Lynn Davidson reports from her recent literary travels
I’ve
been to two writing festivals in the past month – the first was the Byron Bay
Writers Festival which I went to with my son Elliot and his partner Cat, and then
on my own among the throngs to the Edinburgh Festival(s) –
International/Book/Fringe. At the Byron Bay Writers Festival you bought a
ticket for a whole day and got a rubber wrist band to wear. With the sun shining
on softly billowing marquees and silky rainbow flags you kind of felt like you
were at a music festival – and then you were. We went to a love poetry session
chaired by Mark Tredinnick who described poetry as ‘an architecture of
utterance’. Performance poets read their own work: C J Bowerbird read a
performance poem about the gritty side of love while raucous birds added some
background screech. When Kelly-Lee Hickey read Cohen’s love poem ‘A Thousand
Kisses Deep’ the white tent seemed to hold its breath until the end of the poem.
A
session with M J Hyland was lively (she used the ‘c word’ about a reviewer who
had been less than kind) and generously full of tips about her process. She not
only gets friends who are good readers to read her work; she asks them after
about a month what they remember of the novel and what they think the centre of
the novel is. Personally I think it would be scary to get a surprise pop quiz
by MJ a month down the track after reading her work … what if you’d forgotten
the gist of it! Horrors. She also meditates for half an hour each morning,
which includes slumping in a chair with cigarette and coffee before heading
into her writing day. Generally I like hearing the Aussie writers talk, they
have a certain appealing zest and irreverence.
Highlights
for me of the busy, vast Edinburgh Book Fest (and I’ll add here I wasn’t there
to hear Ellie Catton read – I heard she was wonderful) were Kay Ryan, Jackie
Kay, Kathleen Jamie and the great story-teller Colm Toibin. Kay Ryan talked
about the importance of ‘getting going’ with writing; she says if you can get
going, something can happen. She often uses Ripley’s Believe it or Not and murder mysteries as inspiration. She was
funny and wry and generous with her readings. Her asides – pre, mid and post
poem reading – were almost poems in themselves. One memorable quote: ‘I like
the texture and the sound of facts but I don’t care about them actually.’ How liberating.
Kathleen
Jamie talked a bit about what she called the ‘hinterlands’ of poems – I think she means the land you can’t see
when you look at the landscape of a poem, but it’s there. She spoke about her
recent breast cancer and how, during her recovery where she spent a long time
relaxing in her garden, a friend sent her some rose-scented body moisturiser
and how lovely the scent was, and then she talked about the scent of Damascus
roses and she wove around to Rosa Luxemburg and I almost forget now, but maybe
she was really talking about a prose poem, ‘Healings 2’, in her new
collaborative book Frissure where
artist Brigid Collins paints the line of Jamie’s mastectomy scar as a rose with
a line of Robert Burns falling off the edges of the page: ‘You sieze the
flo’er, the bloom is shed.’ The poem finishes ‘To be healed is not to be saved
from mortality but rather, released back into it:/ we are returned to the wild,
into possibilities for ageing and change.’
So
since then I’ve been to County Kerry in Ireland and my ex-sister in law has
taken me around peninsulas and onto islands. Back in Scotland I spent some days
on the Isle of Islay, revisiting after 27 years. It’s as beautiful and strange
and as full of eccentric characters as it ever was. I ate a memorable meal
there called Hebridean chicken with black pudding, haggis and whisky sauce.
It was
on Islay that I heard about the death of Seamus Heaney. It’s hard to imagine
that he is gone. I was going to hear him read at the British and Irish
Contemporary Poetry Conference next week. At least the poems are still with us
– we can enter them at any time and hear their music.
Now I’m
resident (for a short, heady time a fellow)
at Hawthornden Castle and hope to spend my month here writing poems and perhaps
essays that may have some interesting hinterlands. We went beneath the castle the
other day to explore the Pictish caves. Our host Hamish unlocked the heavy wood
door to the caves with a large old key. We all (except me) bowed down a little
to enter caves that are like large burrows, rounded at their edges. At one
point a cave opened onto the side of a very deep well (Seamus would have found
a poem there). In another cave carved into its walls was what looked like an
extensive wine rack, but was a dove cote. For doves. In the caves. You heard
me.
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