Flinders University

Andrew Miller

Abstract
Traditionally, memoir writers use ‘prose’ to build narratives. Sometimes they use images, but often not. In the multimedia age some memoirists are turning to art, photography, design, typography, and technology to increase the range and scope of their research and ‘writing’. Writing, in this sense, takes on a more Derridean flavour, and comes to incorporate all manner of inscriptions. Readers consequently become viewers, and texts shift from ‘readerly’ to ‘writerly’ in the Barthesian sense. Design software like Adobe InDesign helps make such bricolages possible, and helps overcome some of the design limitations of mainstream word processors.
By combining elements of a/r/tography, applied grammatology, autoethnography, and creative non-fiction, I have created a graphic memoir bricolage to explore the death of my mother and the difficulties of narrating it. By combining words and images—design and content—I have come some way to articulating the challenges of this process.

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Andrew Miller is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University. He has published critical and creative work in Wet Ink, Creative Approaches to Research, English in Australia, Liminalities, and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. His research interests include graphic texts, memoir, creative non-fiction, travel writing, hypertext, and critical and creative approaches to research. Andrew uses Derrida’s theories on ‘picto-ideo-phonographic’ writing to create multimodal and nonlinear texts. His work challenges the ‘prose-centrism’ of traditional university research by incorporating images and design into its meaning-making process. Andrew supports the expansion of the term ‘writing’ to include ‘non-verbal’ and ‘graphic’ elements as readily as it currently embraces words and prose.