ABSTRACT
I teach both creative writing and Australian Aboriginal literature, and I find it inspiring and sometimes challenging to bring these two interests together. In the courses that I teach on literature, I include creative writing exercises to encourage my students to expand their writing techniques in order to rethink the key theoretical terms in their research. These techniques are drawn from my own writing experiments. In my own writing I find it useful to stop sometimes and think about the terms, concepts, metaphors and phrases that are central to my research and my writing. In the course of my writing I find myself repeating these key terms, and they can become naturalized. I end up taking their meaning for granted, and I become habituated to a certain kind of logic which becomes sedimented into argument. I find that examining the central terms of my argument can be a useful way to think about adjacent issues, ideas and affects which may be obscured by recurrent patterns of thinking.
