Catherine McKinnon

Australia
research interests: narrative, Climate Change, collaboration, fragmented narratives, future, feminism, creative practice, creative ecologies, creative writing, creative process, violence, unreliable narratives, braided narratives
affiliation: University of Wollongong, Australia
en

 

Catherine McKinnon is a researcher in the fields of traditional critical research and creative research, specifically prose and playwriting. Her creative research is diverse and has received commendation from the industry. Her novel, Storyland (2017) was critically acclaimed. Review highlights include: 'Impressive ... a haunting power,' The Australian, June 2017; 'a devastating retelling of man's effect on the land and the native people, and offers a chilling insight into what may come to pass with climate change. Storyland is reminiscent of Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves,' Books+Publishing, March 2017. McKinnon was co-winner of the Griffith Review: Tall Tales Short – The Novella Project 111 award in 2015. Her first book, The Nearly Happy Family was published by Penguin in 2008. Her plays have been produced nationally and her short stories, reviews and essays have appeared in Transnational Literature, Text Journal, RealTime, Narrative, SMH, and the Griffith Review.

 

McKinnon's scholarly research investigates narrative voices, particularly first person narration, both fictional and non-fictional. What do the stories we tell reveal about ourselves and our culture? How do these stories influence or persuade others? Over the last five years she has focused on the environmental and social changes in the Illawarra since first contact. McKinnon's current research investigates climate change and narratives around atomic energies. She is currently researching her new novel, The Great Time, set in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Japan and New Mexico during World War 2. McKinnon is a founding member of the MECO network. She is also part of the C3P research group and one of the multi-authors of 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019).

 

research

research expositions (collaborated)

  • MIXED DOUBLES: COLLABORATIVE WRITING AND PERIPHERAL STRATEGIES (2019) author(s): David Carlin, Peta Murray, JOSHUA MICHAEL LOBB, Catherine McKinnon published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
    This exposition attends to the theme of peripheral spaces, sites, practices, epistemologies and conceptions. It takes the form of a playful, nonfiction archival document that comprises the interleaving of two scripts within a series of photographic images. It stands as trace for an event—originally described as “peripherally performative”—that took place at an academic conference in creative writing in Australia in 2018 (the annual Association of Australian Writing Programs Conference, in Perth). As a research artefact, the methods and mode of presentation of this work are tangential to normative procedures. This exposition co-mingles the performed accounts of two collaborative writing projects in which the exposition's four authors—Carlin, Murray, McKinnon and Lobb —had been variously enmeshed: the collectively written book project 100 Atmospheres; Studies in Scale and Wonder (Open Humanities Press, 2019), and the Murray/Carlin speculative research endeavour How To Dress For Old Age: an Enquiry with Costumes. Each of these projects experiments with devising creative methods of collaboration so as to approach research questions multifariously and heterogeneously. Slant, in other words. What does collaboration offer writers and writing processes? How is vision refracted through a multiplicity of gazes? How does the peripheral make itself felt? In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation, the 100 Atmospheres project—speculative, poetic, provocative—pays attention to future ways of being and becoming. In a tightly scripted dialogue, Lobb and McKinnon reflect on a collaborative process involving an interdisciplinary ensemble of 13 people, that uses ‘cross-over writing’. This process allows for fluid boundaries, multiple entries and exits, and other peripheral strategies, to enliven living and practicing in the Anthropocene. This first script is met sideways by the more improvisatory, contingent approach of Murray and Carlin, who re-construct their process of framing and investigating “how to dress for old age,” as a live and unfolding methodology (including costume changes). They report on how, in improvising with writing methods that involve alternating responses, redirections, and unanticipated shifts in focus / tempo, they have been drawn to sport, theatre and domestic metaphors to negotiate evolving rules of engagement and exchange. The original performance used a length of rope pinned with images to stand in for a tennis net and a backdrop. This malleable object allowed us to demonstrate materially the multiple experiences of collaboration: combative and communal, public and private. In our written document we will use inset photographs (portraits and images of place), columned text and variable typography: these will interrupt and intersect with the ideas discussed in order to amplify the complex interactions central to the collaborative process. Our visual and verbal approaches assert tactics of peripherality to examine that which is often overlooked, irrelevant or superficial, and serve as a counterpoint to normative methods. Our approaches argue for a different kind of sensitivity in practice, one which pays heed to the dance of agency between subjects and objects.
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