List members,

About eight months ago I raised the possibility of establishing a Centre for
Contemporary Writing. I canvassed the list for opinion as to how such a
centre might operate, and many kindly back-channelled some useful ideas.
The intellectual generosity of most list members is to be treasured. Can we
please stop finding reasons to leave the list and move on? Here's one way
forward.

The proposal for the Centre for Contemporary Writing has now gone to the
funding bodies and we hope to have it running October 2002 to 2007. The
working party responsible for this document includes myself, Denise Riley,
Jeremy Treglown, Jon Cook, and David Dabydeen. It will be based
(physically) at Warwick University and at the University of East Anglia.  It
will also have an interactive website as well as its own mailbase. Through
reading events, publishing activity, summer schools and conferences we
will also ensure its work links up to other institutions such as Arvon, and
the universities of Lancaster, Manchester Metropolitan, Bangor and Bath
Spa.

The Centre will combine creative writing with literary criticism to develop
new projects in the study and practice of contemporary writing, creativity
and authorship. Its engagement with cultures of writing outside the
academy will occur at a time when contemporary writing is assuming new
forms as a result of technological and cultural change. Imaginative creation
remains importantly located within the major genres of fiction, poetry and
drama. But these literary genres interact with film and TV, and with IT. The
centre will be concerned with assessing the significance of these new
genres and media and the ways these affect cultural understandings of the
distinction between critical and creative writing. This assessment calls for
research into the complex and sometimes forgotten histories that inform
our own contemporary practice.

Denise and I are mainly concerned with the running of the centre and also
with two (out of four) five-year research projects. The first is 'Histories of
Creative Writing in Higher Education' which Denise is directing. Another is
a multidisciplinary investigation of creativity involving Denise and myself, as
well as a number of novelists, poets, psychologists, philosophers,
educationalists and social theorists. What I'd like to ask the list is how
they might answer some of the research questions we're looking at.

Creative writing is an active process performed by artists in several genres
(including this mailbase). How might the constituent elements of this
performative process be identified and explored in theory and practice?
What conditions promote or hinder creative work? How is research
understood and undertaken by imaginative writers? While most artists value
elements of randomness and intuition which can make their work seem
intellectually unsystematic, the hisory of science (and my own experience
of being a research scientist) suggests that these questions are not
peculiar to the arts.

Which is where Britpo could come in again. A joint Warwick/UEA series of
writing workshops will be established. It will bring the investigative and
creative methodologies and insights of our artistic and scientific
communities to bear on the exploration of the performance of writing, both
as metaphor and practice. Individual workshops will draw upon existing
experimental practice in the contemporary arts. Precedents and examples
include this valuable list, and the Purdue/Milano Online Writing Laboratory;
the Iowa Writers Workshop; OULIPO; and Katherine Hayles' studies of
scientific field models and literary strategies in the twentieth century. The
project will take place both in a series of summer schools and in more
continuous year-round work which members will be invited to. Do let me
know your responses to any of this.

I repeat the offer of complimentary tickets for Britpo members at Warwick
writers' events. This is not for lack of audience; most events attract over
100 paying members of the public and I've been surprised by the low pick-
up rate by members. So, please add a rare reading by Tadeusz Rozewicz
on 16 May. I have also booked Harry Matthews and Caryl Eshleman for
2002. The events you are invited to are: Lavinia Greenlaw (9 May); Kit
Wright (14 May); Tadeusz Rozewicz (16 May); Geoffrey Hill (22 May and
lecture 23 May); Charles Tomlinson (10 October); Roy Fisher (17 October);
Galway Kinnell (31 October). I'll leave the fiction writers and dramatists to
their own devices,

David.













David Morley
Senior Teaching Fellow
The Warwick Writing Programme,
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick,
Coventry,  UK,  CV4 7AL.
Telephone: 024 76523346  [log in to unmask]
IF URGENT: Mobile 07901 618 023
You can also reach me anywhere on [log in to unmask]