WIGTOWN’S events are unlike so many others. Moving away from the usual rented-out spaces on offer at festivals, we cram together in The Open Book to hear readings from local writers, fill tiny village halls to hear musical pieces and squeeze into the martyrs cell to pose for photos.
Among the best places to begin the Wigtown Book Festival experience was a Dutch writing showcase, where Jente Posthuma and Fien Veldman impressed audiences with their surrealist stories about a woman who loses her twin and a woman’s relationship with a printer.
In the audience, you feel a little bit like the only students in the classroom who didn’t read the set text, and you’re sorely missing out. Posthuma’s unnamed protagonist is a woman who is desperately trying to run away from her feelings. She uses dry humour, strange imagery – one scene has her recalling her childhood, where she and her brother recreated waterboarding with a tea towel and bucket – but whenever she cuts a little too close to home, she swerves away from the topic, obfuscating.
Her tone is odd; the character doesn’t quite understand the world around her and the author isn’t sure whether this is a talent or a defect. Posthuma closes with an excerpt where the crater the brother has left in two people’s lives has made them unable to physically connect. They’re half a person brought together by the man, and it’s terrifically real.
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Veldman’s story has a similar stilted tone but this time you never learn what the protagonist’s trauma is. With her relationship with a printer – no, really – she grieves the life she should have had while humanising the Xerox. Like Posthuma’s protagonist, she cannot connect with others, instead bestowing her affection onto inanimate objects, and represents the people she works alongside as cogs in a machine.
The style is much more stream-of-consciousness, and we’re along for the ride as the “defensive outsider” protagonist projects onto the reader, using second person almost accusatorily to include everyone in her cynical worldviews.
Veldman’s final excerpt directly addresses the idea of the world passing someone by – the idea of a “fringe orbit” – and it’s imagery that contrasts sharply with the other excerpts. We feel we’re on the precipice of a great novel.
My night closed out with a visit to the words and music showcase. The hosts were the bookshop band, whose muses are the very books being celebrated by these events. We hear folk songs about a henchman, a piece ebbing and flowing like the sea and the memories a character is trying to keep, and one that seems to sound exactly how reading feels.
We hear music from Joyce and Ian Cochrane from the Old Bank Bookshop whose songs cover everything from sailors returning home to the Solway Firth to ospreys migrating across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Claire Philips impresses with poems where she’s unafraid to show more ugly emotions – with stubborn jealousy and the feeling of a life you left behind.
Then come the singers. Scots poet Susi Briggs poses, warts and all, for a painting. We hear the battles of gay female doctors, and we take a magical tour through her childhood memories of Routin Brig. Ukelele player Zoe Bestel’s sonorous tones lead us home, with tales of a porcelain tapestry, a wasteland of Westerners’ tears and longing for a self-sustaining world.
Among all the books, you might miss the artists. There’s Julie Houston, who makes crafts out of stamps, paper and Tunnock’s tea wrappers, and if you follow the smell of turpentine across the road and up the stairs, you can meet Galloway artist Davy Brown, whose use of bright colours and contrasting shadow in his landscape oil paintings are second-to-none.
This tour of Wigtown ends with a visit to the local writers. Annie Versery’s punk poetry is made to be shouted aloud – she rages against the cranking machine of politics, the media and of children being forced to grow up too quickly, but pauses to breathe with an idealised woman for a man’s plastic life and a pun-filled delight about a vampire.
Meanwhile, Elaine Barton introduces us to a man transformed into folklore, but legend becomes human as the light fades from his eyes and tears spring to Barton’s as she recounts his last moments.
Finally, Helen Ryman takes us on a trip through her mind as she travels to her family’s farm. She intercuts internal rhymes and follows a twisting river, bringing poetry into realism as she recounts the death of her father. Farming is in her blood, she says, the land is literally under her fingernails.
Talent is under the fingernails of the performers in Wigtown.
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