title: Travelling through memories: Processes of writing a travel memoir as ruin text
Creators: name: Jatschka, Stefan
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Travel memoir
subject: Writing process
subject: ruin text
subject: Travelling

description: Life writing as a form comprises a broad range of genres and sub-genres which include travel writing and memoir. The combination of these two might suggest a separate genre – travel memoir – but travel writing and memoir as genres themselves lack clear definition (Couser 2005, Blanton 2002). In this thesis, I explore how a writer navigates memories of different versions of the self in the process of writing a travel memoir, and present my own travel memoir titled The Broken Anatomy of a Travelling Heart. In the exegesis, I examine contemporary examples of life writing that use elements of travel writing and memoir but function differently from, and go beyond the accepted understandings of, travel memoir. It is worth pointing out, that each chapter of the exegesis is framed with a brief personal nonfiction narrative that links my personal and emotional motivations with academic research. This alternative approach of ‘storying’ ideas and knowledge is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5 of the exegesis. The argument at the centre of this thesis is that travel memoir presents a space where the writer can navigate the memories of the journeying self, the relational self and the authorial self. In order to examine how these three versions of the self can inform and interact with each other and how a writer can construct a narrative based on different memories, I have developed a methodological process I term ‘ruin text’. The travel memoir as ruin text is a fragmented narrative which only exists in the active process of construction and deconstruction of memory and text. My travel memoir titled The Broken Anatomy of a Travelling Heart tells my experience of travelling through Indonesia in 2018 accompanied by the journal my mother kept on her own journey through Indonesia in 1979. Each of the four chapters of my travel memoir takes place on a different Indonesian island and reflects the discussion of the writing process in the exegesis. Chapters 1 and 2 explore my relational and journeying self as I use my mother’s journal as a guide through Sumatra and Java. In Chapter 3, during my visit to Bali, I deconstruct the narrative of the previous chapters and engage with my memories through the lens of the authorial self. The last chapter, dedicated to Sulawesi, consists of ruin-like fragments, allowing the writer (and the reader) to travel through my memories as spaces of becoming. In this thesis, I provide a new understanding of the function of the travel memoir genre as a space of becoming; I introduce an original methodological approach – the ruin text – to investigate the writing process of memory and the writer’s role in creating fragmented narratives in travel memoir; and I discuss the exegesis as a space of becoming while I illuminate the intrinsic role of writing and thinking used in scholarly and creative ways in order to produce this thesis. The exegesis, as I argue in my final chapter, offers a space where the writer and the reader fill in gaps through connections with and between the exegesis and the creative component of this submission.