Books, coffee, Tim O'Brien and the troublesome matter of excellence (not necessarily in that order)

I’m back in the UK, munching on cheese at the Sourced Market in St. Pancras, waiting for my train home to Leicester, and downing another coffee to help keep awake after the overnight flight from Toronto. It’s good to be back—I think—but I was sorry to leave Toronto. It didn’t feel long enough.

The final day of the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference was excellent and highly stimulating: there were some fascinating papers, and the day ended with an extraordinary talk by Tim O’Brien, who managed in half and hour to say more about the art of writing fiction than many writers could manage to say (myself included) in whole weeks of to-ing and fro-ing.

The following day we spent with writer friends from the conference, eating an enormous brunch, and then visiting the book fair at St. Lawrence Market. The market is claimed by National Geographic to be the No. 1 market in the world, although I’m not entirely sure what that might mean. Anyway, I managed to pick up a nice hardback of Alice Munro, as well as falling into various interesting conversations with some of the stall-holders, a couple of whom I may be continuing my conversations with when they are over in Leicester (strangely enough) in the next week or two.

I was sad to say goodbye at the airport; but a few days away, conversations with fellow writers and a change of scene have—taken together—done wonders for the imagination. The trouble with working as a writer (or, to be frank, working at all) in the thrusting, forward-looking, business-friendly, customer-focussed, efficiency-obsessed, everything-must-be-done-yesterday, excellence-intoxicated environment that is twenty-first century higher education is that it is not necessarily an environment that is particularly conducive to thought. And so it is necessary, from time to time, to get away. Certainly, on this occasion, it has been very fruitful. I’ve managed to resolve a couple of problems with a still very tentative novel project that I’m brewing, and I’m brimming with thoughts for possible things to work on in the future. And I’ve brought back with me a large stack of books that I am looking forward to working through. So I’ve got plenty to get on with in terms of reading and writing. Now the only thing that can stand in my way now is that pesky perpetual demand for excellence…