Visiting authors delighted with friendly and welcoming John O’Groats Book Festival
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THE John O’Groats Book Festival is only in its second year but is already developing its own distinctive character and establishing itself as one of the friendliest events of its kind, according to the guest authors who took part in the busy 2019 programme at the weekend.
Gerda Stevenson, singer/songwriter, author, poet and Bafta Scotland award-winning actress, summed it up well when she said: “I think the fact that it’s reaching out to the community is really important and it feels incredibly friendly. I would recommend it to anybody, and I’m not just saying that – I actually would. It has been lovely.”
Gerda was speaking on Saturday after giving a talk in the Seaview Hotel, where she was joined by fellow guest writers Bella Bathurst and James Robertson and illustrator Kate Leiper.
The festival also showcased a range of local authors, turning Groats into a literary hub over the course of three days. There were school visits to different parts of the county as well as a children’s session at Lyth Arts Centre.
Gerda’s talk was based on her recently published collection Quines: Poems in tribute to women of Scotland. She read extracts from the book with such power and expressiveness that it felt like a performance rather than simply a recitation.
She focused in particular on the remarkable Frances (Fanny) Wright, Dundee-born feminist, abolitionist, social reformer and “atheist of the Enlightenment”.
Afterwards, explaining the thinking behind Quines, Gerda said: “It’s a celebration of the achievements of women of Scotland through the ages, from Neolithic times right up to the 21st century, and I’ve just loved the whole project of exploring all these women.
“In 2018 we were celebrating 100 years of women over 30 getting the vote, so I think it has kind of focused us on to actually remembering women and looking at them.
“I also think it’s important that we are inclusive and look at Scots who are here at the moment and are contributing. That’s why I have immigrants in the book.
“At this point in our very fractured history, what’s going on at the moment, I think it’s important to remember the great diversity that we have in Scotland. I have a traveller in the book and I have a wonderful woman from Bangladesh who was one of the first interpreter trainers in Scotland, empowering women from immigrant communities. There are scientists and artists and sportswomen… there’s a whole wide range.”
Gerda was impressed with the running of the festival and the audience response.
“I think it’s terrific,” she said. “I like the fact that the three writers and one artist are all getting involved with one another and attending each other’s sessions. You get to know each other. That is very stimulating in itself. The audiences have been fantastic and we have been looked after very well.”
Gerda was also enthusiastic about her sessions on Friday with local primary school pupils. Her body of work includes a collection of children’s stories which she illustrated herself.
“I love the fact that we are going into the schools,” she added. “I did two classes at Noss Primary School in Wick. The children were wonderful and the school was so welcoming – a beautiful building, my goodness.
“The children had lots of questions. I got one of the classes doing a bit of writing and we had lots of fun.”
Earlier, Bella Bathurst had given an absorbing insight into her book The Lighthouse Stevensons, which won the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. She also made reference to her later book The Wreckers, which has a paragraph devoted to the Pentland Firth.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, Robert Stevenson, was the first of the Stevensons to become involved in the building of lighthouses, although RLS famously stepped aside from the family business in order to pursue his ambitions as a writer.
Introducing Bella to the audience, local businessman Walter Mowat – one of the festival organisers – pointed out that as many as nine lighthouses can be seen from John O’Groats. He also mentioned that it is hoped the disused foghorn from Duncansby Head lighthouse can be positioned at the “end of the road” area by the time of next year’s festival.
Bella highlighted the construction techniques and practical challenges involved in establishing lighthouses on such outposts as Skerryvore, near Tiree, and Bass Rock, in the Firth of Forth. She described lighthouses as “masterpieces of architecture and engineering” and touched upon the brief period RLS, as a young trainee engineer, spent in Wick – “which he absolutely hated”.
She added: “His fame clouded and obscured his family’s achievements – he recognised that his fame took away from the recognition that they should have got.”
Bella described the Pentland Firth as “an incredibly tricky body of water” and paid tribute to the “brilliant sailors” of Stroma who depended on the sea for their livelihoods and understood the notorious currents better than anyone. She prompted a burst of laughter by revealing that one thing she had learned during her research for The Wreckers was: “Never go near a Stroma man.”
It would be wide of the mark to suggest that Bella’s interest in lighthouses stemmed from proximity to the wild coastlines of the north: she grew up in Lanarkshire and is now based in Herefordshire. It was a London museum visit that lit her passion for the subject.
“I am a landlubber, basically,” she explained. “I was working in London and I went to the Science Museum. At that stage they had one of the old lighthouse centres set up as a display – these three-and-a half-ton fantastic Fresnel lenses, beautifully displayed in a darkened room with a low bulb in it. And it said underneath that it was built by the Stevensons and had been at St Abb’s Head.
“That sparked my interest. I kind of knew that Robert Louis Stevenson had an engineering background but I didn’t know that much. So the more I read, when I went back home, the more I realised there was this extraordinary story – that he had this very vexed, torn relationship with his family’s history. He was so proud of them but at the same time I think he felt a certain amount of guilt that couldn’t do, physically, what they had done.”
With the familiar Pentland Firth and Stroma just a short distance away, Bella was clearly pleased to be at John O’Groats and felt there were parallels with the Colonsay Book Festival in the Hebrides.
“All the different festivals have very different identities,” she said. “This one is in such an interesting part of the world, and there are so many stories and so much richness underneath that it’s an obvious place to have a festival.
“I know it’s only in its second year and is just getting established, but my experience is that festivals quite quickly develop an identity.
“Having spent a lot of time researching both The Lighthouse Stevensons and The Wreckers up here, I keep being drawn to this area. There’s something kind of wild and edge-of-the-worldish and Norse about this place that I definitely respond to, and Stroma I just find completely magical.”
James Robertson’s talk centred on his book And the Land Lay Still, winner of the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year award 2010, covering 60 years of Scottish life (and featuring a scene at Dounreay). He is a poet, novelist, short story writer and editor who writes in English and in Scots.
He gave an enthralling, lyrical account of Scottish society and the country’s industrial landscape as it was in 1950, and covered themes ranging from perceptions of remoteness to how history is a never-ending narrative in which our understanding of the past is constantly changing.
He spoke of how Scotland in the immediate post-war years had been “tied in to a sense of Britishness”, shaped by empire and the shared experience of war. For many, he said, this sense of British unity gradually gave way to a desire for Scotland to have greater political control.
Afterwards he was happy to share his thoughts on Caithness identity.
“I don’t know Caithness as well as I know Sutherland but I’ve been up here quite a lot and it’s a great part of the country,” James said. “Caithness has got a real sense of itself, a really strong character – I respect it and really like it.
“I love coming to places which feel like they’ve got a real confidence in who they are.
"I get a sense that people here are very confident about their own culture and their place, even though that’s sometimes in the face of quite difficult adversities. There’s maybe not a huge amount of job opportunities and there are lots of issues around transportation and links to Inverness and things being moved out of the area and so on.
“But in spite of that, Caithness folk have got a very strong sense of themselves.”
He shared the view of the other visiting writers that the festival organisers had achieved a winning formula.
“It’s very friendly, it’s very open,” James said. “They really look after the authors, and the organisation has been terrific. I’m really impressed for a festival that’s only in its second year, and they’re getting a really good turnout of numbers as well.
“I’ve done a lot of festivals over years, in big places and small places, and when you start off sometimes you’re talking about tiny numbers of people coming for the first few years and it takes a while to build up.
“Actually this has got off to a flying start – for year two it’s doing great.”
Award-winning illustrator Kate Leiper enhanced the festival with her mesmerising artistic skills. Her work has been published in a number of books, including An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales. She and James Robertson created The Book of the Howlat together, and their festival sessions with local primaries included a dragon-drawing lesson.
Kate had run a creative workshop with youngsters at Lyth Arts Centre on Saturday morning, looking at the tradition of selkie legends.
“It was super, a beautiful venue with an intimate atmosphere, and the kids were great,” she said. “I was in a couple of the schools on Friday and it was the same. They were very enthusiastic, really up for it. They almost had too many ideas – but that’s never a criticism!
“I’ve worked with Theresa Breslin before and she was here last year. She said if you get the chance to go to the John O’Groats Book Festival you should definitely go, so I will do the same. It’s a great festival and it creates a real community for the weekend.”
Sunday’s sessions turned the spotlight on local and Highland authors including James Miller, originally from Keiss, author of A Wild and Open Sea, The Dam Builders, Scapa, The Gathering Stream and The Finest Road in the World, among other titles.
Also featuring on the programme were Gail Brown, Catherine Byrne, Margaret Mackay, Dorothy Stewart, Liz Shaw, Sharon Gunason Pottinger, Kevin Crowe and Meg Macleod, along with Crow family of the Wick publisher Crowvus – Virginia, sister Judith and their mother, Susan Crow.
