Finding our creative team
One of the keys to the success of I Am A Reader will be the quality of the creative team of writers we put together to work with our readers. It’s a hugely exciting task, but just how do you ensure you get the right authors for a project like this? Clare Brown, Inspire Libraries and Culture Officer, writes about the process of recruiting a team of wonderful writers who will help make I Am A Reader a reality.
Six of the best
One of the most enjoyable parts of planning a project like this is the prospect of putting together the team of creative people we’ll be working with. In this case we’d already secured the services of amazing artist and illustrator Carol Adlam – who will be responding to key reader insights by creating a suite of visual images – and we’d discussed the project pre-Arts Council application with a few writer friends, but now, at last, we could sign up our half dozen authors!
We knew they would be brilliant writers of fiction. But they also needed to be great workshop leaders, proficient at online engagement, and, most importantly, 100% on board with the project... authors for whom the notion of creative reading was not a new concept but a natural way of expressing the relationship between writer and reader, between the words on the page and the mind that consumed them. And we wanted to work with a group which boasted a diversity of voices, writing styles and genres, to reflect the vast range of stories and novels which readers enjoy. Sounds like a tall order? Not when you know where to look…
Premium blend
We’d got an in-theory agreement to be part of I Am A Reader from Leicester-based novelist Mahsuda Snaith and Nottingham’s own Eve Makis before we wrote the application. It was important to demonstrate the calibre of artist the project would involve and, having worked with both writers before, we were completely confident that they were a perfect fit. Then, once funding was confirmed, we took what you could call an ‘organic’ approach to recruiting the final four writers, putting out feelers, making offers one by one, always thinking of the ‘blend’. It didn’t take long – the writers we spoke to couldn’t have been more enthusiastic.
Of course, a collection of six authors can’t represent the entire world of writing. But between them they can demonstrate a plethora of writing genres, cultures, nations, traditions, styles and approaches to their craft. Alongside Mahsuda’s casts of youthful multicultural characters and Eve’s Mediterranean settings, British-Grenadian Jacob Ross writes and edits poetry as well as prose; Notts-born Stephan Collishaw hasn’t yet set a novel in the UK and runs a publishing house for writing from Lithuania; Joanne Limburg is a poet and memoirist who has important words to share about neurodiversity and Clare Harvey’s books focus on stories of British wartime heroism and heartache. This half dozen talented authors are in themselves a celebration of what readers love.
The balance of power
An interest in exploring creative reading is a given – some of these authors are already involved in related academic studies and all of them are fascinated by the reader/writer relationship – but we were surprised by their reactions to the notion of being commissioned by their groups of readers. They were intrigued, excited about the possibilities, and just the tiniest bit scared. Being commissioned is an often welcome pressure, but for that commission to come largely from a group of readers you’ve only met once before, in some cases only online, is something new for everyone. It’s also the element of the project which many reader applicants to the project identify as the key attraction.
What will happen when our writers involve their reader groups in those first moments of inspiration, the point at which the seed of a story starts to take shape? Who will feel the pressure of the moment more; the writer or the readers? How will such an unusual collaborative process play out? Will our readers remember that with great power comes great responsibility?
Come back to find out. . .