Editorial

Since the launch of the first issue of Too Little / Too Hard, we’ve been overwhelmed by the supportive and encouraging feedback from writers, readers and publishers about the project, and are pleased that these articles and discussions on our podcast series continue to be shared widely.

We feel that this platform is what we’d hoped: a place that gives writers the space to articulate complex responses to our themes of literary work, time and value, connecting writing with the architectural fabric of the things that govern us. Through these conversations we aim to show that these questions are not just for writers, academics and cultural workers to consider, but open out into contemporary discussions of subjecthood, morality, ethics, politics, economics, institutions and the role of art, that affect everyone daily. None of these issues are separate or separable from others. The ongoing attempts of a minority of individuals and business interests to desecrate the arts and humanities is a reaction to these very matters that literature leads us to consider: the entanglement of our public and private – individual and collective – selves.

With these concerns and thoughts in mind, we are delighted to present six brilliant articles in this new issue. We are grateful to our contributors who have responded with generosity and care to our themes.

In ‘Allowing Our Hearts To Break’, Sanah Ahsan asks a critical question at our present moment: what is the value of poetry in a time of cruelty? Exploring the embodied relations of grief, poetry and resistance, as well as drawing on their practice as a psychologist, their article is a vital call to mobilise our fragments in the face of the ongoing violence against Palestinians. In ‘Difficult and Bad’, Rachael Allen reflects on her experiences of class, education, publishing and the work of innovative auto-didact writers, to succinctly outline how anti-intellectualism is weaponised against working class writers, and how claims of exceptionalism are used to reinforce class hierarchies in the industry. In her essay ‘In Praise of Bad Writing’ Julia Bell examines the transformative potential of ‘bad writing’ and of the creative writing workshop as a place of refuge and resistance. Creative writing as an academic discipline, she argues, is a radical space not simply for writing but one of communal engagement. In ‘Compression’ Andrea Brady explores relations between somatic experiences of pain, the poetics of compression and the pressures of the punitive neoliberal university as a workplace. If poetry creates an intensified space of meaning, contracted capitalist ‘panic time’ does not densify but erodes both meaning and the body to breaking point. Turning back to publishing, in ‘How Long Can It Take to Fix Publishing’s Diversity Problem?’ Anamik Saha reflects on the process and outcomes of his and Dr Sandra Von Lente’s long-developed research project Rethinking ‘Diversity’ In Publishing, which captured a detailed snapshot of the homogeneity of the British publishing workforce, highlighting the ways in which the culture industry disadvantages writers and workers of colour. Though publishers and corporate shareholders engaged with the report, was this engagement simply an exercise in itself rather than a means to an end? Finally, in ‘On Hosting’ Lara Williams considers how being a host at literary events means entering a space of conditional hospitality and required performativity, highlighting the invisible labour involved in this kind of work.

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue and look forward to releasing the TL/TH podcast in the upcoming months, where we will be in conversation with our contributors discussing these articles further.

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