ABSTRACT

The quote above, from a short story, ‘Ninevah’, written by Trina Jackson (2014), demonstrates the way fictional narratives written by members of the community can engage with place in nuanced ways. This chapter describes one methodology for bringing little-known narratives out of the community, exploring place through fiction-writing strategies, and sharing community narratives using digital tools. Since the beginning of my career as a historical fiction writer and artistacademic, I have been inspired by the discipline of oral history, with its roots in narrative, storytelling, and the desire to dismantle grand historical narratives by bringing marginalised voices to the fore. My historical fiction is also rooted deeply in local stories of place. My writing and research interests led me to initiate a place-based storytelling project in a regional community in North Queensland, working with local writers to produce ‘locative literature’ (Løvlie, 2012), a form of writing that uses digital tools to publish stories in specific locations. This chapter is based on textual analysis of the stories regional writers produced as part of the project, and results of a survey completed with local writers. These data provide further understanding about how fiction writing, particularly aided by digital tools, allows writers to express their imagined perceptions of landscapes and presents multiple visions of the symbolic significance of the landscape. This is significant for regional writers who may struggle with isolation from writing networks and hubs. Fiction, particularly place-based fiction

prompted by digital tools in the form of locative literature, allows for expression of regional identity around landscapes, which can function as a form of agency. In addition, locative literature, because it can show multiple representations of place, allows dense, multidimensional representations, which has the capacity to transform more rigid notions of place. This story begins in 2008, at the end of an undergraduate degree in creative writing, when I took a position working in a research experience scheme. As part of that project, I interviewed three Sisters of Mercy who worked at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane. I was deeply moved by their stories. As a creative writer, my instinctive response was to explore the Sisters’ stories through fiction, adopting their voices and ways of speaking as a way to more deeply understand their experiences. In the course of my research, I discovered that ethnographic fiction writers also have observed fiction’s capacity to represent complex lived experience and social situations (Frank, 2000; Phillips, 1995; Schoepflin & Kaufman, 2011; Smith & Sparkes, 2008; Stoller, 2002), and to help researchers think through the data they have gathered (Leavy, 2015; Richardson & St Pierre, 2005). Although I was approaching my practice from the perspective of a creative writer, rather than ethnographer, I too found that community narratives could enrich fiction and that fiction can be a tool to explore methods of storytelling (van Luyn, 2012). In 2009 I embarked on a PhD examining the ways oral history interviews could inform works of fiction. I chose a practice-led research methodology, which prompts artist-researchers to explore theoretical concepts through creative practice (Haseman, 2006; Smith & Dean, 2009). One of the outputs of the PhD was a collection of short stories, set in Brisbane, Queensland, and based on oral history interviews and other archival material. In the process, I became involved in Oral History Australia, and gained training and access to the notions of social history that underpin the formation of the oral history movement. Oral history, because of its emphasis on community narratives, shifts the historical endeavour from a focus on grand historical narratives to a representation of the personal significance of events in the past. Thompson (2000) argued that oral history transforms the content and purpose of history by allowing ‘the people who made and experienced history’ to tell history in their own words, giving them a central place (p. 3). By bringing silenced and multiple voices to the task of understanding the past, oral histories have the capacity to allow a ‘multiplicity of standpoints to be recreated’ (Thompson, 2000, p. 6). However, oral narratives cannot be understood simply as sources to be mined for data. Oral storytellers are engaged in a complex act of narrating the past in the present, which can sometimes be elaborate, complicated or confusing (Grele, 2006, p. 59). Both the social history focus on ‘providing a challenge that helps towards change’ (Thompson, 2000, p. 22) and the complex methods of narration in the oral histories have informed the development of my creative writing practice and research endeavours. In exploring these qualities of oral histories in my own written fiction, and engaging in cycles of action and reflection (Smith & Dean, 2009, p. 2), I came

to see that fiction had a capacity to represent lived experience and symbolically explore notions of the human condition. Unlike other forms of writing, fiction can show the interior of a character (Cohn, 2000; Dickstein, 2005). By mimicking an interviewee’s voice in a short story, I found fiction to be a means of re-enacting narrative techniques in oral storytelling. By exaggerating these qualities in fiction, I drew attention to the complex acts of narration involved in understanding the impact of the past on the present. I was also motivated by a desire, drawn from the social underpinnings of the oral history movement, to represent the impact of historical events on a character’s interior, in their thoughts, emotions and bodily responses. The process of imagining how a character felt allowed me to more deeply understand the personal significance of historical events (van Luyn, 2012). Indeed, it is exciting to think that fiction has a long tradition of being a means to test hypotheses about the world through character (Greenblatt, 1998) and act as a ‘springboard for reflections about the human condition’ (Pavel, 2000, p. 521). Fiction thus functions as a means for a writer to imagine how wider phenomena can have an impact on the interior of a character and, in doing so, illuminate humanity in its context. This expanded mode of viewing fiction corrodes the dualism that situates fiction as at the opposite end of a continuum to non-fiction. Leavy (2009, p. 48) observed that this dualism historically has been held fixed in both academic research and public perception. For example, Ellis experienced such a response to her ethnographic fiction from researchers; she stated, ‘I’m very interested in the angst these issues [of fictional representations of ethnographic data] seem to cause . . . is my fiction a lie or is my fiction true?’ (Davis & Ellis, 2008, p. 113). However, her statement still couches the debate in terms of polarities and may reinforce the dualism between fiction and non-fiction. Other scholars have argued that there can be ‘truths’ in fiction (Leavy, 2009, p. 48; see also Davies, 2001; Lamarque and Olsen, 1996; Oatley, 1999; Rinehart, 1998). The exact nature of these truths, and how they might intersect with community narratives, became the subject of my next research endeavours. In 2012, I moved from the city to a regional town in Far North Queensland, Australia. I brought with me my interest in fiction as a means of exploring local history and place. At the end of the PhD project, what had struck me was fiction’s great capacity to represent location. The oral and creative narratives I worked with in the PhD, from different periods in Brisbane’s history, drew my attention to the local and personal significance of particular places. Driving into a new regional town, one of the first things I encountered was an intriguing empty space near a busy intersection. Using practice-led research methodology, where research is driven by ‘an enthusiasm for practice’ (Haseman, 2006, p. 3), I set about researching the history of that site and uncovered a historical narrative that became the basis of a novel of historical fiction. These developments in my own creative practice, and a desire to return to the multiplicity of narratives encouraged by the endeavours of oral history project, led me to initiate a new

project working with a group of local writers to tell place-based fictive stories about specific locations in this regional town. In 2013, I worked with the Townsville Writers and Publishers to establish a writers’ group made up of regional writers interested in further developing their creative writing skills and sharing their writing with readers. In response to these twin desires, and drawing on my own writing and research practices, I invited this group of local writers to write fictive short stories set in specific locations. These stories were published in the place they were set using digital tools, specifically QR codes (Figure 14.1), which are square barcodes that, when scanned with a smartphone, will take the reader to a website – in this case the website where the stories are published in an online anthology (www.townsvillestories. com). In this way, local writing was made visible to readers. The practice of presenting narrative using locative media is described as ‘locative literature’ (Løvlie, 2012). Leavy (2009, p. 12) noted that ‘technological advances have assisted in the development of arts-based innovations in research: new technologies have allowed the construction and dissemination of new kinds of texts’. This project, through its use of new technologies, thus raised larger questions about how digital tools can aid and shape the construction of regional communities’ fictional representation of place.