What goes around comes around. I started out making small contributions to local conferences – now comes an invitation to take part in a major international academic event.

The 10th European Society for the Study of English Conference is being held in Turin on 24-26 August. I’m appearing on a panel about Scottish film while my friend and colleague Sandy Hutchison, a very fine poet who’s read at Tchai Ovna, is appearing at a cultural event reading his own poetry, which is being published in a major Italian translation in May or June of this year. 

True, my contribution will still be small. By far the biggest win will be floating around from talk to talk, listening to the academics and drinking in the atmosphere. It might even consist of the less-than-sexy task of periodically manning the ASLS bookstall. But heigh ho, that’s what it’s all about, promoting literature all the way through, and fine by me.

Looking forward to it …

News just in: an extract from Lost Bodies has been taken by Gutter Magazine, the new and leading creative writing magazine in Scotland. But they won’t be publishing it until Issue 04 because, as editor Adrian Searle explained in his acceptance email, Moira Jones’s murder is still too fresh in people’s minds. 

Hm.

Actually the book was written long before that tragic and gruesome event and I see it as proof of the novel’s authenticity more than anything else. But there will no doubt be those who think it was ‘inspired’ by real life – the classic mistake people make, if you ask me, about fiction. But there’s no sense in being huffy about it: Adrian has a point. And so it will appear in about a year. Which isn’t that long really, in publishing terms. And probably worth the wait.

Possibly the most boringly titled educational documents in existence (although education specialises in them, so you never know), these agreements are in fact part of the most exciting development in tertiary education I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. They’re like peace treaties in a war of attrition that’s been going on for twenty years and despite all the hassles they’re undoubtedly going to cause, harmony is going to be the eventual result (I hope). 

Last week I helped sign off two of these in the fields of radio, television and journalism at Reid Kerr and Cardonald Colleges, meaning that in these areas the university I work for and these colleges are now in official partnership. So what, you might ask. Well it might not seem like it on the surface, but under it the implications are profound. Will colleges offer all undergraduate degrees in future? Will universities and colleges merge? Will research become something we can use to seriously affect the economy, meaning – in Scotland – actually make one? Nobody knows what new world we’re entering but it’s clear we’re in it. Exciting times …

Today, went along to this event at the Scottish Youth Theatre. The titles of these things can be so bland and similar that you just can’t tell what they’re about. But this one proved fruitful. Lots of colleges there, and some very well-kent faces, a smattering of universities and a few employers. 

The hosts were the Creative and Cultural Skills Council, a quango – or ‘Sector Skills Council’ – and what they were up to reminded me very much of Skillset’s early days. It was good to sit and figure out with colleagues how to rule the world, but the unspoken presence in the room was that the world has changed, and that the future of all quangos, colleges and universities is now open to question.

Still, plans are better than no plans, and it could be that this is the sort of thing that will allow some of us, maybe even quite a few, to survive. The chat between the workshops was just as interesting. I said the M-word – merger – and nobody flinched. Interesting times …

http://www.ccskills.org.uk/

Invited to speak at this interesting conference on 5 March at the University College of London, along with the novelist Stewart Home.

http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2010/Nightmare/index.htm

As with the recent event in Luton, I feel on relatively safe ground (my presentation’s based on the novel). It’s still a bit daunting though. Actually, I’m starting to realise it doesn’t matter whether they cheer or boo, it still goes down on your CV. But increasingly I’m seeing these things as performances. It’s not what you say so much as how you say it.

And so the long search to become an effective public speaker continues. Part of the job. At least I’m getting a fair bit of practice.

Here’s the proposal:

‘Losing the Body’: De Quincey, Confessions and The Knocking at the Gate

When is a dream not a dream? How will we know when it ends? When, as in De Quincey’s essay, comes a knocking at the gate? What if no knocking comes?

This paper will examine the concept of waking nightmare, the reality of a man unable to stop committing evil deeds in real life because of the dream-like quality of his existence, as depicted in a novel written for a PhD. Lost Bodies was submitted to the University of Strathclyde in 2006 and was awarded the doctorate at the Viva without any changes – the first full-length novel to be awarded the qualification in Scotland. A confession of a sort, as in a soul whispering to itself, it follows in the tradition of dark tales of living hells told by spirits unable to comprehend or control their lives, because of their failure to acknowledge the existence of others: confessions of justified sinners, of trainspotters, of opium eaters. And yet, though he lives in an isolated, impenetrable world, he seeks reality, and deals in flesh and blood. Only through the body can he understand; only through the body can he make sense of what he searches for. Sounds, images, symbols, smells and tactile impressions mix and merge in a tale of synesthetic horror.

 The paper will range across classical and contemporary criticism and include extracts from the book.

 David Manderson is a novelist and academic. He lectures in Creative Writing & Screenwriting at the University of the West of Scotland. He has published short stories in magazines and anthologies in Scotland and the USA. His novel Lost Bodies will be published by Cargo Publishing in 2010. He runs the Tchai Ovna readings in Glasgow’s West End.   

Finished and sent off tonight an extract from Lost Bodies and an article about it and other future writing that I presented at The Lonely Page conference with Roddy Doyle in Belfast in April, which are now to be published by eSharp, a Glasgow University critical journal.

Have a look at it here, if you can be bothered.

http://www.gla.ac.uk/esharp/

Tchai Ovna will be quiet this month – the result of holding it so early. It’ll be bigger and back to its usual shape next month. But, as ever, all are welcome to come along and read or listen.

Come along to

The “Reading Allowed”

Reading

at the

Tchai Ovna Teahouse (West End)

42 Otago Lane

Glasgow

G11 9PB

0141-357-4524

Friday 8^th January 2010, 8.00 pm

Featuring:

David Manderson

Erica Cochrane

Alan MacGillivray

Janie Jones

Gordon McInnes

plus guests

Live music by Wing and a Prayer

All Welcome

And so last night to Edinburgh, Ann Street in the New Town to be exact, to a party at the new agent’s house. She owns a four storey town house in this historic part of the capital, the same street, apparently, where Robert Louis Stevenson grew up. I drove though with Carol my wife and we spent a bit of time walking about before we went up to the house. The New Town terraces and gardens, the snow lying deeply, the street-lamps lighting it. Inside the houses, comfortable drawing rooms. I remembered years ago walking through these same places when I was living in Edinburgh – I was just twenty – and it all seemed so strange and unreal.

It also reminded me of a poem I happened to read a couple of days ago: Stevenson’s ‘The Lamplighter’. Check it out if you want to feel the atmosphere.

It didn’t stop there: inside the book-lined house, with wood fires crackling in the rooms, a concert party was being held in ‘The Green Room’, with a piano player and a bass singer, both in bow ties and dinner jackets. The songs were more Stevenson – his ‘Songs of Travel’ – the music by Vaughan Williams. A crowd of people, adults and children, on narrow seats listening and enjoying, with the Georgian terraces and the snow outside. It was like stepping back in time a hundred years or more.

In the room, a poet professor, a historian, and a young non-fiction writer, but no one payed them too much attention, and they looked quite happy. The historian even sang.

An evening that seemed completely out of this world.

Buses and publishing deals must all come along at once. Fresh from being signed up by an agent, I’ve now been commissioned to write a follow-up to my book(let) on the film Rob Roy. This time it’s about Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, the 80’s film that seemed at the time like the most important thing that had ever happened in Scottish film, and probably was, and which then was forgotten for many years, or at least ignored.

Eddie Dick, producer of Small Faces and Go North, talks of Scottish films being a series of prototypes for an industry that doesn’t exist. Alistair Scott, my ex-colleague, now a Senior Lecturer at Napier University, uses the term ‘cultural amnesia’ to describe the way we always, in this country’s arts, dismiss and forget the recent past to our own great loss.

Alistair’s one of the most astute commentators on the Scottish screen media in academia, having been a TV producer himself, where he made everything from dramas to cultural magazine shows to cooking programmes. He also made a documentary about the making of Local Hero when it was being produced, so was actually in Pennan when the film was being shot, interviewing Forsyth himself at the time. So when I got this offer of the Local Hero book, I contacted him, and we’re now writing the book together, a fact I’m rather proud of.

So now down to the hard work. We’ll probably start it in March, if we can make the time, and carry it on through April. Publication date? I don’t know yet. But watch this blog. I’ll be sure to announce it.

Well I haven’t blogged for a few days, and I’ve been wondering whether to release this news at all, but I guess it’s time to let the world know – or at least the bit of it that reads this page – that I’ve been signed by a major literary agency.

It’s an Edinburgh-based company, a new one, but very reputable. Its founder Maggie McKernan is well-known in publishing, having established an important imprint down south, and also for being married to the best-known agent in the UK, Giles Gordon. GG was a publishing phenomenon, and, among many other astonishingly astute acts, he pulled off the biggest advance of its time to an author, one million pounds to Vikram Seth for An Unsuitable Boy. (The fact that his wife worked for Seth’s publisher might have had something to do with it.)

Another inspired move was that he returned to Edinburgh from London, a change of location totally incomprehensible to a London-based industry. He was a major part of the so-called Renaissance in contemporary Scottish writing until, tragically, he died in a domestic accident about three years ago, falling down a flight of stairs at his home, injuring his head and dying a few days later.

So Maggie his wife, still then a publisher, set up her Edinburgh agency. Two years ago I sent her my novel. She liked it at first, then, after a long silence, rejected it. A friend told me things have changed over the last few months and that I should try her again. So I did. Next day her business partner was on the phone. Could I come through and have a chat…? I went, we talked, and about two days ago I signed the contract. 

Amazing… Now I’ve just got to write the next book. Christ, maybe someone’ll read this one!