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

Standing at the bus stop, and my ‘WHAT IS CREATIVE CRITICISM? A COLLOQUIUM. OXFORD. 20 06 04’ tote bag, has a new owner.

Sitting there not in the driver’s seat but a lecture theatre at University College, Oxford, 20 June 2024, my hand writing on the first page of my notebook: how do you invent (form)?

‘What’, Clare Connors asks us, ‘is the grammar of our criticism?’. From this question, several further emerge: who is the presumed ‘our’?

At some point after you grow up, you begin to see people in your memories of others.

These notes, which I took during the What Is Creative Criticism? colloquium, were not my finest intellectual jottings. They would provide scant material for the unfortunate doctoral student in 2074 researching the notebooks and methods of early 21st-century comparatists.

If asked to describe what creative non-fiction is, Jack Parlett would jokingly respond: ‘the thing you write when you’re supposed to be writing about something else.’

What can we make out of it – make it into – what can I make out of this – squint and the blurred edges refine, slightly, pinch my forefingers and thumbs together and raise them to my eyes to telescope, to focus

A day spent writing, arranging, and rearranging shadows.

Might the first-person critical-creative voice be a marker not of identification with one’s subject, nor of the collapsing of critical distance, but rather a different kind of creative act that affords new critical possibilities?