Jane Messer

University of Canberra, Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, Faculty of Arts and Design, Visiting Fellow

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I am an Australian novelist of critical acclaim, and a writer of nonfiction, radio drama and short stories. I'm also the director and found of StorySALOON: Short Stories, Centre Stage, a live show and podcast that features contemporary Australian short stories. I am a former Associate Professor in Creative Writing, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University.
My current projects include Raven Mother: a memoir, biography and cultural history set in Berlin, Tel Aviv and Melbourne, coming out in early 2026 with NewSouth Publishing.
My research is interdisciplinary and draws upon ethnography, philosophy, sociology, feminist and maternal studies, and literature studies.
Address: Sydney, Gadigal country

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Practicing interdisciplinarity

Text, Oct 30, 2012

Practice-led research is inherently interdisciplinary, with practitioners engaging with a range o... more Practice-led research is inherently interdisciplinary, with practitioners engaging with a range of knowledges and methods through processes of selection, integration and synthesis. Claims are made for the unique qualities of both the creative arts artefacts produced through this practice, and for the research approaches used by creative researchers. However, a substantial amount of 'genre blurring' (Geertz 1980) is occurring within the humanities and social sciences, with researchers outside of the creative arts utilizing creative practices and incorporating creative products in their research. Further, the history of interdisciplinary research reaches back to as early as the 1920s (Klein 1996) and is not subsequent to the rise of practice-led research in academe. Seen in this context, what can practice-led research claim as its own, and is there a benefit to conceptualising it as part of the 'interdisciplinary turn'

Bedlam: An Anthology of Sleepless Nights

Suicide in Nazi Germany: Transformative Family History

Life Writing, Sep 18, 2022

Writers in the universities

The Australian author, 1994

Why on earth would a publisher knock back a politician’s memoir?

Shocking ideas and safe jobs: what makes a Nobel author?

When something is wrong in the world of literature, who better to blame than the writers? Nobel P... more When something is wrong in the world of literature, who better to blame than the writers? Nobel Prize for Literature judge Horace Engdahl said this week, only days before the award was given to French writer Patrick Modiano, that American and European literature is today characterised by writing which does not transgress anything -but only pretends to. The cause for this decline in urgency of values, he said in an interview with French paper La Croix, lies with writers being institutionalised and university-based. Patrick Modiano has won the Nobel Prize for Literature -with what must be the right kind of transgression. EPA/IAN LANGSDON Shocking ideas and safe jobs: what makes a Nobel author? ...

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Non-fiction's beauty is in the I of the beholder

Are we being saturated with "inconsequential memoir"? That question was posed in the latest editi... more Are we being saturated with "inconsequential memoir"? That question was posed in the latest edition of The Lifted Brow (TLB), a print/online journal of new Australian and international (think US) writing and opinion that's been around long enough -since 2007 -to have received way too many submissions that it didn't want. In its sights are "the unflinching rise of the inconsequential memoir, gonzo arts criticism, selfies at funerals, inane micro stories about the textures of different chair materials when travelling on luxury holidays, etc." Yes, narrative nonfiction from the tweet to the book and everything in between is the genre de jour. These are the decades, it would seem, in which "the real" is more immediately fascinating than anything imagined. Saying a piece of writing is "wholly imagined" by the "writer at her imaginative best" does not have the cachet that saying it is based on real events or real people has. Have we in fact reached the limits of our imaginations, and given up? Now that the notion of "truth" is only ever lower-case, it would seem "true stories" are what we to read, and aim to write. We resist the relativism of there being nothing True. Digitisation has enabled this seismic cultural shift, amplifying the paradox that with the death of Truth, we long for the real. So what is this popular beast? Narrative nonfiction (NNF) is written by an "I" who is present to a greater or lesser degree in the work itself, and ideally engages with the qualities of literariness that we recognise in fiction: attention to craft and voice, to vocabulary and language, to pacing, structure and narrative arc. Unlike that other kind of nonfiction -journalism and reportage -narrative nonfiction does not iron True story, seriously, it's all about me. Nathan O'Nions July 23, 2014 5.56am AEST Non-fiction's beauty is in the I of the beholder ...

Why writing programs are worth it: a reply to Hanif Kureishi

Analysis is awash with public memoir, but only some will survive the flood

Reconciliation dialogues: Kathleen Mary Fallon's Paydirt, and narratives of mothering

Australian humanities review, Nov 1, 2018

I'm sorry I don't know any other way to be with you than stiff-backed and suspicious, the whitene... more I'm sorry I don't know any other way to be with you than stiff-backed and suspicious, the whiteness rising up in me… I'm sorry I haven't been a better mother (Fallon, Paydirt 47) EN YEARS AFTER ITS PUBLICATION AND ALMOST TWENTY YEARS FOLLOWING THE release of the 1997 Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (BTH), Kathleen Mary Fallon's semi-autobiographical narrative Paydirt continues to be a subversive and confronting work. Its complex evocation of mothering, contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjectivities, and the racism, sexism and abuses of indigenous children and mothers by state and federal governments, along with its distinctively Australian character make the work as relevant today as it was when published. A decade has passed since the publication of the Little Children are Sacred report (Anderson and Wild), and nine years since former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's National Apology to the Stolen Generations. In more recent years there has been a resurgence of activism from groups such as Grandmothers Against Removals about the increasing rates of removal of Indigenous children into care, frequently to non-indigenous carers.

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Dear Dr Chekhov: A radio play produced for Australian Broadcasting Commission

The Mermaid of Cockatoo

Entry in an anthology of short stories. Jane Messer brings back to life a workhouse for wayward g... more

Hopscotch: a novel

Forced into an early retirement due to illness, Sam Rosen has lost any semblance of control over ... more Forced into an early retirement due to illness, Sam Rosen has lost any semblance of control over his life. His wife, Rhonda, confined to the carer role, is feeling her identity ebb slowly away as her former life retreats further and further into the past. Their eldest son, Mark, is over-invested and as he lurched towards financial disaster, he can't bring himself to tell his wife Ingrid that they're losing money fast. Middle child Liza has always been independent and content to scrape through on her child-care worker's wage in one of the most expensive property markets in the world. But when her biological clock goes off, she's out of time in a city where men are thin on the ground and grown-up ones even scarcer. Baby of the family Jemma thinks that being mild-mannered will let her pass through life unharmed. And then, one night, everything changes. Fast and funny, Hopscotch charts a year in the lives of the endearingly flawed Rosen family, and holds up a mirror to contemporary urban life in Australia, interrogating our endless capacity for self-destruction, longing and love, and asks why we think we could ever find happiness in a city that's roaring with dysfunction.338 page(s

Night by Night

Obsédées par l'argent : reconnaissance, récit et marternité

Sirena sa Kakadua

Short story: "Mermaid of Cockatoo", translated by Ivana Cvijanovic.5 page(s

Being impossible: narratives of mothering

This chapter offers selected readings of contemporary memoirs and novels that engage broadly with... more This chapter offers selected readings of contemporary memoirs and novels that engage broadly with mothering, death, abuse and failure. It examines the ways that 1970s Second Wave feminisms inhibited this literary subject area. It reflects on statements and writings by Adrienne Rich, Kate Jennings and Margaret Atwood as examples of that period, about feminism, motherhood and writing. Rich's comment that writing about mothering requires 'treading over ground mined with false namings' is used as a pathway to analyse why writing might avoid the lethal or socially divisive aspects of mothering (reading Charmian Clift, Louise Erdrich). The author locates her own writing praxis within her mothering of her children, and suggests that the experience of caring for and socialising children as citizens can inhibit a writing praxis. This work of socialisation and protection can disable imaginative and critical engagements with mothering as a subject of literature. However, when writers embrace the possibility of 'bad' mothering and place that within the social and cultural forces that intersect and frame the mothering experience (reading Susan Johnson, Toni Morrison, Lionel Shriver), their literature then fully engages with the complexity of mothering, including the lethal aspects of particular interest to this collection

In my bed, after Tracey Emin

The Making of a man

This paper investigates the authOt's writing processes during the research and creation of the fi... more This paper investigates the authOt's writing processes during the research and creation of the fictional character of Chella Singh-Jolley, The author's novel Pwvenance is set in 1960; one of its principal characters is Chella, a Sikh biochemistry student in Australia on a Colombo Plan scholarship, The paper discusses the challenges in writing a character so ostensibly 'other' to the author; and how these dilemmas were turned to creative use, The paper outlines the history of Indian immigration to Australia, and briefly the role of the Colombo Plan fOt Economic Development, situating Chella within this history, An extract from Chapter One of the novel is included: the opening story of the novel's protagonist, an Italian-Australian girl, Rafaela Mollino

Eat and be eaten

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Jane Messer

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