Alan Riach interviews Gerda Stevenson on the art of writing

Alan Riach: Quines is a series of portraits, representations of women – but not simply depictions. As monologues, they are thoughtful meditations on who this woman is, what the conditions of her life must have been like. They’re character-centred short stories in a sense but, as poems, they have a kind of enhanced urgency and intensity. Is that a fair description?

Gerda Stevenson: Yes, although they’re not all narrative poems. In Nessie, for example, the poem is simply a challenge to the reader – laying down a gauntlet. And sometimes, as you say, it’s a meditation, occasionally, from a deliberately quirky perspective. The one for Nan Shepherd is in the voice of a mountain, addressing a piece of non-biodegradable litter – a new £5 banknote with Nan’s face on it – ruefully meditating on the extinction of species and the carelessness of profiteering mankind.

And, yes, some are portraits. For example, the one about the photographer Gunnie Moberg, that poem’s almost a double portrait, written from the perspective of Orkney itself, as if the landscape is looking through the camera lens at Gunnie, and then, in turn, imagining itself seen through Gunnie’s lens.

And the one about the world’s greatest fishing fly tyer, Megan Boyd, in the voice of the fishing fly that Megan is tying, is an ode to her great skill, where I attempt to recreate the rhythmic sensuality involved in the action of her intricate daily labour.

Alan: And the characters and their stories go right back into prehistory – from Reconstructed Head of a Young Woman that opens the book and the warrior queen Sgathàch, who taught the Celtic hero Cú Chulainn the arts of combat, to our contemporaries, or near contemporaries, including the poet Tessa Ransford, who founded the Scottish Poetry Library. Sgathach is in the ghostly murmuring voice of the woman herself:

I’m a shadow, only a murmur now,

on a scattered choir of tongues,

though sunlight still splinters the waves

through my crumbling castle’s arch,

like the knives I taught Cú Chulainn how to throw;

across the bay, the Cuillin leaps from where the sun

once flung its spear, black crags clawing the sky

in ragged gabbro; the hazel woods of Tokavaig

whisper the wisdom I gathered there to share

with my fledgling warriors. But my art has long

been lost – the way of patience, to balance anger

on a blade of grass in the wind, and let it cool,

till you grasp the devastation it might have wrought;

how many times, to no avail, I warned Cú Chulainn

his rage would slay his only son: “That temper of yours,”

I told him, “will scorch a land for many moons,

where peace might have prevailed.

Hunt down your own fear first,” I said. “Feel the heat

of your breath on the bow-string as you pull, then

hold it, and take pause before you strike the heart

of what you do not need to kill.”

Alan: And your note to the poem tells us that the Black Cuillins, that serrated skyline of mountains, sprang from a spot on the Isle of Skye where the sun flung a spear into the ground; and also that, as foretold, Cú Chulainn would unknowingly kill his own son in a rage of fighting fury. There are clearly differences between writing “characters” in verse and prose.

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In your short story collection, Letting Go, you’re creating narratives, social backgrounds, historical contexts. That’s true of the poems in Quines, but differently. How would you describe the difference of priorities?

Gerda: I definitely wanted to do that in both books – create a cross-section of society. The research involved for writing Quines was immense and that isn’t by any means always the case when I’m writing poetry. I think the difference between a poem and a short story, broadly speaking, for me, anyway, is that in a short story something has to happen which makes the character undergo a change.

All the major protagonists in each of my short stories experience a profound change in themselves by the end of the story. Not necessarily a resolution – though sometimes that does happen.

There’s got to be a trajectory, an arc of some kind, which I discover as I’m writing.

I prepare a lot for creating a short story before I get any words down, think in depth about the characters, their place in society, all their terms of reference, their location, their psychology, their voice.

Alan: And that’s different in poems?

Gerda: With a poem, you can’t take a character on a journey in quite the same way – there isn’t time, unless it’s an epic poem like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But you can take the reader on a journey with a poem.

The act of writing a poem, for me, is often the capturing of a moment which holds a microcosm. I’m not necessarily aware of what that microcosm is initially – at first it’s just a hunch, but I discover its layers and meaning as I’m writing.

I have to find a hook for a poem – a specific single idea which is supple enough to carry a chain of connections. I can’t write a poem without that hook. I don’t necessarily know, initially, where it’s leading – it feels more like being a hunter on a scent.

With Quines, though, a lot of those poems, as you say, are short stories in miniature, and I had to work very hard at integrating the narratives into poetic forms, to avoid clunky exposition, finding ways of story-telling in images, and in some cases employing a meter or a rhyming structure which would allow a narrative to be driven forward, in the way, for example, that ballads do.

Alan: Then the poems take different forms – for example, the sequence of short stanzas (a series of haiku) in your tribute to the great Renaissance artist, embroiderer, calligrapher and miniaturist portrait painter Esther Inglis (1571-1624), daughter of Huguenot refugees, one of those terribly neglected and yet wonderful women most people might never have even heard of. Here are the first of them:

Goose and crow quills scratch

a tiny patch of parchment,

giving flight to words.

I paint myself – not

vanity – necessity:

a lord may hire me.

A ragged man sells

seed pearls from a burn; I stitch

them to books for kings.

Honeysuckle scrolls,

thistle spikes and fleur-de-lis

twine with damask rose.

Like a butterfly,

I inhale from harebell cups

the tang of blue ink.

Alan: Those haiku suggest that in your writing there are things only implied, and things explicitly described, and the choices you make there, whether in the poems or the short stories, createdifferent kinds of tension, or suspense...

Esther Inglis

Gerda: Well, I like ambiguity. I remember Don Paterson saying in one of his poetry readings something along the lines that if you’ve written a poem and think you know exactly what it’s about, it probably won’t be very good!

I know what he means. Good writing is often about what you leave out, and, as you say, what’s implied rather than what is explicitly described, and I think that’s true of writing both poetry and short stories.

In fact, I think they have a lot in common, because they’re both highly condensed forms. Rhythm and a sense of music is very important to me in both poetry and prose.

I come from a family of musicians, and the sound of language as I’m writing is hugely important to me. I work in a lot of detail on these aspects of my writing – for me the sound is equally important as the ideas that are being communicated, particularly in my poetry.

The director Peter Brook did a lot of work with his actors on the emotion carried through sound in Shakespeare’s verse – separating the vowels from the consonants and examining them in isolation. Of course, a famous example of a poem which does this brilliantly is Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting.

Alan: Is there an intrinsic difference between your practice in composition in prose and in poetry? Is what prompts you the same set of things or are there different triggers?

Gerda: I think character, societal situation and place are probably more of a starting point when it comes to my short stories.

Place is so important to me. I can’t imagine a character without knowing where she or he is located geographically. Whereas a poem will more likely be triggered by a single thought or idea that has a ripple effect, like a pebble thrown into a pool, making wider and wider circles.

Alan: The stories in Letting Go are all connected – sometimes very lightly – with each other, as in the subtitle, A Timeline of Tales.

Why did you want to do that?

Gerda: I love making these connections – everything is connected. The idea stemmed from the second story in the collection Bella Day, in which I refer briefly to the beautiful wooden carving in West Linton’s St Andrew’s Church, created by two women during the 19th century – highly unusual for women to be doing such work in those days.

I’ve always been fascinated by these church carvers, women from my home village in the Pentland Hills, and though it’s very hard to find out much about them (so often the case with women) their family background is extraordinary. So I thought I’d open the book with a story about these women, and then, in the second story (which I wrote before the first), we’d meet characters living 100 years later in the same location, discovering their work.

Then I felt it would be interesting to play with that idea, with cross-references throughout the book. Just very light touches, brush strokes, some of them so subtle that unless you’re reading carefully, you’ll miss them – characters in different stories, different locations, decades apart, referring to or experiencing the same things.

In the third story, for example, the mother sings the line “And a black boy frae yont Nyanga” from Hamish Henderson’s great song Freedom Come All Ye. This is the same boy who appears in the powerful poem by the South African poet, Ingrid Jonker – Die Kind Wat Dood Geskiet Is Deur Soldate By Nyanga / The Child Who Was Shot Dead By Soldiers In Nyanga, which I refer to in the fourth story, Colour.

Alan: There are always further connections, more to find out.

Gerda: No end to them.

Gerda Stevenson will be reading from and talking about her stories at the Aye Write festival at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, on Saturday at 1.15-2.15pm: “Short, But Perfectly Formed Stories”.