Janet Paisley
Acclaimed Scottish writer who channelled her personal history into stirring poetry and plays
JANET PAISLEY, who has died aged 70, was an award-winning Scottish poet and dramatist, a frequent fixture on school and university curricula, the mother of seven sons and a practising witch. She wrote with equal mastery in English and Scots and many of her pieces dealt with the subject of domestic abuse. Indeed, it was after she ended a horrifically abusive relationship with the father of her children that she gained the confidence to write and to forge her own identity.
In 2000, during the heated debate over the repeal of Section 28 of the Local Government Act banning the “promotion” of homosexuality, she wrote an open letter to “Dear Scotland”, published in The Scotsman, protesting at “screaming” homophobic headlines in some organs of the press and describing from her own life where such attitudes could lead.
One of her sons, she wrote, was gay, and his father could not tolerate him: “When he was three years old, he ballet-danced into the living room dressed in vest, pants and rubber swimming-ring tutu. The act earned him a vicious beating from his father for being ‘queer’. When he was four and about to embark on his education, his father insisted I ask the school doctor to guarantee our child was heterosexual. He would not, he insisted, ‘bring up a poof ’. Despite the doctor’s incredulity at being asked such a question about a pre-school child, my son continued to be regularly beaten to knock ‘it’ out of him.
“His four elder brothers, brutalised for other reasons, were ordered to refer to him as ‘the poof ’ and not to speak or play with him in case it infected them. His baby brother, too small to be instructed, was regularly beaten too, but just for being alive. One of our seven sons did not survive his father’s notion of ‘Christian heterosexual marriage’.
“Fifteen years ago, I ended it and brought up my remaining six sons, without maintenance, on what little I could earn as a writer. Now I watch six fine young men again being torn apart as press and public step into their father’s vacant shoes.” After publishing several collections of poetry and short stories, Janet Paisley gained widespread coverage in 1996 when her play, Refuge, a powerful drama set inside a safe house in Scotland for victims of domestic violence, won the Peggy Ramsay Award for new writing. She produced many other plays, collections of poetry, short stories, novels and television and film scripts, winning a Bafta nomination in 2001 for a short film script, Long Haul, based on one of her own short stories.
A profile writer observed of Janet Paisley that she always maintained tight control over her personal history: “Even facts as basic as the date of her birth remain private.” It is known, however, that she was born to Scottish parents in Ilford, Essex, in January 12 1948, but grew up in Avonbridge, Scotland, after her mother left her father to raise her children in their grandfather’s home. In a 2008 interview Janet Paisley recalled the family as being “miners, farmers, shop and car manufacture workers, and [their] house was full of books. Everybody read constantly.”
Janet always wanted to be a writer but as an adult she married and began a career as a primary school teacher before giving birth to seven sons, the last of whom died when he was just 26 hours old.
She began her writing career after her divorce and later, when asked what she considered her greatest accomplishment, she responded: “Raising my own six sons single-handed from the ages of one to 13, as a poet, literary short-story writer and playwright, despite no financial assistance from their dangerously violent father.” One of her sons is the actor and singer David Paisley.
Janet Paisley published her first short story in 1979 and the first of five poetry collections, Pegasus in Flight, in 1989. Mostly she wrote in English, but later on won praise for her exploration of vernacular Scots in Ye Cannae Win (2000), a collection of monologues, and Not for Glory (2001), a book of interlinked short stories set in and around Glen Village near Falkirk, where she lived. The book, for which she was awarded a Creative Scotland Award, was one of 10 Scottish finalists voted for by the public in the 2003 World Book Day “We are what we read” poll. As well as sitting on the cross-party group for the Scots language in the Scottish Parliament, Janet Paisley also regularly visited schools to teach creative writing in Scots.
In later life she published two novels, White Rose Rebel (2007), based on the true story of “Colonel Anne”, an Aberdeenshire woman who in 1745 rose up against her husband, chief of the Mackintosh clan, and led his people in the Jacobite rebellion, and Warrior Daughter (2009), a compelling story inspired by the legendary Scathach, or Skaaha, a fierce warrior woman after whom the isle of Skye is said to be named.
The novel won praise for its depiction of Celtic Pagan culture, in which Janet Paisley was well-versed, having taken up witchcraft after her divorce. “My husband used to tell me I was a witch,” she recalled, “so I thought maybe I should find out exactly what he meant.”
Although she cited many literary influences, Janet Paisley’s work was marked by her life. A collection of English poems entitled Reading the Bones (1999), tackled subjects such as child abuse and cooking, personal relationships and death. It included “Mayday”, a visceral poem recounting the death of her infant son: “You sailed beyond me / bearing only your name. / From your glass shell, a small fist salute, / the final white box your one flag. / All you left, breast full, blood heat, the bluish milk, / fell in the void of your leaving / and destitute, my arms raged.”
The poem ends: “Time can’t heal the hollow that never held you, / your absence is a fresh wound widening, / the salt in it your name not said.” Her biggest fear, Janet Paisley once said, was “ever having to face the death of another son”.
All her other sons survive her.
Janet Paisley, born January 12 1948, died November 9 2018