Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)

'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)