y separately published work icon New Writing periodical  
Alternative title: New Writing : The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing
Issue Details: First known date: 2004... 2004 New Writing
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Issues

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 21 no. 3 2024 28729899 2024 periodical issue
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 21 no. 2 2024 27985089 2024 periodical issue

'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)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 21 no. 1 2024 27636465 2024 periodical issue 'When in the 17th Century Edward Shin Yentre and Millicent Caracaccio unknowingly and almost simultaneously invented creative writing neither expected it to last. The notion of it, by its very nature, was preposterous and even more so in a century in which electricity and calculus were invented and gravitation discovered. And yet, somehow, a hundred years passed, and it was still around. The Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, Imperialism, Rationalism – none of these could shift it. So still it persisted. In 1876 the world’s first phone call did nothing to dislodge its popularity. In fact, if anything it enhanced it. And when in 1878 electric light was invented it shed enough light on paper and quills that it set in motion the invention of the fountain pen and, subsequently, the ballpoint, which followed. Both empowered the fatuous scourge of creative writing.' (Graeme Harper : An Agreeable  Crest: The New Writing 20th Anniversary Year')
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 20 no. 4 2023 27238186 2023 periodical issue
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 20 no. 3 2023 26676254 2023 periodical issue
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 20 no. 2 2023 26189501 2023 periodical issue

'We generally recognise that creative writing involves a number of intelligences. Linguistic intelligence is the ability to learn and use language. Throughout history, creative writers have sought to have and to improve upon their linguistic intelligence. Interpersonal intelligence is related to effective communication, and while creative writing is an art it has always also been a form of communication. Creative intelligence is of course fundamental to creative writing – creative intelligence being the ability to imagine the new, the distinctive, the unusual, the different, the previously unimaginable. Creative writers often do what they do to in order to apply their creative intelligence. Audiences seek out works of creative writing because of wanting to engage with that application. This exchange creates an individual bond in what is often a communal exchange. For example, an individual writer writes a novel and we buy that novel in the expectation of it appealing to us individually, even though dozens or thousands or even millions of people will buy that same novel.' (Graeme Harper, Editorial introduction)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 20 no. 1 2023 25976799 2023 periodical issue 'The problem with early-nineteenth-century automobiles was that they were large, heavy and difficult to stop. So, in Britain, by the 1860s, Locomotive Acts or Red Flag Acts were introduced to deal with the danger they posed. Because of these Acts, self-propelled vehicles on British public roads were only allowed to travel if preceded by a man waving a redflag and blowing a horn. The result of these Acts, in addition to any saved lives, was that many British inventors turned their attention away from automobiles and worked instead on the development of railroads and trains. These Red Flag Laws were not repealed until 1896' (Publication summary) 
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 19 no. 4 2022 25393069 2022 periodical issue 'Around 10 years ago, New Writing published an interview with Chris Bigsby. Professor Chris Bigsby of the University of East Anglia (UEA), ‘literary analyst and novelist’, as most biographical entries go. C.W.E. Bigsby, as he has sometimes been known in print. Christopher William Edgar Bigsby F.R.S.A. F.R.S.L. Chris Bigsby, biographer, and consummate interviewer of other writers, on stage, on T.V., in literary festivals and in classrooms. In short, a frighteningly accomplished ‘man of letters’, though that phrase seems threadbare when considering the Bigsby case.' (Editorial introduction)
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 19 no. 3 2022 24910352 2022 periodical issue
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 19 no. 2 2022 24640288 2022 periodical issue
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 19 no. 1 2022 23771064 2022 periodical issue
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 18 no. 4 2021 23543094 2021 periodical issue

'As I write, it is rapidly approaching Halloween here in the United States and the stores are now filled with discounted creepiness. Remaining novelties and adornments are everywhere, from the large grocery stores to the gas station ‘Grab-n-Go’ joints, from fast-food restaurants to university bookstores. Orange as a pumpkin, skeletal as the trees, the bare ash, the stark maple, the stick hickory and the grey elm, as dark as 6.00 in the morning. What was anticipatory is now spookily pending.' (Graeme Harper : Editorial introduction)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 18 no. 3 2021 22559750 2021 periodical issue

'In September 1974 Murray T. Lynn submitted a doctoral thesis to the Graduate School of Canada’s McMaster University, entitled ‘The Concept of Enthusiasm in the Major Poems of John Dryden’. Beginning to read his fittingly enthusiastic ‘Acknowledgements’, we cannot immediately discern if the topic reveals the influence of A. D. Hammond, his thesis supervisor, or R. E. Morton of McMaster’s English Department who is said to have ‘offered many helpful suggestions’ or Austin Flanders of the University of Pittsburgh whose classes ‘awakened an interest in the period’. Later, however, Lynn reveals it was in fact the University of Toronto’s Peter Hughes, in a year spent at McMaster in 1970–71, who was the source of his interest in ‘the topic of enthusiasm’. Not of course to dismiss the support of his wife, Bernadette, whom, he writes, ‘deserves special mention for her patient typing of a lengthy manuscript and for her valuable suggestions.’' (Graeme Harper : In What Way Does Enthusiasm Matter? : Editorial introduction)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 18 no. 2 2021 21790927 2021 periodical issue

'I am not asking if it is difficult. It can be. What I am asking is if it is a doctorate in the field of rocket science. Clearly, it is not. In fact, it should not be a doctorate in any other field than creative writing. Yet, over and over again, we find this simple fact misunderstood or misrepresented or misinterpreted. I admit I used to blame colleagues in English and Literary Studies for attempting to bend creative writing study (the methods, philosophies behind the degree, outcomes) to their disciplinary will. But I was wrong – English Literature Departments are not to blame, Literary Studies is not the culprit here. Nor is Cultural Studies, Film and Media Studies, Theatre Studies, Writing Studies, Composition Studies, or Biomedical Studies or Legal Studies, for that matter. If the Doctorate in Creative Writing might as well be a Doctorate in Rocket Science we have no one to blame but ourselves.' (Editorial introduction)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 18 no. 1 2021 21057577 2021 periodical issue 'A sure sign of life on other planets would be if someone from one of those planets finally got their act together and started writing a poem. Say, for example, someone from the planet Thermador, where (we would then discover) poetry is composed in the trillions of small nuclei of a poet’s hypothalamus and transmitted to the individual mind of a reader in an instant, taking the characteristics of what on Earth is called an emotion, a feeling or a thought. Alternatively, we might be lucky enough to go to our local pub one night and find there a reading by a creative writer from Circa, in the Circinus Galaxy, which was originally created by a supernova (the writer seems a little haughty simply because of that – after all, it is quite a thing). Of course, she also is not reading alone, because creative writers from Circa go about composing their work on the skin of their peers, so that each Circadian is (like our two readers) on average 15 feet in height and 9 feet in width, and is both the blank sheet and also the walking books of those around them. To us, such Circadian creative writing is called tattooing, or a medical skin condition known here on Earth as dermatographia urticaria, or it refers to the dark history of skin writing that has accompanied some of the horrific human acts of war and prejudice. But, of course, these Circadians we are currently watching are not from around here, so such comparisons are laboured.' (Graeme Harper, Creative writing on other planets, Editorial introduction)
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 17 no. 4 2020 20750654 2020 periodical issue

'Responding through creative writing and to creative writing is largely what creative writers do. Let me repeat that, with a little more explanation. A creative writer responds to the world, to things from their imaginations, to their experiences, to ideas, to emotions, and so on, through the actions of doing creative writing. A creative writer also frequently shows an interest in both their own creative writing and in the creative writing of others, the actions and the results, and in that sense responds to creative writing. It is important to clearly acknowledge both these facts, because it is in this that is located much of what is meant by actively engaging in creative writing.' (Graeme Harper, Why Our Responses Matter, Introduction)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 17 no. 3 2020 19806960 2020 periodical issue

'Exploring creative writing with writing colleagues rarely disappoints. That is the result of the comradery brought about by mutual joys and common challenges. You get this kind of thing in every field of human endeavour, but creative writing asks us to navigate between our emotional life and our analytical life, magnifying the sense of connection. This magnification is the result of valuing both our feelings and our observations, of our efforts to display the intangible in writing which, by nature, is tangible. In doing so, the navigation we each and all undertake between the incorporeal and the corporeal encourages our secular communion.' (Editorial introduction)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 17 no. 2 2020 19493215 2020 periodical issue
y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 17 no. 1 2020 18653458 2020 periodical issue

'There is seemingly no more spectacular contemporary parade of unbridled literary commercialism than the Frankfurter Buchmesse (FBM), the Frankfurt Book Fair, held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, over five days each October. FBM is the world’s largest trade fair for books. With over 7,000 exhibitors, thousands of journalists from all over the world, and annually over a quarter of a million visitors, this is also the world’s oldest bookfair. Local booksellers began to exhibit their wares here not long after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press in 1450.' (Graeme Harper : Editorial introduction)

y separately published work icon New Writing vol. 16 no. 3 2019 16974304 2019 periodical issue

'There is a TV news item playing right now about Selah Schneiter, a 10-year old who has just climbed to the summit of El Capitan. She is the youngest to have ever successfully made that climb. El Cap, as it is often called, is a 3000 ft rock formation located in the Yosemite National Park in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Even if you have absolutely no fear of heights, the idea of a 10-year old climbing El Cap is mindboggling. Selah comes from a climbing family (her parents met on an El Cap climbing trip back in 2004); but, for anyone of any age to do a climb like that (sheer granite, straight up) they need tremendous grip and finger strength, exceptional hip and shoulder flexibility, strong knee flexion – and they need a tremendous, unerring, deep-rooted amount of endurance. Summits are generally not considered to be within the reach of 10-year olds. Selah Schneiter's feat challenges our perception of what is possible.' (Graeme Harper. Editorial introduction)

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