I wrote a play! With support!
Over 2022-2023 I was supported with a Play Development Bursary from the excellent Playwrights’ Studio Scotland. I was given funds to give me time and space to complete a first draft over twelve months – as well as the chance to attend excellent workshops and sessions with a wonderful mentor, in the form of Catherine Grosvenor.
The play is about a number of things – motherhood, madness, illness, history, faith. At the centre of it are two real women, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. They were two of the earliest writers in the English language, and they met in Norwich in 1413. Their stories, their conversation, and how their books made their way to us today are all fascinating to me, and I was so pleased to spend a year obsessing about it all. I intend to spend many more years of tasty obsession whether for the play or not. They’re in my life now, and like so many people over the last 600 years or so, I firmly believe them to be mine now.
As part of my year I took two different trips to East Anglia to visit the places to women lived, and worked, and travelled, and wrote*. I pilgrimaged with them, sat with them, worshiped with them. And I also wrote out conversations happening around me live, in 21st century Norwich and King’s Lynn, because once you go somewhere with your writer ears on, it’s hard not to listen in and it turns out the world is hilarious. I also had to take my kid with me because of her tiny person needs, and that meant also my husband. I had to rely on my in-laws for childcare too at points. I say this because Julian and Margery had to wall themselves in a room, or travel across the known world to have the space to write and think. I took a day trip to King’s Lynn, and had some afternoons in libraries, but the work of getting to a place where you can do the work, is a massive part of the work. And that is gendered.
The process of the year was incredibly hard, incredibly rewarding. Particularly valuable was building a relationship and trust with Catherine Grosvenor, my mentor. Louise from PSS had paired me with Catherine, using her amazing spidey-sense about such things (she did a great job on the director for the development day as well) even though she hadn’t known that seeing Catherine’s play, Cherry Blossom, in 2009, was a turning point for my life – in the light, and incidental way that those things often happen. There was a wee moment in Cherry Blossom when one of the actors leant against an imaginary door frame and something about it made my brain explode. I wanted to learn how to do that. I decided in that seat in Trav 2 that I would leave academia behind (temporarily, I thought – lol) and go somewhere to learn how to lean against imaginary doors like that.
And so a decade and odd change later I was sitting in a room in the CCA with a director and four amazing actors reading my words, making me laugh in an uncool way at my own words (and actually cry at one point, don’t tell anyone). The draft is so rough, and the form is not there yet, but I am very proud of what I managed to achieve on the 1/3rd of a brain I am working with, three years into motherhood. I think it has the potential to have wee moments that might make a 22 year old Ishbel’s head fizz, or maybe even explode. I would like that. She would like that.
Next for the play is a week or two in Wales to write up a second draft. I have a scholarship from Gladstone’s Library to continue working on it and to use their amazing theology collection to deep dive even further into the ideas of Margery and Julian. And also to be fed very well three times a day and sit in a fantasy library reading, thinking and writing. So. That’s not ALL bad.
In fact, maybe – maybe – in the words of Julian of Norwich, all will be well, and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.
*Margery didn’t write, she was most likely illiterate, she dictated. Stay back, imaginary Margery Kempe scholar I envisage reading this.
The other aspect of the Big Nine Days, was the first sessions of the Minority Language Training, which I spent the last half of 2017 making. We did our first session at the funders, The Scottish Government, and it was a high stakes day which went well. The team were brilliant, and we spent the whole of that session saying how similar everything was for the three languages – Scots, Gaelic and BSL, so it was nice to feel that connection. Finishing that day I felt more proud of myself than I have in years.
By comparison, it was glorious to do Hoolet again in a theatrical setting when we went to 
I did two projects with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland this year. I again led the Aye Can Summer School, looking at Burns and Scots language more widely, and then was also one of two theatre artists on a week-long summer school (with some sessions through the earlier months) for the launch of the 
I spent a lot of the summer working away on my own, researching a project with no prospect of doing anything. I have slightly tended to put the cart and the horse only one way round when it comes to making work – I have to perform on a certain day so am forced by terror to create so that I’m not standing like a numpty on said day. I am trying to get a practice where I make things and see what happens, rather than waiting for the approbation of funding, invitation or development. I love academic libraries, so it’s worth it just to hang out on the eighth floor and look over Glasgow.
When Debbie challenged me to review my year, one of the things I uncovered was the 
In the autumn I was asked to join the Scots column team at 
The final thing in Debbie’s email was a wee list of disappointments, professional and personal, and this photo of my much-loved workspace is dedicated to all the work that seems to have gone nowhere in 2018. I was shortlisted for three separate things, all of which I did not get. Plugging away at it is definitely the way to move on, but I’ve started to think about applications as very time and energy consuming invitation to punch me in the face. Other people have ways of dealing with these punches, but for me they hurt, and they make it harder to go again. I comfort myself that I would have cried with joy at being shortlisted, even to be rejected, five years ago, so there is progress in my failure. Except, of course, I have been shortlisted many times for many things and haven’t ‘won’ anything in, well, years. It’s not nothing, and to be honest this year it has felt like the main thing, so there’s that.
And yet I am not unhappy! 2018 included a quite unreasonable number of holidays, two UNESCO World Heritage Sites ticked off, and a transcontinental train journey across America that I have been dreaming of for a decade (pictured). Tommy gave up his job working for The Man and has been so much happier that he spent late winter and all of spring basically just skipping. We run an Airbnb in our spare room as Tommy’s paying job (his main job is an artificial intelligence research project which he is doing on his own at the moment), and had lots of friends to stay so we’ve been able to share our nice house with nice folk and help people out sometimes. We have been involved in the Scottish Green Party again, and I’m on the committee for our sub-branch and ran a good event at our local Asylum Seeker Night Shelter. I have got much, much better at BSL (though my BSL Level 3 exams sadly belong in the disappointing failures paragraph) and I’ve learnt loads of stuff from museums, trips, podcasts, books and the internet. Life is excellent, art is good, 2019 is new and so are we.
Ishbel McFarlane 