Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

June 2006 Volume 4(3)

Endpiece

Sushi, chips and poetry pamphlets

Colin Will says libraries should do more to support their local poets.

Hazel Cameron wrote a very enjoyable article about the Scottish Pamphlet Poetry initiative in February’s issue, in which she mentioned the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for poetry pamphlets. I’m delighted to report that the 2006 Award was won by Pauline Prior-Pitt for her collection North Uist Sea Poems. Whether writing on the Great Storm, or on the sea’s calmer moods, Pauline’s work has clarity, human interest and depth.

Hazel mentioned that pamphlets can be bought through the Scottish Pamphlet Poetry website, and it occurs to me to wonder how many of the works of these local writers have been purchased by Scotland’s public libraries? I’m certain that the authors are based in all, or almost all, of Scotland’s local authority areas. I know bookfunds are ludicrously low, but these pamphlets are very cheap.

More importantly, it’s a very effective way of supporting the work of writers, who almost always want to be associated with their local areas. I’m sure you would want to help them, while furthering your local cultural strategy, and all for a very modest outlay.

I’m happy to say that Midlothian and East Lothian library authorities actively help local authors in many ways, not least through their support for Tyne & Esk Writers, an umbrella body for local writing groups. Tyne & Esk, like Tessa Ransford and others in the pamphlet movement, believe that pamphlet publishing’s time has arrived. The decline in the number of dedicated poetry publishers, magazine closures, and the reduction in the poetry lists of mainstream publishers, give us fewer outlets. At the same time technical advances make it easier for writers to publish their own work. We could see that the quality of writing within the groups was rising, thanks in large part to the enthusiasm and hard work of our last Writing Fellow, Drew Campbell. We knew that some writers were starting to think about publishing, but didn’t know how to go about it. How could we help?

Drew and I put together a funding application to Awards For All which emphasised the value of taking authors through the publishing process. The money will enable us to help local authors publish six or seven pamphlets later this year.

While literary worth is the primary consideration, publishability comes second. We see no point in helping an author to print several hundred pamphlets to moulder for years in a garage. We want the authors to promote and sell their work, and we’ll help them to develop strategies for doing this, through marketing, readings, and a splash launch. It’s all about joining up writers with readers.

Putting my own new full-length poetry collection together has been a challenging but rewarding task. My first full collection was published in 1996, the second in 2000, and I felt that it was about time to produce a third, bringing together poems, some of which have disgraced the pages of magazines, anthologies and web-zines, others previously unpublished. How to select though? I started off with a year-by-year list, plus a separate Japanese sequence for haiku and poems from my 2004 trip. I prioritised the lists – first, second and third preferences – then I handed the manuscript over to my editor and publisher, Sally Evans, of diehard publishers in Callander. She asked me if I had a title in mind, and I said Sushi & Chips. “Good title,” said her partner Ian King, and the project started to develop wings.

I have a strong belief that poetry collections should have some kind of order, but I couldn’t for the life of me think how to order my own collection. Thankfully Sally is very good at this, and she came back with her own preferences, arranged in five sections which made a lot of sense to both of us. How to characterise the sections had us both scratching our heads, however. Categories like ‘people’, ‘places’, ‘events’ just didn’t work. Then one evening, sad and lonely and ill at ease in front of my computer screen, it came to me. I went back to the title and got the section headings right away: Tatties, Hot Fat, Salt, Vinegar, Sushi. (Sushi means ‘vinegared rice’, by the way, so it connects, even!) Anticipating future critics, I’m sure that some will see these headings as arbitrary, whimsical, facetious even, and who am I to disagree with literary critics? I can justify them to myself, and I’m a harder critic than most.

Choice of cover was the next thing – cover and title must work together. Ian told me he had acquired some 19th century Japanese woodblock prints, and he was sure one of them would be perfect as the basis for the cover design. My son translated the print series title as “36 views of Kyoto”, and after a bit of detective work in the Fine Art Room of Edinburgh City Libraries I identified the signature (well, it’s a reasonable guess) as that of Hiroshige II (Shigenobu, 1829-1869), former pupil and son-in-law of the great Hiroshige.

All done and dusted? Well, not quite. We’ve still got printing, storage, distribution, promotion and marketing to come. All the stuff that will bring in the money to pay the printer, and to give publisher and author their widow’s mite of profit. Possibly.
Colin Will
http://www.colinwill.co.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 4(3) June 2006

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Last updated: 05-Oct-2006