Louise and I got into the Christmas spirit early this year by working on another collaboration – a festive story for the Sunday Herald. It’s about two ghosts who haunt a struggling independent bookshop. One is a studious bluestocking, the other a bawdy rake. Look out for it on Sunday 19th December.
I’m honoured to be patron of Imprint, the East Ayrshire Book Festival. The highlight for me this year comes on Thursday 11th November when I will be introducing one of my favourite poets, Tom Leonard. This festival is a great thing for Kilmarnock and the surrounding area, and I wish it had existed when I was growing up. I would have loved the opportunity to hear writers like Tom speak. On Thursday evening I’ll also be helping to award the prizes for the Imprint Poetry Competition 2010. This is the first poetry competition we’ve run at Imprint, and the entries were very impressive. Judging was tough, and discussion heated!
Event details as follows:
‘Tom Leonard – Glaswegian poet, polemicist, Professor and radical makes his first appearance at the Imprint Book Festival. His poetry has been described as direct, subversive, unyielding and funny. He is part of a quite remarkable trio of writers including James Kelman and Alasdair Gray with whom he has co-authored works and shared the chair of Creative Writing at Glasgow University between 2001 and 2003. A review of his 2009 collection of poems Outside The Narrative described him as having ‘…moved away from writing in dialect, but his concern with bringing excluded voices into poetry has remained as strong as ever…” The Guardian. We also host our second Imprint Writing Award ceremony – this year the competition focuses on poetry with ‘Ayrshire Life’ as the theme. Imprint festival patron Zoë Strachan and her colleagues from the Glasgow University Edwin Morgan School of Creative Writing have judged the entries and the winners will be announced during the evening.’
Burns Monument Centre, Kilmarnock, Thu 11th November, 7:30pm – 9:00pm, £7/£5 concession. For booking information click here.
Louise and I have been attending rehearsals for Panic Patterns, the play we’ve co-written. We now have a wonderful director, Alison Peebles, and a brilliant cast: Selina Boyack as Jacq and Veronica Leer as Fay. Nichola Scrutton is composing the soundscape and Colin O’Hara is designing the set.
Panic Patterns was commissioned by Glasgay! and you can read a little bit about our writing process in an interview we did with The List.
To recap what I’ve said below about the plot: Jacq and Fay are on a remote island in the far north of Scotland studying sudden changes in bird migration patterns. Fay believes these changes signify forthcoming disaster while Jacq thinks the isolation is making her younger lover paranoid. But they were meant to leave the island three days ago, their boat home still hasn’t arrived and their radio has been dead for a week. When the decommissioned lighthouse across the bay shines back into life, the two women are forced to make a crucial decision.
Tickets are now on sale: Panic Patterns at the Citizens Theatre, Circle Studio, 19 Oct – 30 Oct 2010 £12.50 (concessions available / preview 19th Oct £5), book here.
To celebrate the 200th play commissioned and produced at Oran Mor as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint, 40 writers have been commissioned to write tiny plays on the theme of ‘Glasgow then and now’.
A cast of many of Scotland’s leading actors working with a team of eight directors will perform the mini plays at lunchtimes from October 4th to 9th. Mine is called My Old Complaint and is set in a Glasgow music hall. You can buy tickets here.
And on the evening of Sunday 10th October, the Piecentennial Awards will be given.
My colleague Drew Campbell and I are preparing to attend the Congress of International PEN on behalf of Scottish PEN. PEN is an international community of writers and exists to defend freedom of expression and promote literature worldwide. There are 145 centres in 105 countries, and this year the host centre is Japanese PEN, so we’ll be meeting in Tokyo for elections, seminars and discussions. The theme this year is ‘The Environment and Literature – what can words do?’, and we’ll also be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Writers in Prison Committee.
I’ve been a supporter of PEN for years and it’s a real honour to attend the Congress. Margaret Atwood, a vice-president of International PEN, says that, ‘In a world where independent voices are increasingly stifled, PEN is not a luxury it is a necessity.’ With ever more insidious threats to freedom of expression and over a thousand names on the Writers in Prison case list, it’s hard to disagree.
My friends at the Goethe-Institut asked me to write a piece about Edinburgh Konditormeister Falko Burkert for their Meet the Germans project. You can read the result here. Although their tuition has enabled me to extricate myself from many scrapes in Germany, I’m ashamed to say that in this case the interview was conducted auf Englisch.
Nice news! Sublimation, the opera I wrote with composer Nick Fells for Scottish Opera, will have five special guest performances as part of Cape Town Opera’s Five:20 Operas Made in South Africa series. It’ll be directed by Matthew Richardson, as before, and will feature Lee Bisset and Kally Llord-Jones from the original cast.
Performance dates are 21, 23, 24, 26, 27 November 2010 in the Baxter Theatre, Rondebosch.
Recently I reviewed Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong for the Sunday Herald. You can find out what I thought of it here.
You can hear me on the Herald Scotland’s CultureCast talking to literary editor and author Rosemary Goring about my influences and the wider topic of sex in Scottish Literature. Listen here or download free from iTunes.
Rosemary and I were chatting in advance of one of the forthcoming Unbound nights at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. McSex: A Night in the Gutter is at 9pm on Sunday 15th August in the Speigeltent, and I’ll be reading alongside Michel Faber, Ewan Morrison, Helen Sedgwick, Anneliese Mackintosh, Allan Radcliffe and others tbc. The evening is organised by Gutter magazine and you can find full details
There’s also an extract from my novel in issue 3 of Gutter.
Louise and I are working hard on our first collaboration, a play called Panic Patterns. It’s a Glasgay! commission and will be on at the Citizens from 19th to 30th October 2010.
The blurb says:
‘Ornithologists Jacq and Fay are on a remote island in the far north of Scotland investigating sudden changes in bird migration patterns. Fay believes these changes signify forthcoming disaster. Jacq thinks the isolation is making her younger lover paranoid. But they were meant to leave the island three days ago, their boat home still hasn’t arrived and their radio has been dead for a week. When the decommissioned lighthouse across the bay shines back into life, the two women are forced to make a crucial decision.
Sometimes tender, sometimes disorientating, Panic Patterns draws on contemporary fears to create an edgy, suspenseful drama for a new decade.’