In search of a Scottish Writers Centre

Oh, for a warm and dry centre for Scotland's writers. Or several.
Earlier this week I attended my first DiScOmBoBuLaTe (or is it dIsCoMbObUlAtE? DiScomBoBulaTe?) at The Arches in Glasgow. It was a great show. I've rarely seen such a crowd at such a gathering. Probably having a proper bar, there, helped. Guest readers included Ryan Van Winkle, whose banter with the audience had me laughing (not just me, of course) and whose poems had the right kind of mix of attention grabbing wit and sincerity that are ideal for performance.  Headlining the evening was Bernard Mac Laverty, that most delicate of writers (despite his labourer's hands) who managed - though perhaps only just - to pull off that no-no of short story writing, a packed livingroomful of characters.

I've got so many bones I could pick with the event but that would be negative when my overall reaction to the content was positive. Oh, go on. I have to air them. Controversy is the haemoglobin of blogging.

First - why is it that so many Glasgow-based writers think the whole world should be measured by how poorly it compares to Glasgow? As a Glaswegian, may I just pass on this advice? 'Get over yourself! Everyone else shares the same emotions, the same big heart and small mindedness as Glaswegians, in equal measures, and everyone else is a mix of good and bad just like a typical Glaswegian! Get off your pedestal: you're just one city in a crowded world of cities; no better, no worse - just normal. Get yourself a bus pass, fellow Glaswegian writer, listen to your fellow travellers and look at the view from the windows.' Thank you.

Second - football is enjoyed by many people the world over. This grumble is closely related to the first one, so I'll stop here.

Third - what is it about people who grew up in centrally heated housing in privileged western society? Why is it that slummy venues like The Arches are popular? Mildew on the ceilings, bare brick walls, cracked cement floors whose only covering is the pebble dash of chewing gum? The chill of damp that seeps in through your clothing and the spores of mould that penetrate your lungs? Is it just my impression, or is there a manifest desire among those who grew up in comfort to relax in dirty, slovenly, shabby places? (While I'm on the offensive, let me also mention Tchai Ovna, a place which also celebrates live literature but whose soft furnishings give rise to repressed memories of squats and student flats and tatty, flea-infested, bug-infested housing. Not mine, of course. We were always clean *ahem*. As I'm sure theirs are, she said, worrying about libel.)

There seems to be some kind of reversal, here; it must be a generational thing. My parents were raised in crowded beds set-in behind doors or curtains in crowded rooms in crowded room-and-kitchen flats off wooden lobbies in crowded, TB and whooping cough infested tenements - in Glasgow, coincidentally (see first grumble). They yearned for cleanliness, clean lines and space. A square of carpet, perhaps. Cups that were shop-bought rather than exchanged in return for old clothes in a barter with the rag-man. Only two to a bed instead of three.

Now, two generations later, maybe each having their own bedroom with ensuite has led to a feeling of loss and isolation. Maybe that's why so many of today's twenty and thirty year olds seek out cheek by jowl crowding in damp, dingy dungeons like The Arches sub-railway-station.

Could be, of course, that they flock there because there's almost nowhere else to see established and establishing writers in performance. Fair point. So, what we need is a dry, warm, eco-friendly, modern, twenty-first century Scottish Writers Centre. Step forward the supporters with your money, your skills and your enthusiasm proffered in the palm of your hand...

Workshop at Clarkston Library

The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival is running till 22 October. It's a super event, now in its third year, and already it's grown to be a significant cultural event with activities across the country. The aim is to transform attitudes to mental health and it's about time too. With headlines in the last two weeks about a vulnerable mother commiting suicide and taking her daughter with her because of constant derision and abuse by local bad boys, and two fourteen and fifteen year old care-home residents leaping, hand in hand, 180 feet to their death from the Erskine Bridge, it's clear that mental health issues often go unseen and that those suffering loss of hope or emotional pain often feel unsupported.

The thing that struck me when I was browsing the Festival brochure, though, was how up-beat the events are. The accent is on the positive: about self-expression through the arts and about having fun with it.

I was invited to run a creative writing workshop at Clarkston Library as part of East Renfrewshire Council's contribution to the Festival. What an experience! All good, from my point of view. Nineteen people turned up to the workshop, whose age ranged from Teenage to Third Age. Nineteen people is a massive turnout in creative writing workshop terms and with the workshop scheduled for one hour, an intensive - and I think entertaining - session followed.

Favourite of the evening was probably my collaborative writing exercise. This simple ice-breaking exercise has gone down well wherever I've run it, in university settings, Ladies Who Lunch writing groups and even among Spanish school children learning English language at the British Council School in Madrid. The principle is this: group the participants into threes or fours; give each person in the group a sheet of A4 paper with a different single line of prose on it, e.g. 'I jumped out of bed. Who was banging on the door?' or 'The smell hit me first.' (Although ' "My dear Lucinda," James said, tilting my chin ever so gently up towards the light' is also surprisingly popular!); tell everyone to read what's written and add the next sentence, then pass the sheet of paper to the person on their left; after about four or five sentences have been added, (depending on the time scale) announce that the next person to write on each sheet has to bring the story to an end.

After this, the group should read all the stories produced by their group and the facilitator can either ask each group to choose one favourite to be read aloud to the whole workshop, or if time permits, all the stories can be read out, e.g. all the 'smell' stories written by the different groups can be read one after the other.

This exercise works well as an ice-breaker because people are forced to engage with the others at the table. It works well in creative writing terms because it shows that stories can be generated out of nowhere, from random prompts. It also counters any reserve people have about showing their writing to others, and any fears of rejection, because these stories are all collaborative - so everyone in the group has played a part in any weak ones, but they've also all played a part in creating the strong ones, too.

At Clarkston Library, this exercise lasted almost twenty-five minutes but it was definitely the favourite of the night. After this, we looked at individual writing. I asked the participants to look at their hand and to write about it for a few minutes. This writing wasn't for sharing (I told them at the beginning). We discussed the kind of things they'd written about - i.e. how much was about observation of the physical 'object', looking for fine details, and how much the prompt made them delve into memories. Several actually looked forward through the generations, taking the connection of 'my hand' and linking it with the hand of a grandchild. In a workshop specifically geared towards mental well-being, this kind of exercise begins to open up the idea of discovery of 'self'. The short duration of the exercise (and the fact that it's followed a fun, collaborative one) keeps the introspection light.

After some discussion of observation and of sensory perception, I distributed a few signs of autumn to each table (wild rose twig with ripe hips, opened beech nut pods and fallen leaves, hawthorn, twig of elder berries) and introduced the group to Japanese haiku. Again, they were told that this next piece of writing wouldn't be shared, though time did allow a few volunteers to read aloud.

Writing about one's hand and writing haiku seem to me to work particularly well in writing groups where mental well-being is the theme. It's important, always, to gently warn against delving deeply into harmful memories. Writers are generally not qualified counsellors. However, it's clear that introspection can be a significant part of the desire to write. And part of the healing process. Writing helps us process our life experience and helps us come to terms with the past. It doesn't work when people become bogged down in going over and over old wounds and writing group facilitators should always warn against this. As the old song says, 'You've gotta accentuate the positive.' Keeping a writer's notebook can help with this because in it all the fleeting impressions of each new day can be jotted down. And the little observations of the natural world that are recorded there can be developed into haiku: an art form that encapsulates a moment of serenity and change. Of course, adhering to the strict form (17 syllables over three lines of 5, 7 and 5) and the care over word choice in such a restricted poem allow an opportunity to struggle to express an idea, an image, an emotion - in a vessel which is ultimately polished and beautiful: a little piece of perfection created by the writer alone.

My thanks to Gillian Hamilton and East Renfrewshire for inviting me to give the workshop. Thanks to her colleague Alison who helped out on the night. Thanks, too, to all the participants, whom I hope enjoyed the whirlwind tour we took of creative writing. And finally, thanks to Live Literature Funding, operated through the Scottish Book Trust, which operates a subsidy which enables local authorities and community groups to engage writers like me to take part in events like this with a professional level of remuneration.

The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival runs till 22 October.

The academic year begins again

It's always such a buzz when the list of names arrives. Eighteen strangers, all with their individual histories, horror stories, happy times and hopes. The course I teach is managed online and there's a lot of technical 'stuff' to get through before the real studying can begin. Sometimes, students can be put off by this, yet, year after year, these same students look back with satisfaction not only for having passed the course but for having passed the ICT initiation, too!

Creative writing. Navel gazing? A way of making millions? A desire to express the thing that hurts the most (and maybe expunge it)? With creative writing courses so widespread now, the odds of all these students achieving fame are remote yet some will reach it. For the others, creative writing won't pay any bills but it will bring rewards and riches. The non-financial kind. The most important kind. The 'human' kind. Like all creative pursuits, writing should first and foremost be a way for all of us as individuals to explore this experience of being alive and being human, here, now, in this place and time. No other person has the same experience or the same view of the world and that makes each of those eighteen people whose names are on my list of new A215 students unique. I'm looking forward to reading about their life, experience and imagination over the next eight or nine months and to helping them take a step nearer achieving their writing dream.

Writing tips - Do something different!

It's hard to be sparkly in your writing if you don't feel sparkly in yourself. If you're looking for inspiration or motivation to write, these tips might help you.

• Do something different!
• Go for a bus-ride to see what you can see (and smell, and touch, and hear).
• Take a walk in the daylight.
• Sit in a crowded fast-food shop to sharpen your ear to young dialogue.
• Find a tree and hug it (and describe in your notebook exactly what your senses picked up).
• Lie on your living room floor for five minutes. Ask yourself, 'what if...?'
• Take a walk in the dark.
• Read a short story.
• Spend half an hour on a noisy station concourse.
• Give yourself a break. No one can produce sparkly writing all the time!

Guttered

Looking forward to Thursday because that's when the first edition of Gutter Magazine comes out and my story Frozen Waste is due to appear in it. Launch is to be held in Mono, the vegan café-bar-restaurant in King's Court in Glasgow at 6.30pm. Big names like Scar Culture writer Toni Davidson and Ewan Morrison were asked to write stories for this first issue and people like Alan Warner, Kirsty Gunn and Kathleen Jamie are on the editorial board, so here's hoping the mag attracts lots of critical attention. Freight Design are publishing it and they do a great job with everything they touch. They did the 'Knuckle End' anthology a few years ago, too.

Anyway, the launch will have some free drink and nibbles, some short readings and socialising. Looking forward to it. 'Frozen Waste', incidentally, was written as a first draft about six years ago but every now and then I pulled it out of the drawer and tidied it up, cutting it down from its original 4000 words to try to squeeze it into various shapes of magazines and competitions. When I saw Gutter's mission statement and requirements, it struck a chord with me as it fits a lot of the themes and socio-political issues I'm interested in so I gave the story another little spring clean, slimmed it down to 3000 words and sent it off.

Here's the Gutter website: http://www.guttermag.co.uk/

Hey, well, here we are. Summer 2009 and I've finally got round to setting up this blog, which I signed up for months ago. What does that suggest for the future? Regular posts or what?

I've chosen this photo because it looks like a kindly me, maybe a slightly granny-ish look, and that's probably appropriate. But never judge a book by its cover!

Over the next wee while, I hope to be able to use this blog to keep in touch with friends old and new, including former students from my classes with The Open University. So, if you're reading this, why not get in touch and let me know how you're doing? I'd love to hear.