Mirror, Mirror
Click on the images below for an edited recording in two parts of a word and image workshop for Book Week Scotland, 21 Nov 2024. In Part One, Kirsty Gunn reads from a short story, "Mirror, Mirror" from her new collection, Pretty Ugly (Rough Trade Books, 2024), and a short exchange between Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low ensues over some of the themes and features of the story. In the last section of Part One, Gunn sets the first of her creative writing exercises. In Part Two, Gunn sets more creative writing exercises and Jean Duncan talks participants through creating word-and-image concertinaed books; both creative activities stem from the morning's reading and discussions.
Threads
Sometimes the most complex seemingly disparate things in our heads come together in our thinking like spoons in a drawer whilst simpler ideas just won’t align. I’m reading Dan Pearson’s recent ‘Dig Delve’ about garden design trends and abstracting from them what is memorable and important brings to mind the jumble of clothing in our wardrobes and drawers— scarves and hats, jackets and jumpers no longer worn but, for reasons of their connection with persons and events in our pasts we are unable to relinquish.
My friend likes to read Derek Jarman’s books about gardens, as I do, and talk about her own city garden that runs long and narrow almost all the way to the Cherwell (in my imagination, at least). In these times of considerable uncertainty, not knowing how her cancer will respond to this second round of chemo, her ideas overlaying with his. ‘Modern Nature is a kind of talisman for me’ she writes in a blaze of WhatsApp-words that capture the power in their landscapes of what is hidden and what is not. Where land and sky collapse, as horizons must, only in flares of a delicate light. Jarman ‘allows souls to usher forth and whisper of transience’… our mortality.
And it’s in these flares of a delicate light that I, too, find connections. Flares dispersed by visitations on our fabrics, on the clothes that we wear, which intimate our mortality. Like these viscose threads here spun into a cloth that had been for some years a dark blue scarf, spangled red, white and gold with an inimitable Paisley pattern, which belonged to my father. It first appeared in a cache of black and white photographs from 1957. I wore it too, intermittently, as a student in the 1980s when it became unfashionable to wear university colours. My father wore it for a short time after that until it was laundered and folded neatly into a drawer and forgotten, a drawer that wouldn’t be opened again until I really had to. All those iterations of its past, my past, caught and pulled back in this moment now of just looking. Our lives re-presented in a tassled weave of light and colour.
William Hume
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Beth McDonough’s poem and concertinaed book…