StAnza 2014: Q&As with Andrew Sclater and Marion McCready

Feature by Bram E. Gieben | 07 Mar 2014

As this year's StAnza Festival continues, we follow up our feature taking a look at this year's highlights with a series of exclusive Q&As with the performers, writers and organisers of Scotland's only international festival of poetry. We continue today, presenting our full interviews with two recipients of the coveted New Writers Awards from the Scottish Book Trust – Andrew Sclater and Marion McCready.

MARION MCCREADY 

The Skinny: What were the benefits of receiving the Scottish Book Trust's New Writers Award?
Marion McCreedy: It was amazing being a recipient of the award. It gave me the validation, the permission I needed to go ahead and write the poems I really wanted to write. They put together a wonderful package of support and mentorship, which continued throughout the award year. Part of the award was a writer’s retreat at Cove Park. The time I had at Cove away from family and general life responsibilities to purely focus on reading and writing helped me to make a breakthrough in my writing, which was further developed by going on a poetry workshop course run by Pascale Petit (which the award money paid for) and the one-to-one mentoring I am currently receiving from Vicki Feaver, set up by the Scottish Book Trust.  Due to this support I was able to put together my first full-length poetry collection, Tree Language, which won the Melita Hume Poetry Prize (2013) and will be published in time for StAnza by Eyewear Publishing.

Tell us a little about your writing – what are its themes and how would you describe your style?
My writing incorporates a lot of landscape and nature images, so I suppose you could probably box it as nature poetry. However, I tend to use the natural world as a way of exploring personal experiences, relationships and general themes of love, death, faith and violence. I’m interested in nature as not just a passive backdrop to our experiences but how these themes are played out, reflected in and contrasted against the landscape they are set in.  

Where do you stand on the issue of 'page versus stage'? Would you ever compete in a slam?
I wouldn’t ever compete in a slam, although I have plenty of respect for those who do. It’s a style of writing, reading and performing that I have no skill in what-so-ever! In saying that, I do enjoy reading my poems and I think my best poems are the ones that work equally well aurally and on the page. I do think poems should be heard / read aloud and over this last year I think I’ve become more aware of this when writing.

Does your work address any of the themes examined by this year's festival?
One section in my forthcoming collection is based on a trip I made to Israel in 2012. A month after my visit, the last Gaza-Israel conflict broke out; inevitably this is reflected in a couple of the poems in terms of a general tone of tension and violence, and in one poem in the form of reworked tweets from journalists reporting from the front line during the conflict.  

What's next for you?
Right now the focus is on my forthcoming collection – planning the launch and looking for opportunities to do readings. I still have two meetings left with my mentor, Vicki Feaver, so with her help I’m working on poems that will hopefully develop my writing further and in different ways, and ultimately work towards a second collection.   

ANDREW SCLATER

The Skinny: Tell us a little about your writing – what are its themes and how would you describe your style?
Andrew Sclater: It's language and rhythm-driven. It's thought association-driven – it's to do with people's relationships, and feelings.

The poem on your StAnza profile, A Jail Bird, is very powerful – tell us about what inspired you to write it.
The train broke down outside of Carstairs. We were sitting outside the barbed wire, outside the prison. I was looking across the grounds towards all of these windows, and I realised there could be plenty of people looking out of those windows at me. In between us were these little birds, on the razor wire. I grappled with it for a long time, or I should say it grappled with me – occasionally you get poems like that, that won't leave you alone. I had to keep going back to it. When I finally got some sort of closure with it, it was gratifying. You feel more of a sense of finishing, with those ones. I don't necessarily think that they're better. But the fact every line has almost been produced by arm wrestling, virtually, by pushing against something, does have significance.

What were the benefits of receiving the Scottish Book Trust's New Writers Award?
They've offered me the chance to read at StAnza, which is brilliant. They treat you as a serious person, doing something that is, I wouldn't like to call it professional, because I don't think writing is professional, it's people who don't like professions who do it!, but at least a valid cultural activity. Apart from that sense of validation, they are just wonderful people; they're so friendly. You feel part of a big family. All the recipients of the New Writers' Awards tend to know each other. It's like belonging to a little club. It makes you feel good, because you all know you were good enough to get that award. If some people are making it and others aren't, that's the fault of the publishing industry, not the individual. They've also given us voice and presentation training, and attempted to train us in the benefits of Facebook and Twitter, how important those things can be to your profile. The mentoring scheme is absolutely brilliant – I was mentored by Gerry Cambridge, and he has been fantastic.

Where do you stand on the issue of 'page versus stage'? Would you ever compete in a slam?
I don't think I'd ever compete in a slam. I read at Apples and Snakes' Scratch Club in Newcastle, so I've been to performance poetry events. I feel that my kind of work is maybe a little too condensed to come off well like that – I prefer reading it in a totally pared-down way. It needs to be presented very simply. Performance poets add a performance style, generally speaking, which is like icing the cake. But my cake is better eaten un-iced. But I don't think there should be a distinction between page and stage. I'll be one of the judges at the Rally & Broad slam at StAnza on Saturday 8 March.

You also build drystane dykes – is this process at all similar to writing a poem?
There are very strong similarities. Whether you are a filmmaker, a poet or a writer, you can use the building of the wall as a metaphor for the putting together of words and language. Of course, there are banal, prosaic walls! But a really good wall has a great rhythm to it – every stone in the right place. I think a poem tends to be more like a drystane dyke, and a mortared wall tends to be more like prose. The relationship between each individual element is so important in a drystane dyke, whereas in a mortared wall, the relationship between each stone and the mortar is what is really important. It's the way things key together tightly. It's also an intuitive activity – if you think about it less, if you cut off the rational mind, a better result comes. The headspace you get into when you're doing a wall is not the poetic mindset – it's more abstract. But it's like a kind of abstract template of writing poetry.

Andrew Sclater and Marion McCready will be reading at the Scottish Book Trust Showcase at The Town Hall, St. Andrews, at 12.45pm, on 8 March.

StAnza Festival runs from 5-9 March at various venues throughout St. Andrews. For a run-down of the events, workshops and performances at StAnza 2014, have a look at the full programme on the StAnza website. The Skinny has more exclusive interviews with poets and performers coming soon.

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