'In 2000, I was awarded some money by the UK National Lottery and the Arts Council of England to put together a collection of short stories. I worked with a literary agent called Deborah Rogers, whose fame as a literary agent was only exceeded by her generosity as a lover of new writing and a supporter of new writers. She would sit in her manuscript piled office in London’s Powis Mews and talk about your work in a way that suggested that it mattered to her as much as it did to you – even though at the time I was a barely published writer, and she was a highly successful literary agent. She already represented future Nobel Prize Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. She represented Ian McEwan and Peter Carey and Hanif Kureishi. She had once represented Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. And none of that is name dropping, because those names are merely a few from a bigger list of considerable writers that found their way to Deborah Rogers’ door at Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency.' (Graeme Harper, Editorial introduction)
'This paper continues ongoing research, by the three authors, into possible ways to write climate fiction, a subgenre of literature that focuses on depictions of climate change. Curious as to whether climate fiction has become fixed as a negative genre, most frequently mired in dystopian landscapes, we posited that writing fiction collaboratively might be one method to help us imagine a future in which we have agency and are not simply helpless victims of the inevitable. To explore this hypothesis, we ran a two-day Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory with six other professional writers, all based on Kaurna and Permangk country in Tartanya/Adelaide, Australia. In detailing the setup and findings of this experiment, the paper looks towards artistic practice that does not focus on the capitalist individual and details the thrill of collaboration. We propose that there is a strong (posthuman) argument for writers to abandon the desire to be identified as one singular being with a ‘unique’ voice and reimagine their creative subjectivities as a sticky web of connections.' (Publication abstract)
'Biofiction, a genre that produces ‘literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure’ [Lackey, M. 2016. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1] presents significant technical, imaginative, and ethical challenges to its writers. This article gives a brief history of the biofiction novel and explores creative methodologies used by biofiction authors. The article then describes a post-graduate attempt at writing the manuscript of a novel about Scottish author, Naomi Mitchison and English explorer, Zita Baker. Employing an autoethnographical approach, I explain how I used a dual-methodology of Colm Tóibín’s idea of ‘becoming’ (2010) as creative practice and Meg Mundell’s POET model of literary placemaking (2018) and give examples of how these techniques worked in two ways: the writing of character and place.' (Publication abstract)
