Gladstone’s Library

Back in the late spring and very-much-feeling-like-summer of 2023 I travelled down to North Wales to spend a fortnight reading, writing, rewriting my play about Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. I had been awarded a scholarship by the library to work on a redrafting of the play, and to read more into the theology of the two women. You can read about the play itself, and the year before going to Gladstone’s here. Because of my daughters understandabe four-year-old needs, we were, as ever, a travelling circus. The library made a beautiful effort to make my husband and daughter feel welcome, the kitchen staff were all delighted to have a wee yin in aboot the place – not many bairnies in a theological and political residental library. Some fantastic support from Creative Scotland meant that we could pay for my time, for the extra accommodation and even pay my husband to take time off his work so he could look after the wee one as I worked. It would not have happened without this two-prongs of funding.

And boy did I work. I worked and walked and accidentally found myself reading feminist theology, body theology, an early 19th century book about the visit of George IV to Edinburgh. I read prayer books, books on how teen girls do theology, books about Margery and Julian themselves. I dipped, and wrote, and swam, and wrote – all in books. All in the most beautiful room you could ever imagine working in.

And outside that room I went to daily services, I walked around the graveyard of the church next door, I walked to a farm shop along a busy dual carriageway and thought and thought and thought about life and the arts and the play. At one point I had a total crisis with it all and took an afternoon to take a bus to see the new Little Mermaid with my daughter. I spoke to my dramaturg on the phone, I disagreed with her, and I agreed. It was, simply, heaven.

The next stage for the play, the literal stage-stage will be very much more earthly. It’s a mystery how or if that will happen, but I will always be grateful for the thirteen days of sun and space in Hawarden, given to me by the library, and the Creative Scotland funding which let me know my daughter was safe and happy, that I was safe and happy, and that I could dive down, dip and swim in safety. That is the only way I can do it.

The Village Storytelling Centre

I am currently (Nov 2023 to June 2024) artist in residence at the Village Storytelling Centre in Pollok in Glasgow. The project that I am working on is looking at multilingualism in Early Years arts settings.

Our streets, our homes are multilingual – but when we cross the threshold of an arts setting for wee ones, we are to leave all that behind and everything is to be done in STANDARD ENGLISH. As artists we are creating spaces where folk must present with only part of their selves, and we facilitate the harmful and traumatic cultural loss that comes when generations are split by language. There is no such thing as a neutral language – every choice in how we speak is a choice weighted with politics and power.

My specialism is Scots language, as that is one of my native languages and also my passion. But I want Scots always to be hand-in-hand with multilingualism more widely – whether that is some of Scotlands other native minority languages like Gaelic and BSL, or whether it is with some of the dozens of home languages used in Scotland and specifically here in Pollok where the Village Storytelling Centre is.

So with all those big, sometimes painful ideas in mind, I am making nice wee storytelling sessions for children from birth to school! Fun! We have started with one of the bits of Scots language that’s already acceptable and present in our art lives, and widely known with families – the song of Three Craws. Please admire my pom pom craws photographed. Commissions accepted.

At the end of the project I will be creating a resource to be used by parents/carers and organisations, and I will also be presenting the work (and maybe about the work) at the Village Storytelling Festival 2024. It will be in June 2024 at the CCA and it is wheeching towards us at a great rate.

Let’s all take a deep breath and remember the true fact, the deep fact, the good fact:

Multilingualism is a Good Thing.

New Mothers’ Writing Circle

When my daughter was 9 months old, I went to a church hall with a load of other mums, mats and toys on the floor, tea and biscuits at the side. The thing that differentiated this experience from other baby groups was that it was focussed on us mums. It was a writing group. For us. For us to think about what we were going through, who we were becoming, what we were losing and what we were gaining. We read other writers, we wrote, we read out our writing. The babies (aged from 6 weeks old) gurgled and crawled and chewed on the toys, we breastfed, we wrote, I welled up.

A fortnight later, for our second session, we were locked down in our homes. Over the next couple of months we met online – sessions led by professional writers, prompting us to try new ideas and new approaches. We were the pilot of this idea, to see if it were needed. One by one we expressed how we had clung to the group as a liferaft in this difficult life moment, and world moment. How we wanted more people to have this.

A couple of years later, the founder of the New Mothers’ Writing Circle, Catrin Kemp, got funding to make that happen, and over the last 18 months she has run six cohorts in an eight-week programme of transformation, creativity, community and writing. I have co-lead five or six sessions with her, and we’re about to go off and do a mini-retreat with some of the alumni (and other writer mothers) in Cove Park.

At the end of 2023 the BBC came to document the group and I got to read a piece that I wrote when I was a participant back in 2020. You can watch the mini-documentary on Culture Scene here.