Festival Season

Two weeks and two festivals. The first was the Biggar Little Festival where I returned to Brownsbank Cottage, last home to Christopher Grieve (poet Hugh MacDiarmid) and his wife Valda Trevlyn. I was writer in residence there for three years from 2002 -5 and despite an absence of six years, I felt immediately at home in its two tiny rooms with condensation clouded windows and the idiosyncratic collections of books, trinkets, pipes and wally dogs.

I ran a workshop at the cottage with the group pictured above, and decided to invite close attention to objects. NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education) recently ran a 'Writing on Location' project in which writers worked with the collections of various writers' houses, now museums. I decided to try out some of the activities described in NAWE magazine's issue 54, in particular an activity Mario Petrucci ran at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

First of all we each chose an object and wrote a quick list of its features - observable or known. With a trip to Cornwall coming up, it was Valda's Cornish flag that immediately grabbed my attention. I'd always been drawn to the melancholy of her separation from her beloved homeland. So my list went something like:

black with a white cross

pinned to the blue door with rusty drawing pins

faded by sun

it came here with Valda, the nationalist

etc

Then we made a list of those abstract words for emotion or concept that often haunt our writing and obscure or flatten meaning: beauty, hope, fear, etc.

The trick was then to see what happened if we matched the abstract words with the concrete description. The result was sometimes curious, accidental and intuitive. For example, my object resonated well with 'ageing' and also 'homesickness'.

'Homesickness is a sun-faded flag that was black, and is now greying, with a white cross. It's been pinned to a door six hundred miles from its homeland for the last fifty years.'

Later that day I was reading in the delightful intimacy of the Atkinson Pryce Bookshop.

The next stop was the Dundee Literary Festival where I was reading with Meaghan Delahunt. It was wonderful to be part of an excellent programme of novelists, poets, life writers, who attracted good audiences right through from 9am! Particularly striking was the session with Sarah Gabriel who has written lyrically and bravely about a battle with cancer and how it led her to unlock the memory of her own mother in 'Eating Pomegranates'.

Last Living Writer at Brownsbank Cottage?

There's a lovely piece on Radio Scotland's 'Book Cafe' today (and an audio slideshow on the website) featuring James Robertson re-visiting Brownsbank Cottage near Biggar, last home to poet Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Grieve). The two room cottage was preserved after his wife, Valda's death in 1989, and has functioned as a living memorial through a writing fellowship for the last 17 years. James was the first fellow, I was the fifth, and Carl MacDougall is just finishing his tenure as the last. The funding from South Lanarkshire Council has been cut. This is a very sad day.

I found it hugely nostalgic to see the photos of a place where I stayed and wrote and ran writing groups and readings for three years. Its saturation in poetry, pipe smoke, and Valda's feisty Cornish personality has acted as a wonderful literary focus for so many people over so many years. And as James says in the programme, it's certainly not only of local significance, but national. Let's hope we jointly muster the vision to keep the place alive.

Photo above of myself with the portrait of Valda taken by Gerry Cambridge, the Third Brownsbank Writing Fellow.

Brownsbank - an anthology

This humble cottage, Brownsbank, thirty miles south of Edinburgh was the home of poet Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Grieve) from 1951 until his death in 1978, and his wife, Valda Trevlyn Grieve, until hers in 1989. During their occupation the cottage became a literary pilgrimage - visited by Ginsberg and Yevtushenko, amongst others. Afterwards it was preserved by the Biggar Museums Trust and a series of writers took fellowships based there, of which I was one from 2002-5.

Many visitors to the cottage have been inspired to write about the experience and the resonant sense of its past residents - the literary lion, the feisty Cornish wife, the infamous mice. And now, some of these writings have been collected in an anthology which collectively conjure the cottage, its occupants, the surrounding hills. Amongst the writers are James Robertson, Elizabeth Burns, Bill Headdon who comes from Valda's beloved Bude, and poet Michael Collier, who visited MacDiarmid from Maryland in 1976.

I was always intrigued by Valda's room in the cottage, her famous red hair and her part in the poet's life and success. In 2005, my play about her, The Best Snow for Skiing, was broadcast on Radio Four, researched by talking to people who knew her and by reading her letters to her husband (now collected in a book by Beth Junor, Scarcely Ever Out of My Thoughts). I'm proud that a short extract of my play appears in this new anthology. Gerry Cambridge's photo of me with Valda's portrait at Brownsbank in 2005 can be found on his website.

The anthology is available from Brownsbank Cottage Committee for £7.99.