The day begins with unknowingness. Mary Cappello speaks of study as a suspension of certainty, a mode of existence that denies the definitive.

Into this space of unknowingness flows invention. The creative critic must find new forms for such nescience. Their work and its products are a meandering—a word that my notes, at least, remember Mary using—a meandering through the mind of the writer.

My role in this room is not to present criticism but to assist it. Today, I will be distributing programmes, chasing catering, arranging tables. I will step out occasionally to admit a latecomer and leave some panels early to make sure that we all have something to eat.

I must sit with a not knowing that comes from a not hearing everything that was said. How did that paper end? Where did the next one begin? I fill the gaps with my own meandering conjecture. I gather the post-panel chatter that trips down the stairs for a tea break and the retrospective summaries that surface after dinner. I constellate a gap-toothed version of the criticism that everyone else encounters.

“Inventing a form requires self-consciousness in a way that using an existing one does not.” I record Mary’s sentence assiduously. The personal is everywhere. This is no longer a provocative statement. Meandering through the mind of a writer makes every encounter with their criticism an encounter with their self-construction. The personal is all over this colloquium.

I am listening through my own critical project, the doctoral thesis on autofiction that I will submit three weeks after this symposium.

Somewhere in there, I have written “Deploying the ‘auto’ is a way of placing […] the conditions of production at the forefront of creative practice.” I was talking about fiction.

Nevertheless,

Jack Parlett speaks of a relief released when motivation enters a project to explain itself.

I write, ‘auto’.

Patrick McGuinness proposes that creative criticism narrates the experience of reading.

I write, ‘auto’.

Claire Connors cautions against associating creativity with genius and the premium put on its employable, entrepreneurial associations.

All these ‘auto’s annotate a creative criticism that considers the conditions of critical labour. What is it to create the conditions for such criticism to flourish?

What forms fit, are fit for, the non-critical work that sustains the necessary state of unknowingness,

and

the kinds of uncertainty that are a corollary of our critical conditions,

and

It is past 12:30. We break for lunch in forty minutes, and Ronnie and I need to walk over to M&S to collect 400 sandwiches. On High Street, the daylight intensifies. Daytrippers fan themselves with ephemera, and the cars glint squintingly.

Later, I rejoin my seat before another panel. Deborah Bowman has moved to the neighbouring chair. “Your paper was on the ‘I’,” I introduce myself. “I would have loved to hear it. I think it might have connected to my work on autofiction.” The moderator motions for a beginning before she can reply.