Pamela Beasant is a writer based in Stromness, Orkney, and last year was holder of the first George Mackay Brown Writing Fellowship. Her collection of poetry, Running with a Snow Leopard, was published by Two Ravens Press in January 2008.
Today I spent some time writing this and wondering what a blog is trying to do. I can see it’s a good way to think out loud – communicate in a raw way and see if anything comes back. Some people really enjoy this – a kind of remote gregariousness – but I tend to only have this kind of discussion with people I know and trust. And it’s interesting to hear about people’s days, or books they are passionate about, and especially to hear how people write, and why. But when it comes down to it, I find it hard to join in. I don’t want to describe writing, or discuss it in the germination stage – I just want to think it, fiercely and intensely, and on my own.
Having said that, some people are brilliant at it. One of the best pre-blog bloggers, in my opinion, was George Mackay Brown. Never mind all the slightly mystical, archetypal stuff; he wrote a weekly column for the local paper for years and years, with a directness that was intimate, and there was nothing egotistical, and no agenda, behind it. He wrote about all sorts of things, but the ones I like best are about the mundane, everyday things: when he accidentally put strawberryade into his stew, for instance, or, best of all, when he tried to resuscitate his dead toaster by sweeping out all the crumbs, at which he could only gaze in awe. These things are the stuff of great blogs, and they are individual and universal.
This is a letter from Stromness, but not, I’m afraid, about stew or exploding toasters. This is a not very interesting day in the life of a poet.
We’ve had a long spell of dry, sunny weather in Stromness, but I still can’t go out without a coat, or, heaven forbid, socks. How can people do it, and why does someone who feels the cold so much live in a place like this? Making a concession to the time of year, I reluctantly do without a vest, and end up on the brink of hypothermia after a trip to the Co-op. Back home, it’s colder indoors than out. After guiltily lighting the fire, and toasting a red, mottled stripe of warmth into cheeks, hands and feet, I get down to some work.
A poet seems to fill the day with almost everything except poetry. Today, my sixteen year-old is packed off to a standard grade with lunch money, two pens and a pep talk about focusing, writing legibly, caring about passing, not taking in mobile phones, reading the instructions on the paper, remembering calculator/dictionary (how come they are allowed to take in dictionaries?)…. He sails off blithely and I run to the toilet, feeling all the nerves and over-anxiety he should be feeling, damn him.
Then there are the emails. Please drop everything and write an advert/press release, find out about something, contact so-and-so about some other thing, read someone’s novel/play/poem. (I’m not exaggerating about novels – there seems to be a novel epidemic all over the west mainland of Orkney.) And getting the messages isn’t as easy as it sounds. With a knackered computer at home and temporarily no internet access, I trek to the library with a borrowed laptop, enough milk in a bottle for one coffee, phone and fags. On the way, I nod or say hello to most people, look at the posters in the window of Tam’s bookshop, squint at the exhibition in the Porteous Brae gallery, glare at the ginger cat who bullies all the others and craps in our garden, skirt round a nasty looking post-folk festival stain on the flagstones. Three-quarters of the way there, I realise I’ve forgotten the library key, and walk back home fuming. Once installed at last, I plug in the computer and get going. I’m lucky to have hung onto an office in the library, from when I was officially there all last year through the George Mackay Brown fellowship which I was awarded. My daughter gave me postcards to put on the walls and there are posters from all the events of last year. When coffee is required, I wash out the mug from last time in the tiny, metallic-smelling toilet and fill the kettle with fresh water. When the emails are done, I trek home, hang out the washing, phone someone, panic about whether so-and-so got some message, etc. On the walks to and from the library I often see the ferry, which looms so hugely when glimpsed intermittently down the nousts. If it’s breezy, I get a full, fresh whiff of the sea, and fleetingly notice where I am.
And then guilt sweeps in. Just when I’m tempting myself with the idea that I could type up the poem in the notebook, or have a long session with the novel, I remember that I’m not earning any money, and time is being swallowed up. I have obligations to the Scottish Poetry Library, and am putting together stuff on Orkney writers for Highland Library, and editing a book about Eday. So I do some of that, but the smallest thing can trip you up, or feel dangerously like a victory. The other day, for instance, a guy I’d been meaning to contact for weeks miraculously turned up right outside the house, sitting on a wall having a cigarette. I asked him all the urgent things I needed to, and felt like I’d done half a day’s work.
By lunchtime, not much creative has been achieved. My husband’s the chef in our house, so he emerges from his cave of a work room upstairs and cooks a couple of sausages for me (a treat – I don’t have them every day), and I butter the bread and put juice in glasses. We eat, make a cup of tea and go back to work. It all takes about twenty minutes. Then I get some writing done. At last. And if it goes all right, I don’t care about all the other undone things.
But today I’m clock-watching for my son to come back from his exam, nervously waiting to hear how it went. He arrives, dumps his jacket and two pens, cheerfully says it was fine and off he goes. I feel relieved and a bit foolish, and hope he’s right – and marvel at his attitude, remembering the weight of something huge, dreadful and never-ending at exam time.
More writing gets done before tea. I’m working on a series of themed poems: the jobs all the redundant saints and angels are doing in a godless world. It’s obsessing and becoming much more serious than it was at the outset – but it’s hard to concentrate. The other complication at the moment is that there’s an imminent performance of a rock musical I’ve been doing, on and off, for a few years, with composer Gemma McGregor. She has written brilliant music, and I’m sure it will all be fine. There are some very talented kids involved, an imaginative director and people running about doing sets, props and costumes. But it’s the first libretto I’ve done, and I feel in a state of apologetic panic about the whole thing. Responsible, and helpless. It’s been transformed into this whole other entity, and I can only stand back and watch, and occasionally send round a hastily updated version of the script. It’s a weird feeling, the kind that causes breath-catching anxiety at three in the morning, and the urge to run away very fast and far. At the moment, it’s invading the days as a kind of uneasy undertow.
We have tea, pasta tonight, and I ritually watch a TV programme which I won’t name because it’s too embarrassing. (It’s not even a soap.) Then I make phone calls that should have been done earlier. Later there’s a long, tangled conversation with my daughter, who’s away studying art at Dundee. She’s happy in a fragile way, but sometimes needs to offload. I try not to worry about her, but do. Then there’s some good writing time, when it’s too late for people to phone and the day’s shutting down. I feel alive by 11pm, and could work until 3, but usually don’t unless insomnia sets in. I have an apple before bed, and read for at least half-an-hour. Then sleep, and it all starts again.
