Exploring Connections

ALISTAIR PEEBLES reflects on the recent changes in the arts infrastructure in Shetland, and looks back on last month’s very successful book event

FOUR DAYS in Shetland at Wordplay 2006, with the sun mostly shining – imagine it. From the Peesterleeties to Phil Kay, William McIlvanney to dark deeds seen through a Faroese knothole. Books and writers everywhere, in Lerwick at least, and such friendliness and hospitality you know this event matters, that it’s not just a one-off weekend but part of something much bigger, and, of course, that you’ll want to return.

‘Waterhead Sky’ is playing in the background as I write. It’s an album released by Donald Anderson last year, of his own songs to his own accompaniment, and it makes lightsome listening. Anderson gave me the CD last week when I’d called in at the offices of Shetland Arts in Lerwick to speak to him: not so much about himself and his music – though it’s no surprise that an arts officer in such a place should be so multi-talented – but about the organisation’s fifth and hugely successful book festival.

For the next six months, Anderson (a Shetland name, and he’s lived there for fourteen years, but he’s originally from Kirkcaldy) has taken charge of the Shetland Arts Literature Development Project. Alex Cluness, for whom he’s standing in, has in turn been promoted to Kathy Hubbard’s former post of Projects Manager, an arrangement due to last till April 2007, while Kathy takes up her secondment to Shetland Islands Council’s Capital Projects Department.

The background to these changes lies in an extensive reorganisation of the administration of charitable services in the county, including the replacement of Shetland Arts Trust by the new Shetland Arts.

Of all that I heard over the weekend, however, it was Vicky Feaver’s work that really blew the lid off for me

Gwilym Gibbons, the new organisation’s new Director, arrived to take up his post earlier this month, and he was very glad to have had the opportunity so soon to discover that “the reputation I’d heard about, that there’s a real passion for the arts here in Shetland, is not only true but that it really is matched by a ‘can-do’ attitude. And it’s been a great introduction to Shetland Arts: the staff, the trustees and the audiences.

“All that I’ve seen so far,” he continued, “has impressed me in having both breadth, in terms of the range of initiatives, and depth. You only have to consider the extent of community involvement in Wordplay 2006, and the way it reflects activity throughout the year, to see that.”

Donald Anderson agrees, and though he arrived in post with the festival already planned, he was delighted with the line-up and with the ethos behind it. “It’s the variety that’s the most satisfying part for me, and for all of us,” he said. “Wordplay is not simply about books and authors, but takes a broader view of language used as an art and as entertainment.

“This comes out of the nature of the Literature Development Project in Shetland as a year-round enterprise, which brings language art to people in ways that allow access at a wide range of levels.”

Thus, as well as poets and writers who come from the more literary end of the spectrum, the festival programme featured stand-up comedy (for both adults and children) and included best-selling authors, songwriters, children’s writers and illustrators, theatre performances, shadow puppets and film.

A packed weekend it was, though with all but two of the events (not counting the Njuggle Bus Tour) taking place in Lerwick’s Clickimin Centre, it was quite possible to attend most of them.
 
Or simply to attend one or two and spend an hour or so besides in the main arena, where the Shetland Library, bookshops and other organisations had set up stalls, and where, to give it no more than a modest passing mention, the Bonhoga Gallery was showing Road Works by John Glenday and the present writer. With typical generosity of spirit, more than half the events, including some of the best, were free.

One of my strongest impressions of the whole weekend was the number of children flocking around, mostly younger ones, though the older age group was well served by visits to schools by some of the writers on the programme, Kenneth Steven, for example, and the current writer in residence in Shetland, Susanna Jones.

The emphasis given to the interests of children in the programme is part of the overall aim the Development Project has of building up the level of engagement with writing across the whole community. “With children’s involvement,” said Anderson, “we’re doing our best to look after the writers and readers of the future.”

Another aspect of the festival that pleased him was the participation of many members of Shetland’s writers’ groups. “As well as reading – for example Donald Murray and Malachy Tallack appearing on the Kettilonia platform with James Robertson, and the collaboration with the Lemon Tree writers – the local writers helped enormously in organisational terms.

“I think the experience of introducing the guests, helping out as stewards and just generally being around over these two or three days, will strengthen the sense of community ownership that everything else really depends on.”

Of all the 24 events, featuring more than twice that number of participants, my personal highlight was the reception and reading that took place in Lerwick Town Hall on the Sunday afternoon. It’s a roomy and beautiful civic space, with a wood-panelled ceiling and stained glass windows, each of which tells part of the Norse sagas that, as Shetland Islands Council Convener Sandy Cluness proudly described, form the foundation of Shetland’s cultural identity.

It wasn’t so much the historical aspect that intrigued me, though it was exactly the right place for the reading, but the possibilities the event – ‘Nordic Connections’ – suggests for the future, and what it says about the vitality of that cultural life today.

Here was a lucky handful of talented Shetland writers, with connections amongst them to Lewis, Orkney and further afield, sharing the stage with the Icelandic and Faroese writers with whom they’d recently spent time in Rekjavik, working, translating and singing together in an exchange programme fostered by Shetland Arts and, importantly, supported by Atlantic Airways and the Smyril Line.

Thinking about that event now, and the impression it made on me, I’m reminded that I’d arrived there straight from William McIlvanney’s excellent, packed reading. This had been mostly from his new novel, ‘Weekend’, his first for ten years, and it was a fine presentation by a writer of power and manifest significance, the audience hanging on every word: a tour de force, in fact. But what I’m remembering too is the reason he gave for his silence in the past decade. His silence in public, that is, for he claims never to have stopped writing over that time.
 
Essentially, he said, he has felt alienated from the values of his society: the society that puts books by Jade and Jordan at the top of the best-seller lists and seems shot through with a relativistic instability that leaves “bampots” able to claim as much precedence as the rest of us. As well as all that, quoting with sympathy Alan Sharp’s comment, “the fear of getting found out”, he referred to his own “crises of self-belief”.

I am summarising very briefly here of course, and if I draw a comparison between the darker, more troubling atmosphere of his reading and the sense of optimism of the one that followed, I don’t mean to suggest that there wasn’t a deal of trouble and darkness in the latter. Nor that McIlvanney’s gifts for humour and irony were not fully exercised, nor that it was anything other than sheer delight to see him there: pin-stripe wide-lapelled grey jacket, black shirt buttoned to the top and wavy grey hair combed back in a masterly quiff. He also read some very good poems, finishing with ‘Frankenstein’s Monster Meets a Drunk Glasgwegian’.

And if the effect of that depended, as one might say, on a coincidence as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a half-bottle and a bad hair day, then to return to the ‘Nordic Connections’ event, the bringing together of writers from these neighbour islands strikes one with the force of the kind of natural growth and extension of possibility that was grievously lacking in the picture McIlvanney painted of central belt Scotland.

Perhaps it’s that from this vantage point Scotland seems rather muddled and hemmed-in, and needing a shot of something: of northern clarity? Or that culturally it lacks the self-confidence that lies behind what I heard Adalsteinn Ásberg Sigurdsson describe of Iceland’s system of state support for the arts and for artists?

It’s not that anyone should believe, as Phil Kay said about Findhorn, that there’s any such thing as “a perfect place”, but a conversation I had recently with a history teacher in Edinburgh seems pertinent here. Why, my friend had asked himself, was the Scottish Executive so faint-hearted about the importance of teaching Scottish History in schools? His answer: It’s not really a Scottish parliament at all.

Incompleteness in the nature of Scottish identity is something explored in James Robertson’s excellent new novel, ‘The Testament of Gideon Mack’. Based in some respects on James Hogg’s novel ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, it follows that book in anatomising dramatically the roots, personal suffering and unpleasant consequences for others of its protagonist’s stunted soul.

The extracts read by Robertson were well chosen to illustrate how “the desperate limbo of a life filled with Batman half-stories” led on to the delusion, waste and breakdown of Mack’s later years. As with McIlvanney’s reading, this one was followed by an intense question and answer session from an appreciative audience.
 
Robertson has done a great deal in recent years in support of emerging writers, and with Matthew Fitt and the Itchycoo Press, in encouraging the teaching of Scots in schools. He was also writer in residence at the aforementioned parliament: an important job.

Other voices I relished hearing included that of the young Scottish singer and songwriter, Emily Smith. From Dumfriesshire, via the RSAMD and a Scottish Music Degree, Smith has enjoyed a very successful start in her career, and with the advantages she has of accomplished and committed musicianship from her band, a real love of the original ballads of her home patch, and a powerful and beautifully expressive singing voice, one hopes to see and hear that continue to grow.

She shared the stage on the Saturday night with Jenny Colgan and Christopher Brookmyre, both prolific writers who read comic, grotesque extracts from their new novels, ‘West End Girls’ and ‘A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil’.

I think Brookmyre’s reading was the better received: simian-psychotic headmasters and the subversive effects of schoolroom flatulence being perhaps more readily imagined, though set in Paisley, than a London nightclub breast-fest. Brookmyre’s writing and delivery are full-on, perfectly timed, and his audience was clearly very glad to welcome him back to the festival.

Peter Urpeth and Jane Routh made an interesting pairing, both of them impressing us with the strength of their affection for their favoured landscapes, and the lore appertaining.

The Salt Publishing event, with Peter Abbs and Ian Gregson, gave a good showcase of the work of that important literary house: the two poets, both accomplished practitioners, quite distinct in tone and delivery. Abbs’ poem about animals found dead on the road, and his ritual responses, echoed poignantly with Emily Smith’s lament for a dead bird, which we’d heard previously, and rather more weirdly with part of Phil Kay’s story about his hectic drive to Inverness airport, which involved the sudden end of a “Phezzie”. 
 
There was a neat and I think unintentional segue between the end of Vicky Feaver’s reading and the start of Kenneth Steven’s, when after she’d read a poem about getting to know nature and rural life, Steven began, as he continued, with poetry grounded in his deep knowledge and respect for those subjects.

Of all that I heard over the weekend, however, it was Feaver’s work that really blew the lid off for me. I hadn’t really heard of her before, but look at the title of her recent book from Cape, ‘The Book of Blood’. It’s the real thing: what makes the heart still beat.

I didn’t see everything. Our car broke down and I missed Debi Gliori, though I heard great things, and I’d have liked to hear more of the children’s events, including the Booster Cushion Theatre and the Peesterleeties Puppet Show – and I do particularly regret the fact that Evelyn Hood’s reading at the Town Hall – with afternoon tea! – was timed to coincide with a prior commitment at Clickimin. To judge by the superb catering at the ‘Nordic Connections’, this would have been something to savour – my sources say so, and the same about the reading.

For the expertise of Lerwick mechanics, however, I can vouch personally, and with all those cakes forsaken (perhaps all the better for the heart), where better to run into Susanna Jones on the Monday than in the Peerie Shop Cafe in Lerwick. We were waiting for the ferry home, she was reading proofs for her new, third, novel. Life goes on.

She was pleased that her month-long residency had straddled the festival so neatly. It meant both that she had been able to meet and work with those involved in the run-up to their participation (and hers) and also that the value of Wordplay 2006 would be extended during the remainder of her time in Shetland.

“My own field is fiction, and with a lot of emphasis having been given already within the Project to poetry, I think that’s gone down well. I’ve been very impressed with the writers and the reading groups. There’s been a real sense of togetherness: another example of this is in the fact that published writers have attended the writing classes along with everyone else. The festival itself has been very well organised and purposeful and I feel that it will have encouraged them all greatly.”

Alex Cluness, the progenitor of all this activity, agrees. “The crucial thing is to continue to develop writing in the community throughout the year, but each time it comes around, you realise the importance of doing this work in a festival format. It’s great to see such a wide audience: the children in particular benefit from this kind of experience, but for everyone I think it’s vital that a high degree of prominence is given to writing, to books and to all that language offers.”

© Alistair Peebles, 2006