Words from Scottish Makar and writer Kathleen Jamie heading for Nairn
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Scotland’s national poet Kathleen Jamie will be the fourth Makar for a while longer, but has already lived decades wrangling with words, her first poems published at 19.
“Writing poetry was an odd thing to do,” she admits, talking about her life on her website.
Next Friday, Kathleen Jamie, who lives in Fife, will talk at Nairn Book & Arts Festival (nairnfestival.co.uk), looking back on a career with 15 collections of poetry, and including books of essays on nature and the environment, an art book, Frissure, embracing her experience of breast cancer and Surfacing, a book of essays where she visits the Alaskan people the Yul’uk with archaeologists, global warning releasing the people’s lost cultural treasures from the melting coast.
It seems after her early start in writing, Kathleen was let loose on the world to keep bringing it back filtered through her own precise noticing and listening to it.
Kathleen says: ‘We are brought up to believe that writing is about finding a voice.
“But the older I get the more I think it is not about voice, it is about listening and also about looking, it’s about being attentive not about your voice at all.
“My heart sinks when I hear a writer going on about voice. But that might be a function of age of course!”
But her own poetry began to emerge when she was very young.
“I don’t know how because the house I grew up in wasn’t a literary house,” Kathleen said.
“If Tik Tok has proven anything it is that a lot of teenagers write and mostly give up or did back in the day – but I just never stopped, I got more and more intrigued by it. I kept going.
“When you are a teenager, it is nice to have something that is your own and that nobody knows about.
“And that was my secret thing.
“I think the only difference between then and now is the internet.”
But Kathleen also talks of writing as a route she saw to escape a future she didn’t want.
Her first pamphlet of poems Black Spiders was published when she was 19, having got involved with a writers’ group in Edinburgh while she was still at school.
Hearing of a publisher arriving in Edinburgh and looking for manuscripts, Kathleen offered some poems.
“I wanted to be a writer because I understood that it was a way of being and a way of living that had vast horizons.
“And those horizons weren’t available as a girl, especially an ordinary girl from an ordinary scheme, expected to get an ordinary job in an office.
“I was kicking against that from quite a young age and having discovered writing as a possibility there was also a negative thing, I absolutely didn’t want to do that nine to five in an office as a clerking assistant!
“Those two things drove me when I was young!”
Poetry helped her her start on the life she wanted.
"I failed and failed to get into university, I didn’t make the grade to get into university, but by then I was really anxious to go to university and no-one else in the family had and I realised there was this thing you can do for four years and it sounded like liberation and I wouldn’t have to get an awful job and so having failed to get into university for the second time, I asked if I could go and meet them, somebody, a dean of some sort.
"And I said ‘I can’t do the Higher French but I have got this pamphlet of poems, will this help at all?’ and I don’t know if it did or it didn’t, but eventually I got into university. I think things were a bit more liquid than they are now."
At 40, Kathleen made a commitment to writing about nature and the environment – and it was on her wishlist when she became the fourth Makar.
She believes that – 20 years on from that original commitment, older people must do more.
“I admire the kids who can glue themselves to oil tankers, but what can we do? In the future some child will ask ‘Granny, what did you do?’ and I’ll be saying ‘I sat round fretting and being a bit middle class’ – it is just not good enough!”
A sign of how important the body of work Kathleen has created so far in her career is, comes with a book of critical essays on her work edited by Rachel Falconer.
Has she read it? Did it change her approach?
“I appreciate all the work of everyone involved, and I have it on the shelf, but I circle round it,” the writer admits.
She loved the experience of editing and introducing Antlers Of Water, a collection of nature and environmental writing – “All these other wonderful writers wrote the book for me!”
Kathleen likes to keep pushing on. Future plans suggest a familiar openness to the world: “Keeping yourself undefined and being alert to what catches the corner of your eye. I hope I have more years to explore more things, but I don’t know what they will be. That’s the fun and joy of it.”
Kathleen Jamie will be in conversation at Nairn Book & Arts Festival on Friday (August 31) at 5pm. Tickets for Kathleen's event:
Info on Nairn Book & Arts Festival:
