My piece for the SHIFTS exhibition at The Lighthouse (more details in previous post below) appeared in yesterday’s Scotsman newspaper under the headline ‘Our landscape is the library of our collective memory’. You can read it here.
And yesterday I moved back to Scotland from Berlin.
The Research Club, the new anthology of work from students of the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow has just been published by Chroma, who say: “The best of the writing to come through the course this year – as chosen by writers Rodge Glass and Liz Lochhead, agent Maggie McKernan and The Herald’s literary editor Rosemary Goring – The Research Club contains poems, short stories and novel extracts ranging from the hilarious to the disturbing but all sharing an unfailingly high quality.” It’s introduced by Laura Marney and as well as work by many talented new writers it features a piece by Anne Donovan and a short extract of mine called ‘Outside the Town’. It’s available from bookshops or Amazon.
Louise and I will be reading from new work at the next Bordercrossing Berlin event, which will be on Sunday 2nd September at 8pm in Z Bar, Bergstraße 2, 10119 Berlin. Tickets cost 4 Euros.
Capture is an exhibition by Iain Clark of New Photography at the Collins Gallery, 22 Richmond Street, Glasgow. It runs from 28th August till 29th September 2007.
Capture incorporates Inspired, a series of twenty five portraits of Scottish writers and the objects from which they draw inspiration. Alan Friend says in the press release that, “The Inspired exhibition, in itself, is of historical importance. Not since the Natural Light project by Angela Catlin who, two decades ago, produced forty nine author portraits, had anything like this been attempted. The Catlin project was an artistic tour de force and, as, Rosemary Goring noted in The Herald, May 19th 2007, Iain’s effort is a worthy successor.” Anyway, there will be some great, witty pictures of great, witty writers on display, and one of me looking rather gloomy and clutching an Anglepoise, my chosen object. The one in the picture is chrome and shiny, mine is white and grubby (and genuinely made by Anglepoise). I was allowed 50 words in which to explain why I picked it: “The circular puddle of light from an old white Anglepoise illuminates my murkier imaginings. I like stretching it out full for flights of fancy and pulling it down low for moments of cosy intimacy. It’s a perfectly functional design, though energy saving bulbs do tend to unbalance it somewhat.”
You can also see the images from Inspired here.
SHIFTS: Projections into the Future of the Central Belt is an exhibition that speculates on the future of Scotland’s Central Belt through evocative proposals by four Scottish and international architecture teams: Cadell2, Collective Architecture, GRAS and vD&B. It’s on at The Lighthouse from 17th August 2007.
The exhibition also features contributions from Scottish writers: myself, Louise Welsh, Laura Marney, Alan Bissett, Dorothy Alexander, Sheila Puri and Pat Kane. My piece, ‘Pipe Dreams of a Post-Industrial Arcadia’, explores the changing cultural landscape of the Central Belt and the ways in which it acts as a repository for collective memory. You can hear recordings of us all reading our contributions at the exhibition, and print versions will also appear in a catalogue to be published later this year, edited by Willy Maley.
I have a piece called ‘The Secret Life of Dads’ in NW15 – “an anthology of the finest new writing in fiction, non-fiction and poetry” – which has just been published by the British Council in association with Granta.
New Writing 15 is edited by Maggie Gee and Bernadine Evaristo and features work from Julian Barnes, Anita Desai, Helen Dunmore, Alasdair Gray, Doris Lessing and Robin Robertson as well as many other fantastic established and new writers. You can find more information and a full list of contributors on the accompanying website.
‘The Secret Life of Dads’ is a non-fiction/memoir extract, describing a day I spent shadowing my dad at his work in a chemical plant in south Ayrshire shortly before he took early retirement. I don’t tend to write about my family or personal life so this is an unusual piece for me.
New Writing 15 costs £9.99 and is available in bookshops, direct from Granta or on Amazon.
Another extract from my novel in progress, Play Dead, will be published in the summer issue of the Berlin-based English language literary magazine Bordercrossing. It’s called ‘Ever fallen in love?’ and it takes us back to the teenage years of the central character, Richard.
The summer issue of Bordercrossing brings together new authors based in Berlin, Germany and Eastern Europe with more established names such as Prague-based poet Justin Quinn whose collection The ‘O’o'a’a’ Bird was nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection and Berlin-based John Hartley Williams, who is published by Cape, Chatto & Windus and Bloodaxe Books, and whose book CANADA was Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. There is also an interview with Booker Prize nominee Rachel Seiffert - an old classmate of mine from the MPhil in Creative Writing at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde - and an extract from her new book Afterwards.
If you happen to be in Berlin, please come along to the launch party for the 2nd issue of Bordercrossing. There will be open air readings by featured authors (myself included), live music, a barbecue and a special set of stand-up comedy from Jacinta Nandi.
The party is on Friday 15th June, from 8 pm at ACUD Kantine, Veteranenstraße 21, Berlin-Mitte.
You can find out more about Bordercrossing Berlin and order copies of the magazine here.
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, edited by Berthold Schoene, is published next week by Edinburgh University Press. There are some great essays in it, covering lots of interesting writers and themes. And I’ve contributed a chapter as well, a kind of writer’s response, called ‘Is that a Scot or am Ah wrang?’ As I discovered when I was in Serbia, that’s a pun which is very tricky to explain to people who didn’t grow up in Scotland.
You can see a full list of contents – and order a copy if you want – at the EUP website
I am just back from the 1st International Festival of Prose Writing in Novi Sad, Serbia, where I was reading at the Cultural Centre of Novi Sad and lecturing on Scottish literature in the Faculty of Philosophy at the university. All round, it was a thought-provoking experience.
For one thing, I’d never have predicted that I’d happily sit through 3-4 hours of readings and discussion each evening. However I found the sessions really interesting (thanks to Predrag and Lydia, who kindly translated). The emphasis was entirely on talking about writing and ideas (all the sessions were free and there were no books on sale) which made a refreshing change from some more commercially orientated events. The audiences asked great questions too, some straightforward and intellectual and some completely off the wall.
Sadly I’ve only been able to read short extracts from the work of the authors I spent most time with because the full texts are not yet translated into English. In particular, I’d really like to read the novels of Mikhail Shishkin (Russia), Irena Karpa (Ukraine) and Krzysztof Varga (Poland). You can find out more about them – and see lots of photos if you look under ‘Prosefest 2007′ - at the festival website.
I’m part of a debate in the Sunday Herald today about the forcible outing of celebrities.
There’s an interesting introduction by Peter Ross, then Aaron Hicklin, editor of Out, writes in support of outing. And of course, you can post comments and join the debate on the Sunday Herald message board.
You can read what I have to say here.
PS You can also hear one of my favourite poems, ‘Jocky in the Wilderness’ by Kathleen Jamie, on Poetry Please this afternoon at 4.30pm (Radio4). See http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/poetryplease.shtml for details.