A City of Stories and Creativity

An Interview with Donald Smith

Join us as Donald Smith, author of Edinburgh: Our Storied Town, takes part in our series of quick-fire Q&As!

What is a quick-fire Q&A?

We have our interviewee pick a number at random and we ask them the general question listed next to it.

Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions, to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.

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How would you describe your writing process?

Writing draft after draft.

So what are your three favourite books?

Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Odyssey and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark.

I had the fantastic experience in my role with the Storytelling Festival of organising a Europe-wide retelling of The Odyssey, which I produced over two days live in Edinburgh. And we had 23 islands from Scotland and the Mediterranean and each island was given one episode from The Odyssey. And each was encouraged to retell the episode with a bit of flavour of the culture and the customs and the seagoing of the earth island and region. It was it was an astonishing experience.

And with Lanark I think that Alasdair Gray is one of the great transformative Scottish writers, in the way he takes the contemporary urban experience. I first encountered that book in a Texas bookstore, in the fantasy section.

What are you reading at the moment?

I'm reading a tremendous biography of Edward I, Hammer of the Scots. The big enemy of Robert the Bruce. Absolutely fascinating One of the writers I mention in the book is Barbour. He writes this epic romance, quote-unquote because it's brutally realistic about Robert the Bruce – called The Bruce – and I just thought it'd be really interesting for one of the talks I'm going to give about the book, which connects knights and chivalry to the English perspective.

I'm always reading 4 or 5 books simultaneously. I'm reading a literary guide to Greece, which has no real relevance to anything that I'm working on at the moment, but just for the sheer pleasure of it.

I’m working on an adaptation for a live performance of sources about Scotland and Jamaican and the slave trade. It’s based on Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery by Kate Phillips. I’ve been working with Kate and also with a performance poet, and we've been, digging into some of the background sources and we're going to be doing an event around that, both online and live at the Storytelling Centre together. I mean, when you read that stuff, it's just a big eye opener about the extent of not just the involvement of leadership in Scotland – Scottish society at every level bought into this quite seriously in a way that I don't think Scotland has yet come to terms with.

Working on that project alerted me to the importance of acknowledging when I'm dealing with the Enlightenment period in Our Storied Town, that there were a lot of things going on that were not that enlightened despite Scotland's aspirations. You've got to look at the ambiguities and the struggles that were going on intellectually, culturally and socially during those centuries.

How long was the book in the works for?

For a lifetime. I've certainly been consciously engaging with Edinburgh, since I was about 6 or 7 years old, where I've a vivid memory of being taken by a Perthshire granny down the Royal Mile.

With this 900th anniversary of Edinburgh’s status as a Burgh it all gelled together. In a sense, I had all the elements to hand. Initially I planned to do a series of events on the theme of Edinburgh: Our Storied Town. But then sometimes there's no harm in just sitting down and really pulling it together with a lot of hard editing work.

Do you have a favourite period that the book covers?

Well, there's all these glorious centuries – the Renaissance periods, the modern 20th and 21st centuries – so rich they’re the ocean.

The one century that I really dreaded tackling is the 17th Century, which was such a dark period for Scotland – civil war, religious conflicts, it starts with losing the monarchy and ends with losing the Parliament. You just have the sense that literature is in retreat, pushed to the margins.

And then I discovered that there were very creative responses going on to all that. And they ranged from travel literature, with the amazing William Lithgow and his extraordinary, almost baroque accounts of his travels, which is an obvious form of escape, to people who retreated into a more personal, contemplative and meditative experience.

And then there was this exuberant, kind of anarchic resistance movement that you get in Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty’s translation of Rabelais, which as I mentioned is one of my favourite books. Also, people using European culture, a world culture to some degree, as it was becoming, as a way of expressing a different sense of experience, a different sense of Scotland and what Scotland was about and could be through literature.

There’s Robert Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, published in the 1690s. Kirk, in the middle of all this Puritanism evokes this kind of concept of a traditional Gaelic law as being a sort of spiritual philosophy, another kind of reality in which human imagination and spirit engages. He was creating another world, an alternative reality to, what was what was going on in Scotland.

Did you discover anything you weren’t expecting when you were writing the book?

I was determined that it wasn't going to be a history book that – we were going to look at the character of the city and the character of some of these key writers and engage with them in a way that took a fresh perspective.

A very interesting example was Margaret Oliphant, a very important 19th century Scottish writer, probably the most important 19th century Scottish woman writer. A huge, and professional essayist and reviewer, as well as a prolific novelist, short story writer, fantasy writer. I really then began to find out aspects of Margaret Oliphant I hadn't fully understood – in particular the courageous way in which she foregrounded women's experience, against the background where she had a hellishly tough life, where she had to care for a sick relatives and struggled to be the breadwinner, her kids died one after another. Yet she courageously continued to question all sorts of things about gender and religion and Scotland's sense of history. She was a writer I really came to respect more and to learn more about.

One of the things that I've rediscovered or reaffirmed in writing Edinburgh Our Storied Town is this incredibly strong connection between Scottish literature and world literature. You look at a writer like Robert Louis Stevenson or Walter Scott or James Hogg, they absolutely are positioned in world literary influences and movements and Edinburgh's kind of pivotal to all that as a city and as a kind of intellectual tradition and a place of creativity.

What do you want people to take from the book?

It’s a book that invites conversation and exploration. I've been pretty overwhelmed, to be honest, about the number of requests to come and talk about this book. And I think it's a great chance to open up aspects of the book. I hope it'll lead to people reading some of the books I talk about and then also enthusing about their interests in Scottish literature particularly in the contemporary. I don't in any way attempt to define what's critical, amidst the burgeoning contemporary Scottish literature, as it’s far too early to make any pronouncements about that. I just see that this is a literary city and culture, nationally and internationally engaged, that we can enjoy and celebrate.