We are making a boat, love: 30 years of experimental feminist writing in Australia

“We are making a boat, love” is a bookish multimodal experiment-in-the-making that works with/into/because Ania Walwicz’s Boat (1989) and as an exemplar of Eades’s écriture matière (2015). In this work we boat build a corpus of experimental reflective and material writing that makes visible an extended and always present but often forgotten archive of creativecritical writing in this place named Australia. Following on from methods developed during their longitudinal blackout poetry project Sending Love, Eades and Rendle-Short tore out and sent (by post) a page of Boat to each writer. Writers worked with this page in any way they chose over the course of two weeks, then sent them back to return to the book, to be stitched and glued together, to make a love object, a vessel, a boat. Each writer was invited to write from/with/against these pages and these texts were cut up and rearranged into a series of paste poems that appear throughout the artists’ book. ‘We are making a boat, love’ offers a we-world (Jean Luc-Nancy), a collective, a communitas (Rendle-Short), a many voiced and irreverent conflagration.