SRoB Blog

It’s by no means the first time that Janice Galloway has spoken in front of a literary Edinburgh audience, but beneath the dome of the Central Library’s Reference Library, walls of books all around her, must surely be among the most refined locations on offer in the Scottish capital. Not that Galloway was alone; on stage with her was David Robinson, literary editor for The Scotsman, and before her was a predominantly female, wine-sipping Edinburgh audience! 

Robinson introduced Galloway as “one of our finest writers” and, if there was any doubt about this in the room, it was surely flattened by her impassioned, heart-felt reading from her most recent “anti-memoir”, All Made Up; specifically, the passage when her 17 year old self and then boyfriend were advised on abstinence (until after they were married) by a Catholic GP. “Contraception. He lined the syllables up like soldiers.” The extract underlined the wit and powerful emotion that underscored a deeper, emotional truth — the experience we all share of growing up, of trying to understand the world, of becoming ourselves. 

Espionage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the practice of spying or of using spies, typically by governments to obtain political and military information.” Within our popular culture, this has been crystalised into either the macho braggadocio of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, or the hypnotic mundanity of John Le Carré’s George Smiley. Yet, while both these iconic characters cast their shadows across this latest spoken word event from Illicit Ink, it’s fair to report that the eight writers who performed this evening ably demonstrated that there are more subtle-shadings to the world of espionage than you might expect.

Jennifer Bryce kicked things off amusingly with a Bond-kicking lecture for female KGB agents who must nevertheless “seduce on a budget”. However, any audience members thinking they were in for an evening of super-spy satire were swiftly pulled back by Matt Macdonald’s restrained reportage of conspiracies, paranoia and betrayal in a tale of a fear-torn imperial court and Harrigan, “the greatest assassin who might never have lived”. 

Clichés, it’s often said, should be avoided like the Plague. At the very least they display a lack of freshness, and their usage tends to be considered a badge of inexperience and unoriginality. 

Take, for example, the “shaggy god story”, a term coined by the author and critic Brian W Aldiss in the October 1965 edition of New Worlds magazine to dismiss stories which attempted to explain Biblical concepts in terms of SF tropes. According to Aldiss, a particular “bane of magazine editors” at the time was the unending submission of stories in which, invariably, two astronauts who landed on a lush and virgin world turned out to be called Adam and Eve. 

When better to celebrate the oft-overlooked short story form than on the shortest night of the year? That was the thinking behind Manchester-based indie short story publisher http://www.commapress.co.uk/ when they set up http://www.internationalshortstoryday.org/, with spoken word events set up in Manchester, London, Glasgow and even further afield. 

Scotland’s event (held in Glasgow’s “cool” Mono cafe & bar) was organised with Comma Press’s indie comrades-in-arms Cargo Publishing, who have been known to publish a short story anthology or two in their time. The end result was an all-too-brief glimpse of why short stories still matter. 

It’s claimed that Hemingway once described a six word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) as the best thing he ever wrote, but such concise short stories have seldom gained recognition as a valid, fun literary form. This is one reason for the inaugural national Flash Fiction Day, which was marked and celebrated last night by spoken word events across the UK. 

Edinburgh’s contribution, organised by the Underword crew and MCed by flash fiction maestro Gavin Ingles, brought together some two dozen writers — some experienced hands, others importantly making their public spoken word debut. As a result, levels of microphone technique did vary, but the attentive audience at the Bongo Club enjoyed a generally sharp, nuanced and often humorous selection of tales. 

There were warnings in the Edinburgh International Science Festival’s programme that Brave New Words might “contain rocket science, brain surgery and assorted nuts”. In reality, this evening of spoken word performance from the capital’s premier purveyors of the weird opted instead for — among other things — hungry planets, the mis-use of Class A drugs, giant squids bred by the Royal Navy to tackle German U-boats, international disagreements on stellar projects, everyday life in post-climate change London, the harshest edge of human-IT interfaces, and the life-affirming sound of the cosmos. 

Writers’ Bloc have a justly held reputation for their darkly humorous take on the fantastical and horrific; their background in science fiction is perhaps less known these days, even hidden behind the early jest of introducing each writer-performer with an imaginary PhD in a dubious subject from an even more dubious educational establishment. Yet this evening was an excellent opportunity to show how Science Fiction — often derided by the ignorant as being pure escapism or, even worse, stories that place far too much emphasis on ideas — has an often overlooked role to play in helping us all ask “What if?” when it comes to our ideas of the world. 

Friday at StAnza was filled with bouts of rain, sun and a thin rainbow that hovered over the beach. In the morning’s Border Crossings event, Irish Gaelic poet Rody Gormon and Swedish poet Boel Schenlaer read to an attentive and appreciative crowd. Schelner’s evocative poems about her home country were read in English by Brian Johnstone, giving her work an interesting duality. Gormon read poems about the Scottish landscape in both English and Gaelic, allowing us to see his strength in both languages. 

In the afternoon, I followed a large crowd to the fourth floor of the Byre Theatre to see Alastair Cook’s event ‘Filmpoem Live’. These juxtapositions of film, music and a live reading or voice-over are quiet, poignant successes. Using super 8 or standard millimeter film, Cook combines footage of grass, ocean, sand, hands, churches, walls, skies, tunnels and clouds with specially commissioned narrative poems. Luca Nasciuti ‘s contemporary soundtrack of shuddering bells, well-timed gongs and low notes also sets a reflective mood. Film and poem do not necessarily contain the same images, but are symbiotic in terms of pace, emotion and tone. Jane McKie’s Edwin Morgan Prize winning poem ‘Leper Window’ was matched with footage of foreboding towers and churches. Over eight hundred photographic stills of towns, streets and cars were used in Kevin Cadwallender’s film poem, ‘Better Days’, which narrates a childhood spent in the Northeast of England. ‘Field Notes’ by Colin Will describes looking after his mother in rural Perthshire, and the footage was a blur of forests, deer and figures dressed in black clothing . In the darkness of the theatre, a rapt audience was entranced by Cook’s arresting triad of image, music and poem.

Studying poetry is an ‘education into argument’ says celebrated bard Lavinia Greenlaw in her lecture 'A Good Argument'. To a sold-out venue in St. Andrew’s Town Hall on a mild afternoon, the East Anglia lecturer discussed how poets create argument through exploring emotional tension. Greenlaw melded references to Plato, Aristotle, Robert Frost and Yeats to her own thoughts on how poetry hooks and traps the reader. Dressed in sea-green, Greenlaw’s refined voice explained how poems contain stages of impact, displacement, rearrangement and dislocation. Her speech was exhilarating and elegant, a blend of academe and dramatic recitations of well-known works such as Michael Drayton ‘Since There’s No Help, Come Let Us Kiss and Part’, John Donne’s ‘The Bait’ and Yeats ‘Leda and the Swan’. Greenlaw selected them for their provocative, pressure-inducing devices: Drayton’s lilting rhythms generates emotional ‘slippage’, Donne creates poetic ‘noise’ through his equally silken and rough language, and Yeats, in his violent description of Zeus as a swan assaulting Leda, imaginatively ‘unsettles’ the reader. Slippage, noise and unsettlement are Greenlaw’s terms for how a poet creates argument through tension. Greenlaw’s recitations of these poems were occasionally more engaging than her analysis. Still, some of her phrases will stay with the listener: ‘A bad poem, like a bad argument, doesn’t get you anywhere’, and poets must ‘travel the question’. An intellectual reading that will help those struggling to create an impact with their work.

Doug Johnstone thinks about car crashes. Not because he crashed his parents’ car when he was 18 — too biographical an explanation — but because he finds their life-changing nature fascinating.

In his previous novel, Smokeheads, a car accident is the pivotal moment when a thoughtful Sideways-style novel (which substitutes wine with whisky, and shifts the action from California to Islay) turns into a cross between Deliverance and The Wicker Man. Now, in Hit & Run, the car accident is the starting point for a descent into a personal hell of physical pain and social, familial collapse. 

With most of us living beneath urban light-polluted skies, in which only the brightest stars (and the International Space Station) can sometimes be seen, it’s a rare thing that makes us contemplate the vastness of the cosmos. Arguably, it was therefore (somewhat) portentous that the night before Edinburgh spoken word group Illicit Ink presented an evening of new fiction under the banner, When Words Collide — riffing on the iconic 1950s SF movie When Worlds Collide, naturally — that a large meteor blazed across the skies of Scotland and the North of England.

Despite the March event’s cosmic banner, however, the majority of the evening's writers opted only to go as far as Earth orbit. Not that this suggests a lack of ambition; urbane host Tom Moore began proceedings with an amusing yet also sinister tale of possible alien conspiracy (and/or psychological breakdown) inventively told through a series of answerphone messages. R A Martens opted to extrapolate from the symbolic idea of men being from Mars while women are from Venus; Pippa Goldschmidt, meantime, provided a genuinely touching tale of a child using astronomical facts as a route to understanding their parents’ marital breakdown.

“What is it with you and car crashes?” asks an informed audience member of Doug Johnstone, after he has read from the opening chapter of his new novel, Hit & Run. It’s a fair question, given how they’ve featured prominently in his much of his past work, most particularly the pivotal plot-turning moment in his most recent book, Smokeheads. That an eighteen year old Johnstone once crashed his parents car is bland autobiography. More interestingly, he suggests that a car crash is exactly the kind of out-of-the-blue, potentially life-changing incident that he finds interesting to explore as a writer; how would any of us react in such a situation?

Both he and Helen Fitzgerald are successful thriller writers somewhat bemused to often find themselves marketed as crime writers, even though neither are at all interested in police procedurals — or, as Fitzgerald puts it, that “dumb-ass cop thing”. While somewhat different in style and subject matter, both do share a focus on the ordinary person caught up in extraordinary events, and an interest in people who make bad decisions for what seem to be the best of reasons and are then forced to accept the consequences. You could say that, on occasions, both could be accused of authorial cruelty but, as Johnstone pointed out, it’s not good enough to stick a character up a tree; you have to throw rocks at them as they try to climb down.

It is coming up to a year since the horrendous earthquake and tsunami struck Japan; as a result, it has effectively slipped off the world’s news agenda, despite the very real affects it continues to have on the lives of millions of people around the world. So, even though the Festival’s organisers are also the book’s publishers, well done for giving time and space to A Thousand Cranes: Scottish Writers for Japan. 

Given the scope of this collection of short stories, haiku, poetry and memories, the organisers did a good job in giving their Margins audience a representative flavour of, as co-editor Iain Paton put it, the collection’s offering of “Old Japan, New Japan; and how Japan touches on us all.” While not denying the challenge of anyone writing about such adversity, we were also shown how it is possible to be personally touched by distant events.

With its indie-music ethos, one of the defining characteristics of the Margins Book and Music Festival is its bringing together of established and up-and-coming talent. This year, there was possibly no better example of this than an afternoon’s teaming up of the award-winning and much loved author William McIllvanney — whose novels include Laidlaw, The Big Man and Weekend — and Allan Wilson, whose debut short story collection Wasted in Love was rightfully published last year to great acclaim. 

Although at very different stages of their careers, both authors shared a reluctance to talk about their current work, presumably preferring to keep the telling of those stories to when they’re actually writing them. That said, Wilson did choose to read an extract from his current project — a novel called Meat — which focused on an uncomfortable encounter between a young man and a couple of Strathclyde Police’s finest. After a quick straw poll of the audience, he then read a short story ‘The Marijuana Room’, which perfectly encapsulates his nuanced take on the highs and lows often overlooked within the apparent banalities of our everyday lives.

It’s a sad fact of life that good writers are by no means always the best people to read their work out in public, even assuming they want to. So, it was perhaps for the best that the team behind Scotland’s current top dog in literary magazines — already getting on for three years old — opted to use some professional performers. 

The actors Keith Macpherson and Nalini Chetty (Zinnie Hassoun in BBC Scotland’s River City, apparently) took turns, and sometimes together, to read a selection of poems and stories from Gutter magazine’s sixth issue. Unrushed, nuanced and engaging, these two talented performers ensured that the authors’ words were allowed to sparkle within the dull-bricked shadows of the Arches, to glorious effect. After such a show I would have immediately bought a copy if I didn’t know I’d be soon getting my subscriber’s copy. (And, indeed, a reviewer’s copy too.)

It reflects well on its organisers that they chose to underline their championing of new writing by giving the opening slot of the 2012 Margins Book and Music Festival to what was, essentially, an unknown quantity. 

Announced last autumn, Octavius magazine aims to publish new creative writing by tertiary education students across Scotland. Much of Scotland’s literary world (or at least those parts likely to turn up in some form at the Margins festival) have been very supportive of Octavius, warmly encouraging this latest example of fresh “Let’s put the show on here!” creativity. Indeed, some of those involved have already been invited to take part in a panel discussion about new Scottish writing during the Write Now programme at this year’s Aye Write! book festival.

The National Library of Scotland’s Inspiration events are based on a very simple idea; a notable personage is, essentially, let loose among the NLS’s extensive collections and asked to select and then talk about a half-dozen or so “treasures” from the shelves that reflect some of the people, events or artistic works that have inspired them during their careers.

In the last two years, the author Ian Rankin, the multi-talented television presenter, actor and author Michael Palin and the much-admired stage and screen actor Brian Cox have shared their inspirations with keen Edinburgh audiences. However, it was surely about time that a woman was given the chance, and who better than the much-loved poet, playwright and dramatist, Scotland’s very own Makar, Liz Lochhead? 

Europe’s largest public celebration of science, the Edinburgh Science Festival, is in the process of reinventing itself, thanks in no small part to the input of new Deputy Director Amanda Tyndall. According to Festival Director Simon Gage, Tyndall has already revitalised the festival’s core adult programme, bringing together a wider range of voices, and a renewed focus on subjects and ideas that are relevant to people’s lives today — for example, the “Food for Thought” strand of events and “InMotion”, which celebrates the science of human movement and performance in relation to sport, technology and dance in this Olympian year. 

Given that, for centuries, scientific debate and discovery has been reliant on the written word, it’s also fitting that Tyndall has increased the involvement of not only writers of science fact but also science fiction: in one event, for example, SF writers Ken MacLeod and Justina Robson join ethicist Andy Miah and the sociologist Professor Steve Fuller to discuss the social, political and cultural challenges arising from our increasing ability to re-engineer ourselves through technology, drugs and genetic manipulation. (National Museum of Scotland Auditorium, Friday 13 April, 5.30pm.) 

StAnza — Scotland's International Poetry Festival, now in its 15th year — certainly can’t be accused of resting on its laurels in these cash-strapped times. Well supported by a host of funders, sponsors and other partners, this year’s programme runs to five full days (14-18 March), and features around 100 events — and more than 70 poets, along with many more artists, filmmakers and writers from across Scotland, the rest of the UK, Europe and beyond.

Sometime, poetry and poets can still seem elitist, remote and (worst of all) pretentious, but the organisers of this year’s programme are clearly determined to push away at such preconceptions. There will be more installations and exhibitions around the town than ever before, while visitors arriving at either Leuchars train station or St Andrews Bus Station will know they’re in the right place when they’re greeted by temporary installations of poetry. 

Scotland has a higher number of book/literary festivals, per capita, than any other country in the world, at least according to the good people at bookfestivalscotland.com. At least 40 literary, poetic and storytelling festivals can be found the length and breadth of Scotland, ranging from pertinently local events held in libraries, church halls and community centres to the bustling tents of Charlotte Square that house the Edinburgh International Book Festival — arguably still the largest event of its kind in the world. 

Among all these literary celebrations, possibly the most innovative new arrival was the Margins Book & Music Festival, organised by Glasgow-based independent Cargo Publishing — themselves recent winners of The List Magazine’s Best Newcomer 2011 Award.