How’s Orkney? Well, I have to tell you it’s been the driest spell since the expulsion from the Garden, and hot as well. I can’t deny a touch of nasty Scottish Schadenfreude – all those pics of England drowning while we’re baking. But of course, no, like a good spouse I’m really sad that her indoors, Mrs England, is suffering. We’re partners, after all, in a long and eventful marriage. Drifting apart a bit now, it’s true, sleeping a wee bit further away in the bed – but still yoked to a joint account and a lot of fractious children.
Partnering is on my mind. When you think, creative collaboration, you think – Gilbert and Sullivan (and Jim Broadbent in the film of course, but that’s probably just me being Very Sad; I think he is a Genius.) Rogers and Hammerstein, Abbot and Costello, Weil and Brecht, Batman and Robin, Astaire and Rogers, Flannagan and Allen, Morecambe and Wise. The Two Ronnies. Ant and Dec. (No, this is getting silly) But if you think writing – who do you come up with? Well, there’s that couple called Nicci and Sean who have delightfully and inventively split their names and write creepy detective/ horror stories together. On a slightly higher – but much less lucrative – plane, Edwin and Willa Muir translated together. They tore the book in two and translated their half, then swapped it to check each other’s work. This resulted in a rather solemn version of Kafka which, according to new translators, entirely lost the black humour of the original. Frieda Lawrence claimed she wrote most of Women in Love; DHL himself rewrote The House of Ellis, by Mollie Skinner, and renamed it The Boy in the Bush. He liked artistic collaboration, especially with less experienced women. Hmmm. What Mollie thought (apart from weeping when he added two chapters at the end) isn’t recorded. Zelda thought she wrote all of Scott Fitzgerald. Ezra Pound more or less made T S Eliot’s Waste Land. And blow me, John Cheever’s beautiful terse prose wasn’t his at all, but cut by his editor.
Not an easy skill, to share writing with others. These chapter-about, let’s-make-a-novel-in-the summer-Sunday-paper-written-chapter-about-by-every-middlebrow- Tube-paperback-name things never work. The novel is not a democratic process; it’s Fascist and monomaniacal.
Not so cross-collaboration, though. I’ve done three recently – with a painter, Stuart Sim, who bounced off my poetry and made an exhibition; with a sculptor, John Cumming, for a lovely project you can access on the Hansel Cooperative Press website, about St Kildan Mailboats – and a project with Untitled, a loose collective of Orkney makers. The theme was Creativity, and I worked with Sandra Knight, who does things with textiles and paper and all sorts.
I find the process really interesting. You come together in different ways – friendship (Stuart) names in a hat (John) or designated by the committee (Sandra). Then there’s the first meeting, a bit like some early fumbling sexual experience (you show me yours and I’ll show you mine…) Then the business of making words fit something outside yourself, accommodating another way of looking at the world and representing it. It’s fascinating. I’m lucky, I think. I’m not a natural sharer; but all these projects have been really good fun. Perhaps some of the exhilaration comes from the physicality of the other disciplines – a writer’s life is so internal, it’s good to get into a garden overlooking the Hoy Hills and be asked what you think of a sheep’s bladder painted white with a flag attached, or a big chunk of carved wood – or to go to a gallery in Finstown and see big paintings in progress reinterpreting your one dimensional words. Funny creative synchronicities occur. Sandra made a box full of beautiful things, and I had, amazingly, just made a poem about a boxful of things.
Partnership works, it seems, when it doesn’t go drastically wrong. The most reassuringly recognisable thing about it though, is exactly what we all wring our hands about in what’s laughably called the creative industries. Put us together and the last thing we think about is funding. We do it for the bouncing off, the delight of making something new. We really ought to get a Union Rep. United, we’d be unstoppable. Creative Scotland, or whatever it’s called, would be shaking in its Manolo Blahniks.
Morag MacInnes is a writer based in Orkney. See some of her work in the Two Ravens Press anthologies, Riptide and Cleave.
