Season One: Old Dog, New Sticks

Or, what’s behind this virtual door and why it’s here.

This is not where you’re supposed to be. The museum is out there — the letters, the scholarship, the Victorian Scotland, the man who wrote about it. This is the door at the back of the museum. You tried it. Here we are. This is the curator’s personal space.

In a play I wrote rather a long time ago, the cast of which was Wittgenstein and Schrödinger, I used the famous Wittgenstein quote ‘all the world is in the box.’ I disagreed. It was a play about the quantum nature of boxes. It was personal reflection. Looking back, I spent forty years building boxes — plays, screenplays, books: contained worlds with rules and edges and things inside them that the audience didn’t know about until I decided they should. And my artistic process was to open those boxes. Sometimes flatten them. Professionally, over a period of thirty years I’ve been opening one particular box: Samuel Rutherford Crockett, Victorian Scottish novelist. In the past decade as curator I have been literally opening archive boxes, finding eight hundred letters, and an insight into a literary career that peaked brilliantly and was then comprehensively forgotten, and is now — slowly, carefully — being made visible again.

Then a new kind of box arrived. A box of cats and dogs.

Conversations with my CAT is philosophical dialogue where two voices think out loud about what is actually happening when a creative writer works with a Cognitive Assistive Tool. It follows the form I know best: the rules of dramatic dialogue, applied to something genuinely new.

Fetching Sticks is an essay strand offering dogged, occasionally digressive thinking about tools, practice, vocabulary, and what it means to bring a CAT into serious literary work. The Old Dog is me. The new sticks are what I’m learning to fetch.

Both strands are honest about how they were made. Everything here is the product of what we might call ‘extended integrated writing practice’ — which is the accurate if unwieldy way of saying: I didn’t write this alone, and I’m not pretending I did.

You are not (necessarily) the primary audience for any of this. The primary audience is anyone interested in what it actually looks like when a particular kind of mind — formed by dramatic writing, publishing, philosophy, and nearly half a century of playing with and in nineteenth-century literary boxes — takes a new tool seriously.

You’re the curious one who tried the door.

Come in, then.

It’s cats and dogs. No rain forecast.

The dramatic Conversations with my Cat now available to read at your leisure.

The full first season of Fetching Sticks now available (you guessed it) to read at your leisure