Lucky

So excited. I've won one of this year's Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowships and will be spending the whole month of July living in the Hotel Chevillon at Grez-sur-Loing, seventy kilometres S.E. of Paris.

The Fellowships have been awarded by the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Arts Council for the last dozen or so years and I've applied at least twice before, so I'm really thrilled that this time, I've been successful.

The Hotel Chevillon is run by a Swedish consortium as an artists' retreat now but in its nineteenth century heyday it was a hotel or lodging house which was often frequented by writers and artists. Robert Louis Stevenson met his wife, Fanny Osbourne, there and the Glasgow Boys (Scottish painters) also spent time there.

It's so daunting to set myself into anything approaching the category that these people fell into. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Two reasons - I'm neither a man, nor one from an upper class background. In the nineteenth century, my ancestors would only have been able to stay at Hotel Chevillon if they were making up the beds or seeing to the horses. It's a measure of how far society has changed that I can be awarded an expenses-paid stay there and it's in that spirit that I'll be approaching it.

What am I looking forward to most? Being there. Writing. Experiencing the French experience again. Walking by the river. The quiet and the leafiness. The forest of Fontainebleau. Visiting the chateau of Fontainebleau. Experiencing the French experience again. Writing. Being there.

I was awarded the fellowship to enable me to carry out research into a more northern French way of life than that I experienced when I lived in the South of France. I've written one novel set near Nice on the Cote d'Azur and this trip will help me write authoritatively about the region of France my main character is from.

More on this in another post.

Hieton Writers' Group, Hamilton

Once upon a time, when the days seemed longer and the weeks were full of promise, I facilitated writing workshops once a fortnight for a lovely group of writers in Hamilton. Lovely - but also talented, intelligent and warm-hearted.

Since that time, I've worked almost exclusively on teaching The Open University's creative writing courses online. Online teaching suits me very well: the OU's courses provide high quality learning; I can plan the working hours to suit myself; and I can break for coffee or eat lunch in front of the screen and no-one notices. It also suits me because I meet people from different parts of the UK and beyond. One element that is missing from most online teaching is face to face contact with writers - with only two dayschools a year on my OU courses.

For this reason, and to meet up again with old friends, I was delighted to accept an invitation by Hamilton's Hieton Writers' Group to run two workshops this April.

On an unseasonably bright April day, I took myself down to the grand blond sandstone building which is Hamilton Town House and introduced myself to the group. It was super to catch up on news with those I'd known previously and I was impressed at the way the group has developed, with a considerable number of new members, all of whom were keen writers and willing participants.

During the two classes, we looked at how to boost flagging language when writing about spring and summer, and how to boost our portrayal of momentous moments by using all five senses to help us visualise in close detail the people and places.

We worked on several exercises over the two weeks and I'm hoping to be invited to their end-of-year performance this June to hear them at their polished best!

George, Joey, Ian, Rita, Teresa, Jean and Eileen standing behind Sandra, Nan, Barbara and Jean.

InterLitQ

Very exciting event at the Scottish Writers' Centre last week. Entitled 40 Glasgow Voices, it celebrated a special focus on the area by prestigious e-zine International Literary Quarterly. Founding editor, Peter Robertson, travelled from his home in Argentina to finalise arrangements and co-host the launch, which took place at the CCA on Thursday 8 April 2010.

40 Glasgow Voices is a special feature within issue 10 of the magazine. As the home page says: This will be the first of many features, to be published in the review, exploring the literary vibrancy and scope of different geographic locales.

Glasgow-based writers invited to appear in this issue include Anne Donovan, Zoe Wicomb, Jim Carruth, Des Dillon, Rodge Glass, David Kinloch, Laura Marney, Edwin Morgan, Gerry Loose and Suhayl Saadi. Reading on the night were six writers reading the work of seven contributors. Sue Reid Sexton read from her own novel but also read from a piece she has been co-writing with Kusay Hussein, originally from Baghdad and now living in the UK.  Gerry Fellows, Alan Riach, Peter Manson, Sheila Puri, Jane Goldman and Ewan Morrison also read on the evening and all were warmly received. MC for the night was Donal McLaughlin, who has a Liam story in the feature. Full texts and fine visuals are available for all contributors on-line.

Also worth noting in InterLitQ is a feature called Volta: A Multilingual Anthology. Volta is a poem by Richard Berengarten. Over issues 9 and 10 of InterLitQ, this poem has been translated into 82 languages. This is truly something remarkable and surely a feat like this could only be accomplished by a magazine that spans the globe electronically and is international in its scope. And all of this, accessible without charge around the world.  Definitely a site to support.

Well done to all involved for such an animated launch night at the Scottish Writers' Centre!

In “Sentenced to Fifteen Years: The Story of Creative Writing at Glasgow since 1995″, Willy Maley reflects on the Creative Writing Master’s at Glasgow University, which he co-founded with Philip Hobsbaum « interLitQ

In “Sentenced to Fifteen Years: The Story of Creative Writing at Glasgow since 1995″, Willy Maley reflects on the Creative Writing Master’s at Glasgow University, which he co-founded with Philip Hobsbaum « interLitQ

Reading and writing (events)

I've had some interesting discussions with fellow writers recently about my views on venues for creative writing and reading events. Following on from these, I had the pleasure of being invited to take part in the 'Reading the Leaves' event at the café Tchai Ovna in Glasgow's west end.  It was a good company and a good night. Thanks to Dave Manderson for organising it. I met and chatted with fellow writers Jim Ferguson, Sue Reid Sexton and Graeme Fulton, whose readings held the audience's attention.

It's a funny thing, reading aloud. Especially when the audience comes to the writing cold, i.e. without a copy of the text in front of them or in their memory.  I'd love to be a performer who can capture the audience's attention and also parry with them, bringing in a bit of playfulness.  It always feels too serious when I do it but then that's the way I am, I guess. At Tchai Ovna, I read the short piece I have in the Luath Press anthology 'Written Remedies' about a woman who finds creative expression and satisfaction through dance, despite being blind. During this reading, I enjoyed that lovely sensation of having the audience in the palm of my hand. Or, if you will, of seeing myself as the conductor of their emotional response. A nice feeling! And powerful! 

For my second piece, I read a short extract from 'Frozen Waste' - my story in the first edition of Gutter - and while that started well, I could feel the audience drifting when it came to the dialogue section, though also, perhaps, because the illustration of the character's psychological split was a little too difficult to get across in what was just a glimpse of the story.  There's definitely a difference between writing that succeeds on the page and on the stage.

A few days later I went to a book launch held at the Glasgow Print Studio gallery. Lovely venue - even if the photos on display at that time were a little mawkish as they documented the artist's coming to terms with death.  The writing event was to celebrate the publication of Fugitive Bullets. As always, I find Jim Ferguson's work entertaining, intellectually satisfying and emotionally fulfilling. Jim really has talent. He's a clever performer, too, who works one to one with each audience member, though they're sitting in a group.

Last week, I attended the first of the new monthly events staged by the Scottish Writers' Centre, this one in the CCA in Glasgow. The spotlight for this inaugural session was on Donal McLaughlin, whose short story collection An allergic reaction to national anthems is published by Argyll. Donal may have lost his childhood's Irish accent but his voice has lost none of that purring quality.  He draws on his Irish-Scottish childhood experiences for his stories but much else besides. Given what I've said, above, about my own reading, I found it interesting that he was able to differentiate clearly between the voices of multiple characters in his stories: that's a true gift, as all the textbooks unite in warning writers away from using more than two or three characters in a short story (other than mentioning very minor characters, of course).

Particularly interesting in Donal's session was the variety, given that he works as a literary translator as well as author. So, he read his translations of poems written by one of the Second World War's many displaced people: Stella Rotenberg, a woman who has lived in the UK for seventy years and is now in her nineties but who still writes in her native German. Moving poems, simply expressed and direct, and beautifully translated. We can express so much more truth when we write in our mother tongue, I believe - which is why I encourage my students to experiment with writing in their own dialect, whatever it may be. Writing in our own tongue opens up areas of our experience which we have overlaid and suppressed through adult life. A talented literary translator must enter into that other writer's experience, adopt it as his own, then express it through the heart. As a displaced person himself, in a sense, Donal seems able to identify with the original writer's quest for expression. He ended his session with a reading from a novel by the recent Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Herta Muller.

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.