Kirkwall and Stromness, Orkney, 16-18 April 2010

EVERY festival organiser must hope the event will go off with a bang, but when the proceedings begin with a volcanic explosion, the results are bound to be somewhat unpredictable. When Eyjafjallajoekull erupted the day before the first George Mackay Brown festival in Orkney, all but one of the writers due to perform found themselves with cancelled flights.

Tessa Ransford

That one was me. I travelled as planned to Stromness from Lochinver by road and ferry, oblivious to the disruption, and arrived to be told I faced the prospect of a solo appearance. In the end, all but Robert Alan Jamieson and Kevin Cadwallender made it over land and sea, and apart from one cancelled talk, the show went on.

Voice was the festival theme. In the St Magnus Centre in Kirkwall, Tessa Ransford spoke about the inner voice, triggering a debate that wove its way through many conversations about singularity versus diversity of writers’ voices. Accents and origins were many and varied, from India to America, from Devon to Yell.

Christie Williamson brought his own distinctive contribution, reading poems translated into Shetlandic from Lorca’s Spanish and leading an inspiring session jumping off from a poem about Milan by Sandy Hutchison. Tessa read a Rilke sonnet. I shared a version of the old Celtic Song of Amergin and a story from the Cree people. And in the background all weekend, after booming out loud and clear at the start in a recording played by Donna Heddle, was the voice of the great poet, referred to affectionately by all as ‘George’, as if he were still around and we’d see him later in the pub.

The festival is run by a committee of local writers whose talents admirably filled the spaces in the programme, with extempore readings from Alison Flett, Sylvia Hays and Rosie Alexander (as well as music from Fionn MacArthur and Mark Shiner). One legacy of George Mackay Brown’s life in Orkney is a flourishing community of writers, including well-known poets such as Yvonne Gray and Pam Beasant, and enlivened by the current holder of the George Mackay Brown Fellowship, Nalini Paul.

Nalini has been in position for six months, and has led writing workshops on topics as diverse as neolithic archeology and birdwatching. We learned, when she read some work in progress from a novel based on the true stories of several generations of her family, that one of her obsessions is migration. This is not surprising, given her own life story: born in India, brought up in Canada, and in Scotland now for more than a decade.

With this global outlook, she seems at home in Stromness, with its history of maritime exploration and trade. For thousands of years, its harbour has been a place of setting out and taking shelter, for people on all kinds of journeys. Perhaps because all the festival visitors had arrived by sea, this sense of the harbour village as a gateway to the rest of the world was all the more apparent.

One of the joys of festivals is that things can happen spontaneously when artists are programmed together. On the last night, the evening’s readings were due to be interspersed by musical interludes from Mark Shiner, a harpist and instrument maker in Stromness. He just happened to have with him a Nordic lyre that he had made recently, just the kind of thing used by Brigid, the main character in my novel, The Last Bear.

Mark improvised her performance to accompany my reading of a passage in the novel where she plays in the woods, and another passage where the bard Til is playing in the background of a feast at the Brough of Birsay. It was a magic way to end the festival, echoing all the connections that had been made over distance and time.

Another of the boons of a festival is the way creativity can flourish in the cracks. One gap in the schedule allowed for a meander into Japanese collective poetry writing, with a short renga session led by Alison Flett. The following poem emerged.

From beyond the garden
a voice
calling

north wind rustles
the new green

beneath the cliffs
theatre of sea
resonates

a two-stroke engine
not in much of a hurry

little French song
the candle has died
borrow a quill.

Throughout the weekend the volcano made its presence felt. How odd that plume should be the French word for pen. Was that snow, or volcanic dust? Who would be next to erupt into verse? To cap it all, we added a new word to our vocabulary, the longest word in the English language – pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – which means something along the lines of a nasty tickle in the throat brought on by excessive spouting off. Excuse me while I clear my throat…

© Mandy Haggith, 2010

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