacles encountered on the path to publication. Our research suggests there are four key pillars integral to a journal’s success and sustainability in an underfunded sector: a flexible approach, community support and engagement, early stakeholder consultation, and transparency surrounding the costs of literary journal publishing.
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