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Red Wheelbarrow, one of Scotland's newer poetry magazines, is based in St Andrews and has strong links to the University there. Click the name above to access their website, which has information about past editions, contributors and where to buy. Kirsti Wishart is one of the magazine's founder editors.

Collaboration: pipelines

KW: First of all, how did the project come about and what was the working method? Was there plenty of discussion between Anne Bevan and yourself on the content of PIPELINES, one influencing the other, or would you work
separately and then look for points of contact?

JG: Anne came up with the idea, originally called UNDERCOVERED, about looking at water and the pipework that threaded it underground, and the ideas for her series of sculptures was well under way by the time she contacted me by writing me a letter. I had previously seen some of her work in an Orkney exhibition and hugely enjoyed it (a postcard size picture of one of her works, a nest made of iron scraps, is on the pinboard in my work room all the time) so it was a welcome co-incidence she had chosen to write to me. We had one brief chat on the phone, then I went through to Edinburgh (where Anne now lives) for a day trip to Huntley Museum, the Swanston area and on to the three principal waterworks in the Borders. It was a LONG day - hard hats on and down into the tunnels etc, climbing up rigging etc - but great for someone usually stuck in the back room with the computer for company. I came back with my head bouncing and started that night, largely on visual images retained from the day's outing and raking through a bunch of maps and plans Anne had given me. Drawings of tunnels! Pipes with names! I had never seen such things. As well, of course, we talked all the way back in the car. We are both talkers so that bit was easy. I think Anne found it odder than me - she is used to working solo and found the different perspective (mine was darker) a bit of a head-spinner, I think. The initial draft I wrote up was quick, then I left it well alone for three weeks an rewrote before sending her it as "notes". We were both very pleased to see how "matched" some of our ideas had been all along and assumed it was the car talking that did it. For both of us, I think finding a wavelength happened very naturally, as it does when me and Sally Beamish (composer) work together. I imagine it would be awful to try and collaborate with someone you can't get on a waveband with. I can't imagine how you'd do it. Working TOGETHER, lots of talk and sharing ideas, is part of the point. If you're working separately, the end product is merely juxtaposition, not collaboration, surely.

KW: The subject matter of PIPELINES relates closely to themes explored in your previous work that are obviously very important to you - the gap between perception and reality, our relationship to language, the importance of making the hidden yet necessary elements in life be seen and recognized. Do you know if it was this that drew Anne Bevan to you as an ideal collaborator and were the themes described what drew you to the project? Did the
experience of working with Anne affect your way of thinking about these topics?

JG: Why Anne picked me to work with I have no idea. You'd need to ask her. She certainly mentioned that my name was the one that came to her when she thought about things under the ground, but I thought it was mibby better not to know what that meant. If someone sees possibility in working with you, you don't need to know why - just find out if their hunch is right enough by trying it out. Whatever her attraction, I think the hunch was right - we collaborate easily. Hard to say if working with the person influences perception, though. I think not so much the person (ie their way of looking) as what it it they show you you would never have chosen or found my yourself. I mean, would you be going down a water main into underground tunnels if someone hadn't invited you? Most writers don't do that stuff - some sculptors and painters seem to! What I got the kick out of was seeing these things that I'd not otherwise have crossed my mind. What someone else gives you, if you're lucky, is opportunity to see something physically else. THEN your own perceptive stuff gets to work on it.

KW: Maintaining the water theme of the book, Jenny Turner has described your work as 'fluid' in the sense that you seem to have little time for generic confines. For example, in PIPELINES we switch from fairy tale to a parody of medical jargon to prose poem to concrete poetry reminiscent of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan. Yet, you seem to be hesitant about describing your writing as poetry. Is this because you fear being instantly pigeonholed or is it more a challenge to the reader to question the categories we apply to the various genres we come across day-to-day - from woman's magazines, to car manuals to song lyrics?

JG: Nah - I don't like categorising. Colonisation is never in the best interests of the colonised, is it? I think readers come with very sophisticated ideas of their own, and labels can just get in the way of all that. If something interests, they'll stuck with it and read; get something without it having to be flagged up. I'd no more say "I am writing a poem" than "I am writing a horror story" - unless you're reading to pass the time or for escapism, that's not really very helpful and might be actively unhelpful to the reader's freedom to join in the creative thing - to choose what it is they're getting out of it. How can you tell what somebody else will find horrific? I feel crass labeling in that way, or maybe I'm just not confident. Sure, some readers don't read to do half the work - they want to be TOLD things and unwind. Nothing wrong with that desire, it's just not the only way to read and not the kind of need I feel I can supply.

NOW when you ask about challenge! That had never occurred but I suppose it is. Deliberately turning off the labels - if this wasn't being allowed to pass as medical authority, what would it sound like? - is an interesting thing to do with words. You find all sorts of manipulations and pomposities, sheer absurdities doing that. I recently got digital tv channels and am mesmerized by the shopping channels. They are surreal beyond anything you could make up, but the folk on them seem to think they're just talking advertising talk. Take away that context, listen again and it's so weird it's not real: the layers of presence, manipulation and indignity are mind-boggling, and analysing why that is is when the politics, the taken-for-granteds and so on starts to surface. Then there's something called the BRAVO channel which takes brutality and psychosis as entertainment wholly as given. The political implications and assumptions behind the existence of mobile phones? And don't start me on computer games. Quake? Resident Evil? Jesus christ.

KW: The importance of accessing the subconscious in your writing, getting rid of the internal literary critic, seems to be vital to you. To what extent does collaborating, having other material with someone outside your field help in
this process?

JG: It's a shot in the arm! I get seriously fed-up working on my own and consider stopping doing it every day. EVERY DAY. Life is much more fun with other people chucking ideas and other assorted oddnesses your way. Admittedly. I do need a lot of time on my own to sift and work out what is is exactly I've just been told after conversations, parties, chats or reading book - I am a bit of a recluse there. Let's face it, you can't get too introspective (introspection is the basis of all creative work, I think) in company. It's rude apart from anything else. But to have someone to work alongside is hugely beneficial at the chaos/starting work/middle of things stages. Having the mess in your head helpfully stirred about for you, someone else saying something obvious you'd missed - great fun. Working with other people puts the fun bit back in for me. I lose that sense when I work on my own too long. And without that sense, I think the work loses some of its vitality.

KW: So what appeals to you about the use of the short story or prose poem? Do you find it a more immediate means of establishing a connection with the reader than the novel?

JG: Yes! It's also finished quicker! I like lively. On the other hand, novels give readers the chance to relax into something, adopt a whole different way of seeing at a more gentle pace. Shorter things are livelier but more brutal. Longer things can be lively - I recently read Byron's Don Juan and it races - but the demands of writing at that speed for that length of time ie novel length, can wear me out. I bet they wore Byron out too.

KW: This certainly isn't a work that the usual terms ('gritty', 'urban') that are used to describe Scottish literature could be applied but rather foregrounds the lyrical, poetic quality of your work that is largely overlooked in critical discussion of your work. Is there a feeling of escape from the at times restricting critical constructs that are applied to
Scottish writers when you embark on a project like PIPELINES? On the other hand, are you worried that critics might view this as a sideline to the 'real' business of producing 'proper' 'literary' fiction?

JG: Hahaha. "Urban and gritty" is a joke phrase now, surely. It was shorthand for "Scottish" at one time, and every bit as meaningful ie not much. I notice I have recently been veering away form anything that could be described as "urban" out of the need to do exactly as you say - get away from that stupid label which is the height of laziness - more often English reviewer laziness than any other country's, it has to be said. More out of seeking freedom for myself than anything else, I have been writing pieces based in 19th Century Germany and 18th Century "Romantic" England - the fact that both are about how women create is the cohesion for me. That "urban gritty" thing was mostly coined for men's work (though it seldom does them justice either) and the women got looped in because it was easier than looking at their work as a thing in its own right. Pish-tush urban gritty, say I. It's SOOOOOO LAZY.

I think that's what the whole thing about form and shying away from categorising is about - I can't work well if I'm working in a tight wee space. Writing anything at all makes emotional demands and demands on confidence: whatever the writer uses to get some words onto paper is what they choose to satisfy those needs primarily. The "rationalising" comes after. I work very hard at not worrying too much what critics think for the same reason - you'd spike yourself. This is not to say that critical comment doesn't matter or that it can't help sometimes. If there wasn't some positive feedback sooner or later, you'd stop. The critical feedback that perpetuates your confidence to write is only rarely from academics however - their work is so far down the line from where you are. Finally, remarks by anyone about "what writers should be writing" are so deeply stupid as to be irrelevant. "What we need now is a book which ...". Dear me. Books aren't mail-order psychiatry, for godsake, or instead of politics. That stuff is lot of daft posturing that misses the point of politics, psychiatry and literature all at the same time.

KW: There's always been a strong physicality in your work both in its descriptive nature and the way you highlight the readers relation to the words on the page. This can result in a powerful effect on the reader - once you've read Joy putting her hand in a tin of soup in THE TRICK IS TO KEEP BREATHING there's no forgetting it. Similarly, in FOREIGN PARTS when Cassie and Rona walk into the cathedral and the reader is confronted by two pages filled with the word GLASS, there's the sense you're pushing the written word as far as it will go until it becomes, as Jenny Turner states of James Kelman's short stories, 'like looking at paintings, or like listening to music.' Do such collaborations as PIPELINES suggest an impatience with the written word or is it a concerted attempt to break down
the barriers between literature and other art forms? Also, did your working process differ when you had to work with actual geographical sites and in response to Anne's artwork?

JG: Risk of repeating myself with the reply to this question, bit I'll try not to. Yes I get impatient with the written word (even well-structured words can tell terrible lies and you do get despondent that words ever mean anything if you head off down that track too far) and yes I do think it interests me to ignore divisions between things - part of my enthusiasm for avoiding pigeonholing. All art forms are related and the spurious requirement to create division between them in order that "expertism" may exist has become so sophisticated that is requires active resistance. I am happiest when working between forms, between "genres", against type. I like feeling for where the edges of forms are and wondering whether how flexible they can be. And the actual geographics - visits to real places and real objects - is something real appended to all that abstract stuff I normally deal with and so rewarding I can't tell you. In terms of writing process, nothing changes that much: in terns of personal engagement, the hands-on thing was refreshing because it was such a change.

KW: PIPELINES also draws attention to a theme that appears time and time again in the work of modern Scottish writers but as it doesn't fit with their dour image is little discussed - the experience of transcendence. This is
particularly striking in the moment when John Sinclair finds the spring that will supply Edinburgh with water - a 'book-softened' man becoming 'wholly happy' in his surroundings suggests a Zen-like awakening. Later in the book
a tunnel is described as echoing 'like joy'. Was this something you wanted to explore - the magic of every day things taken for granted - or was it simply your reaction to the experience of the PIPELINES project? How do you see this theme relating to your work as a whole?

JG: Again, how one is perceived is not always how one sees oneself. I think my work is all about joy - finding it where you can even in the most bleak of surroundings. The everyday is the most magical of places, it has to be or there would be precious little that was wonderful about being human. That people manage to make "magic" if you like out of the everyday, the odd raindrop on a window, a moment of connective eye-contact with a stranger, an unexpected burst of birdsong - is the most persuasive thing about us as a species. That stuff is where the most beauty lies, ultimately, and why it's so depressing when you see people to depressed, too "busy", too mistakenly self-involved to spot it. I like remembering what's good about life and expressing that remembering in my work. You're right - for some reason folk don't remark on that aspect much, but it's there right from the word go. The first thing I ever wrote was about a girl finding the face of a dead uncle half-buried under a roan pipe on a Saltcoats council-house and it coming to life and speaking to her. The curse of the urban-gritty strikes again, I guess. That is my work in my eyes. There you go.

KW: Finally, could you tell us a wee bit more about the BIG DRIP project?

JG: The drip! Me and Anne are working on a thing where she's been commissioned to make a big glass-like object to sit in a harbour. What she's come up with she calls a DRIP - only it's some seven feet tall. She made me a little one that sits on my desk. Since this commission is to be set up in Ayr, I didn't do much hands-on this time: I know Ayr very well as the principal city of my former home shire. I've written a fan of seven cards with two-line pieces of the history of Ayr in them - Burns, King Duncan, Robert Bruce, Wallace and Cromwell and girls who used to take part in the Ayr music festival when I was a teenager - all having something to do with water. It seems to be a thing with me and Anne. I don;t know when the piece will be in place, but she's working on it. After that' I'm keen to get her thinking about the interior - more my spiritual home, and since she's been in the driving seat of what we do so far, I figure it's my turn. The idea I'm tentatively poking about with is gynecological implements. Ahem.