Literature and Insights Editorial

Citation

Evans, S. (2022), "Literature and Insights Editorial", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 35 No. 2, pp. 567-568. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-02-2022-137

What elephant in the room?

In the last Literature and Insights editorial, I raised various complaints about the tribulations of dealing with bureaucracies but also expressed gratitude for the graces of waking to the sound of magpies in a relatively safe first world country. Getting things in proportion.

Before I go to the elephant mentioned in the title, bear with me as I sweep around in an arc that also deals with wonder and another degree of gratitude.

I keep a list of various literary activities in date order, in case I decide to be involved in them. Others I have no choice about, quite willingly, because of my role as a convenor of Australia's longest running community poetry group (Friendly Street Poets Inc., in case you want to search).

When I saw a due date for a poetry competition about spirituality that I could enter, I dived back into my work and started editing a poem about sitting in a church (not normally my thing). That was because the church had become the haven for various stained-glass windows from other churches that had been destroyed in the name of, you guessed it, “progress.”

As it turned out, the submitted work had to be fewer than two years old for some reason, and mine did not qualify so I needed to step back and not enter the competition. What it gave me, though, was a reminder about refuge, about issues around taking in the lost and homeless. People in some parts of the world are shoved back and forth during a time of enormous need and during an epidemic that we have not really learned to handle humanely or effectively. There is the elephant, in the sense it has been so obvious and yet I did not know how I could add anything meaningful through these editorials. I was waiting.

What can this journal do? I believe it has a humane ethos. Among other things then, it can contribute to the debate about how we measure pollution contributing to global warming, or do not, and the consequences. It can talk about how businesses do or do not report different aspects of their operations that were not under scrutiny before but are now. After all, should we get that all wrong, there might be no more AAAJ.

In that spirit then, let us shine the light on the elephant – COVID-19.

One of our contributors of creative work in this issue is Diane-Laure Arjalies with “What Trees Taught Me About Covid-19: On relational accounting and other magic.” Who could resist that title for a start? Here we can consider the connection made between more traditional relational accounting and a quite different context. How does it differ from a more conventional one in practice? Would there be a new way of informing existing reports, perhaps adding to them? Would they make a difference that mattered?

There is also writing from Yih Pin Tang, “COVID-19 and Personal Finance”, bringing the present, daunting situation down to a level where one has to consider what really matters most in life.

Your own creative contributions can be submitted via ScholarOne (see below), and your email correspondence is always welcome, of course, at: steve.evans@flinders.edu.au.

Literary editor

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and Insights section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ.

Author guidelines for contributions to this section of the journal can be found at: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=aaaj