A Perilous Road to Success

The Creative Hub writing centre in Auckland recently celebrated its (pandemic delayed) 10th Anniversary. On the night, Director John Cranna told the tawdry story of its origins ... 

"The Hub didn’t have particularly auspicious beginnings. In fact the dream of an Auckland-based writing centre run by successful local authors, almost died at birth ... 

A few years before we founded the Creative Hub, I’d been invited to set up a Masters of Creative Writing at AUT University. I’d been chair of the Auckland Society of Authors for four years, and knew a few authors, so I got together a guerilla army of writers, and off we went. 

It was fantastic to be able to invite authors of the calibre of Tessa Duder, Roger Hall and Owen Marshall to come in to teach. It was a lot of fun, and within two years the course had been voted by students the best taught post-graduate course in the university.

And then we hit something of a perfect storm. 

John Cranna and guest ... 

To my surprise I didn’t really like the university environment. I’d come from a community activist background, working for many years in impoverished inner city environments. I didn’t like the elitism; I didn’t like the sense that academics were a cut above the rest of humanity and most of all I didn’t like the fact that my students, many of whom were mature people, who had lived rich and varied lives, and sometimes traumatic and brave lives, were obliged to tug their forelocks to the hierarchy. 

And then like something out of an Isabel Allende novel, my biggest backer, who had helped me establish the degree, the Pro-Vice Chancellor, who happened also to be an Anglican minister, and a lovely man, clearly a bit too lovely for his own good, decided to elope to South America with the Dean of my Faculty.

I think he was an astronomer, and I like to think they ended up on a mountain top in Chile, gazing amorously at the stars …  

Which was all very well, but not great for my writing centre, because next the Global Financial Crisis arrived, and the University decided to shut down a number of programmes, and make many staff redundant ... and we were the first to get the chop. 

It didn’t help that my chief ally was rumoured to be on a Chilean mountain top, gazing romantically at the stars with my Dean! 

To be honest, I kind of envied him. 

So we were shut down and with my guerilla army of authors, I established the Creative Hub. The first five years were tough, financially. You don’t start a boutique creative writing centre in a godless, commercial town like Auckland if you want to become a millionaire. Trust me.

But it was still a lot of fun. However, we all have to eat, and I was beginning to get pretty desperate. I had sold my house, and used the capital to establish the Hub, something my accountant told me was madness. And he was right of course, as accountants always are. So things were looking pretty grim for a time. The same year the university centre was closed down, I also lost in quick succession both my parents and my fiancée. Even my two cats ran off, never to be seen again. 

So now you know why I bang on so much about the Hero’s Journey in classes. But as you're aware, after the lowest point in the Hero’s Journey, the descent into hell, comes the reprieve, an upswing in hope, and the protagonist begins to see faint glimmerings of light at the end of the tunnel. 

Suddenly our earliest graduates started to pick up prizes in national writing competitions. What I’d left out of my calculations, of course, was how long it takes to grow a writer to publication standard. 

The prospect of having to work at a car wash, or cook up meth for a living like the teacher protagonist Walter White in the series Breaking Bad, began to recede. I’d had to evict a lot of meth and heroin dealers in my years working in Kings Cross, London, and their life-style didn’t look particularly attractive. 

Breaking Bad - unattractive lifestyle ...

Many of you will be aware of the Sunday Star Times short story award, which is the best-known and longest running award of its kind in the country. Also the richest for many years, with big prize money. Graduates of all the writing programmes in the country – including the five Masters of Creative Writing at Universities – plus many well-known authors - enter it – often up to 1,000 entries every year.

First our graduate Eileen Merriman won prizes in it for a couple of years and then began to publish a string of novels with Penguin Random House – culminating in 13 novels as of this year. She’s also just won the 2024 Booklovers Award for her latest novel. 

And then in 2018, our graduates Fiona Sussman, Eileen and Kathryn Van Beek won 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes in the Sunday Star Times Award. The next year we won first prize again with Jill Varani, who had graduated from our Thirty Week Fiction Course only a month or two before, and had been recipient of our first Young Writers Scholarship. 

The next year we won a prize again with Katy Newton, another graduate. I’m delighted to say both Fiona and Jill are here tonight and are going to read the opening couple of minutes of their national 1st prize winning stories. 

So after quite a few barren years, the descent into hell, and the impending dole for me, the Creative Hub had finally arrived. 

Around that time, Waikato University established an even richer short story award called the Sargeson, with a first prize of  $10,000, which attracted the most entries of any award in the country. One of our graduates, Leaanne O’Brien, promptly won that too with a powerful and harrowing story of a sex worker whose father turns up at her place of work. An awkward moment, as you can imagine. 

We’d hope to have Leeanne here tonight to read from her story along with Fiona and Jill, but she has recently had a terrible car accident and a nine hour operation on her back. Speaking of Hero’s Journeys. 

Now, as of 2024, many of our graduates have won national and even international prizes, including the top NZ short story awards and also the Commonwealth Short Story Award – with Dr Himali McInnes. I don’t know what it is about doctors, but a lot of these prize-winning graduates are medical folk. 

Fiona Sussman told me a while ago that most useful thing I ever said to her was: “What makes you think, Fiona, that it will take you any less time to become a successful writer than it took you to become a doctor.” 

Jessica Wilson - Chef de Cuisine for 70

I told her I couldn’t believe I’d said anything quite so rude – but my friends tell me that it's very likely I said something that rude. Which is very hurtful!

Before you return to the banquet prepared for you by Jess Wilson, I’d like to thank all the tutors who have helped make the Hub the success it is today. The Hub is at its heart a collaborative venture, a cooperative venture, the sum of all the talented writers and editors who work here. 

These tutors currently include a number of our graduates such as Fiona Sussman, Eileen Merriman, Rosetta Allan and Ann Glamuzina; plus former Penguin publisher Harriet Allan, Lynn Davidson, Jessica Wilson, Stuart Hoar, David Howard, Judith White, Rose Carlyle, Stephen Campbell, Ruby Porter, Sarah Ell, Zoe Meager and Elizabeth Smither. 

Without these talented people, and the care and devotion they show to our students, the Hub simply could not function.

Creative Hub tutors and authors at our celebration ...