One of the first things I discovered was that there were two ways of thinking about creativity: ‘little-c’ and ‘Big-C’. Little-c was everyday creativity, the type of activities that the average person could do, such as building a bookcase or learning to play popular songs on the guitar. Big-C was reserved for geniuses. The dichotomy – which was first articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – made sense to me. But it would not have been especially helpful for my situation. I wasn’t a genius, so as far as creative writing was concerned, that meant I was lumped in with everyone else – those engaged in little-c. If I wouldn’t be able to reach a level of consistently publishing my creative work, then it seemed to me that I had definitely made the right choice to give up my creative ambitions.
I didn’t know it then, but I had been susceptible to a ‘genius bias’ – that is, I assumed that the only creativity of note was that of brilliant creators. I didn’t value my own creativity enough. My writing was clearly not at the Big-C level, but I would come to find that the category of little-c was too vast to sufficiently describe what the majority of people engage in. I would eventually tackle this problem as a researcher of creativity, emerging with a more nuanced (and continually developing) view of what creativity can be. I will explain that view further – but first, it’s worth examining some other common misconceptions about creativity that any of us can fall victim to, and how these incorrect beliefs can unconsciously shape and narrow our perspective on creativity.
In a novel based around a film buff, actual films naturally play a part in structuring the narrative. Like novels, films mean different things to different people, provoke contrasting responses. My wish was to describe the many movies mentioned in Brian in a form which reflected the emotions of my central character, whilst also communicating accurately something of the films’ original essence, and at the same time not undermining cinemagoers’ individual memories of the work. To achieve this I needed my text to have a certain openness and freedom from rigidity. Although the chronology is accurate and all the films titled and attributed correctly, the narrative style allows for focus often on lesser-known aspects and for the insertion of mild inventions. Told entirely from close to the closed point of view of Brian, the isolated buff, the book’s views on life in general and film in particular are his.
We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work – in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation.
Her newest collection of fiction writing, Our Strangers, reflects this new consciousness in subtle ways. The pieces here—143 pieces in total—have a lot in common with her earlier work: Most are just a page or two in length, with a handful of very sparse prose pieces with line breaks. There are series that run through the collection—scrupulous descriptions of somebody’s distant relations to famous people, vignettes of moments of annoyance in a marriage—as well as pieces that are revisions, or alternate tellings, of previous ones. But if she continues to pay heed to the smallest, unturned details of the problems of domestic life, she affords them with less importance than before. With insistence, she returns to themes of plant and animal life, community, and old age.
This story is a fictional account of the life of Ernest Hemmingway’s third son, born Gregory Hemmingway, who struggled with gender dysphoria, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. The story is of a person straining deeply to understand themselves. From childhood through to struggles as a doctor and eventually the loss of medical license due to alcoholism, four divorces, and a constant internal conflict. There are feelings here of a person on the brink of breaking apart.
And yet one doesn’t need to know any of that to enjoy this book. It is beautifully well done. It’s rare to find a fictional account of real life that moves with grace and passion and yet tells us something profound about the mind, perhaps even gives a glimpse — moments — of what it feels like to be human. Russell Franklin uses his talent to tell that fractured story with the empathy normally reserved for our family, creating a convincing work of fiction.
A Forest Journey is a classic because it has stood the test of time. It’s a paean to forests and a reminder to us all that civilizations have crumbled when the land reached its limit. After all the destructive storms, floods, and fires of the past decade, we shouldn’t need reminding that we exploit the Earth at our peril. Forests are a gift.