A Wee Blether With...
The multi award-winning Scottish essayist, poet and professor discusses inspiration
Kathleen Jamie, renowned Scottish poet, non-fiction author and nature lover
When writing poetry as a teenager – did you realise this was going to be your career?
I still don’t think of it as a career! Poetry is a fugitive thing, it comes and goes, there’s no money, you can’t do it on demand. When I started publishing poems, there were no university creative writing courses. These courses have provided employment for poets like myself and offer young writers a sense that a career is possible.
Has poetry been a constant in your life, were you a keen reader from a young age?
There was little of poetry in my upbringing. We had a copy of Burns’ poems, of course. But poetry and literature were no great part of my home life. We did read – my mother took us to the library. I loved Enid Blyton. School provided some poems, but when I discovered poetry it became the secret, radical alternative to school-learning.
Is there a particular place in Scotland that you go to for inspiration?
That would be telling! No there isn’t, because I don't actually believe in “inspiration”. Poems come from the most unexpected places: an idea, a thing observed, a memory, the sound of a word. It’s a matter of remaining open-minded, of looking and listening carefully, and of pulling on a thread and seeing where it leads.
Have you found lockdown to be creatively stifling or productive?
I didn’t write anything, but having just published a book, this would have been a quiet time anyway. I think it would have been a bit perverse to have been cheerfully productive in the midst of all the strangeness.
Your collection The Bonniest Companie was inspired by change and political energy in 2014. Could you do the same for 2020?
No, the energy of 2020 is completely different. The feeling this year is of retrenchment, pause, reflection, reconsideration, caution. The energy of 2014 was excited, educative, transformative.
Your non-fiction work has taken you to Pakistan and Tibet, might you venture abroad for another book at some point?
I have had thrilling adventures and I’d love to return to Northern Pakistan. I would dearly love to see more of the world’s wildlife. But, Covid aside, there is also the question of flying. We have to cut back on flying from an environmental point of view. If the opportunity arose, I’d have to think hard.
You recently edited an anthology of Scottish nature writing, Antlers of Water – is there a naturalist you particularly admire?
Because I am a writer and not an activist, the people I admire most are those willing to agitate and campaign, to protest and publicise day in and day out. The people who work for change in the face of greed and cruelty. And the conservationists who get dirty, cold and exhausted – they are who will save the natural world.
Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, by Canongate Books, is out now and features some of the country’s finest nature writers including Amy Liptrot and The Scots Magazine columnist Jim Crumley.