What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.

This autobiographic novella is part of longer novel, not yet written. The novel, &quotLe temps d'une vie", has three parts, corresponding to three periods in the life of the character. This novella is the first part of the novel. The story takes place in a small village south of France, between the Mediterranean Sea and the vineyards. A child, then a teenager, comes to his grand parents' house for holidays: Christmas, Easter and the long summer break. He meets grand parents, aunts, and an uncle. For him and his friends, the whole village and the countryside around are their playground. He experiences a life there quite different from his regular one in the city of Bordeaux with his parents. The novella was first written in French, then translated into English by Dr Siobhan Brownlie. The translator and I discussed various problems that arose, the main issue being dealing with culturally specific terms in the French text. The novella was judged by Dr Donna Lee Brien not as a translation but as an original piece of writing, and she made suggestions for changes to the English text. I implemented some of these changes in order to produce a further version of the English text and finding some of the suggestions useful for the French text too, I implemented corresponding changes in the French text. Dr Siobhan Brownlie wrote a paper about the translation process of this thesis, &quotOriginal as Translation; Translation as Original". The paper has been published in &quotUQ Vanguard", 2003, mini-series #3. Contact: UQ Vanguard, c/o Clubs and Societies, UQ Union, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072. uqvanguard@uq.edu.au; www.emsah.uq.edu.au/uqvanguard

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Newly single and working the graveyard-shift at his local railway station, Peter Lawson is a complete failure. Yet, inexplicably, he has never felt better in his life. This confidence swells when a newsreader on morning television and an astrologer at the city’s loudest tabloid both agree: Peter is 'The One'... What follows next tests the limits of his mind, and his faith, as he lurches from crisis to catastrophe – being helped along in his journey by a psychiatrist, a priest, and a class full of autistic boys – before meeting Maya, the woman who guides him home. Set between Sydney, London, and the foothills of the Himalayas, 'The Triumphant Approach' is a tale about love, lunacy and the attraction of belief: a meditation on identity, and the redemptive power of losing one’s mind, in modern day Australia. Following the novel is a critical exegesis that charts the genesis and development of The Triumphant Approach by examining its various thematic elements with a focus on madness and writing, giving particular attention to the mental illness and spirituality shared by the protagonist and the author. The exegesis examines how identity is changed by mental illness and explores the inherent challenges for the writer intent on expressing that through fiction, as well as looking at the relationship between mental illness and belief – with a view to understanding the symbiotic relationship between the two.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Newly single and working the graveyard-shift at his local railway station, Peter Lawson is a complete failure. Yet, inexplicably, he has never felt better in his life. This confidence swells when a newsreader on morning television and an astrologer at the city’s loudest tabloid both agree: Peter is 'The One'... What follows next tests the limits of his mind, and his faith, as he lurches from crisis to catastrophe – being helped along in his journey by a psychiatrist, a priest, and a class full of autistic boys – before meeting Maya, the woman who guides him home. Set between Sydney, London, and the foothills of the Himalayas, 'The Triumphant Approach' is a tale about love, lunacy and the attraction of belief: a meditation on identity, and the redemptive power of losing one’s mind, in modern day Australia. Following the novel is a critical exegesis that charts the genesis and development of The Triumphant Approach by examining its various thematic elements with a focus on madness and writing, giving particular attention to the mental illness and spirituality shared by the protagonist and the author. The exegesis examines how identity is changed by mental illness and explores the inherent challenges for the writer intent on expressing that through fiction, as well as looking at the relationship between mental illness and belief – with a view to understanding the symbiotic relationship between the two.

Thesis ( Ph.D.)--Edith Cowan University, 2006. / Submitted to the Faculty of Community Services, Education and Social Sciences. [Incorrectly stated as Faculty of Community Services, Education and the Arts]. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Theses (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-92). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis Ph.D. - University of Glasgow, 2009. / Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Scottish Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2009. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Univ., Fak. für Geistes-, Sozial- und Erziehungswiss., Diss.--Magdeburg, 2003.