Critical animals

This article is an experiment in mixing personal and professional trajectories and tells a few dislocated stories about my experience of moving from Sydney to Newcastle to teach creative writing. Sometimes I'm writing as a first home buyer, at other points as an early career academic, still thinking through areas that might lead to future research (ideally with a local focus). In particular, my involvement with Newcastle's This Is Not Art (TINA) festival has inspired me to explore ways to better integrate the extra-literary into tertiary creative writing pedagogy. These are preliminary thoughts, however, as I begin to sift through my recent transitions, confronting in the process many complex ambivalences and possible new alliances.