Jenny Turner

Chris Kraus, a 39-year-old experimental film maker, and Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old college professor from New York, have dinner with Dick ____, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s, at a sushi bar in Pasadena. Dick is an English cultural critic who’s recently relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles. Chris and Sylvère have spent Sylvère’s sabbatical at a cabin in Crestline, a small town in the San Bernardino mountains, some 90 minutes from Los Angeles. Since Sylvère begins teaching again in January, they will soon be returning to New York.

Most writers she knows, Maggie Nelson writes, ‘nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire’. Everywhere she goes – ‘especially if I’m in drag as a “memoirist”’ – such fears appear to be uppermost in everybody’s mind. ‘People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.’ But why the fear of writing the thing you really want to?

Pride, Vision, Ambition, says the pop-up video that recently appeared on the website of Park View Academy in Birmingham. On it, there’s netball, djembe drums, electronics, football, textiles, computing, plus a couple of dissolving-in-hopeless-giggles blooper shots, one with pupils in it, one with staff. ‘I’ve been at Park View for many, many years,’ one staff member says. ‘Happy times, elation times, difficult times, and most recently, challenging times … But I think now with an inspiring leadership, we can look forward to a bright, bright future.’

Chapter​ 6 of Rachel Cusk’s new novel takes place round a large square table at a creative writing course in Athens. The narrator asks each student in turn to tell a story. The fourth is told by a girl called Clio, who believes that every person has a ‘story of life’ with its own ‘themes and events’. Clio uses her contribution to the exercise to prove her...