The Mysteries of Galloway
An Interview with Hugh McMillan
Join us as Hugh McMillan, author of McMillan’s Galloway, 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 (between 1-42) and we ask them the general question listed next to it.
Shortly after we switch to asking book-specific questions (1-22), to give you a brief insight into our wonderful writers and their books.
____________________________
I didn't particularly like school very much. I liked sport more than that. But I got some decent marks in the end.
I tend to write on my phone most of the time. But I do like to write on trains. I find being on the move helps me sort of write and think about stuff, and watch different things.
Don't spend so much money. Work harder at university, and become an academic. That’s what I dearly would have loved to have been. Just to sit about in an office with pot plants.
I think I've got fussier. I think my problem has always been rushing into publication.
I look at the first few books and I think that they could have been a bit better. You are seduced by publication. Someone offers you a book, and you’re not going to say no. You just jump at it.
I think my standards are higher than they were.
I started writing poetry in the Dumfries Library. I was trying to win this trip on the Orient Express that I saw on the back of a cheesecake packet. I was looking for answers for the competition when I saw a poster for the Scottish National Open poetry competition, I don’t think it exists anymore. So, I thought I should have a go at it. I had written at school but given up and that poster – and the cheesecake – changed my life.
Flapdoodle – an archaic word meaning complete nonsense.
For Scottish words, I quite like forfochten, meaning generally tired, knackered, or sick of everything.
I would like people to realise the wealth of stories that are kicking about. Everybody's got a tale. Everybody's got some sort of piece of bewildering and amazing information that they impart, just as if it means nothing.
The world is full of storytellers. Great.
I don’t think anybody has read it properly because there are instructions to get to a German Zeppelin base which doesn't exist, but nobody's ever picked me up on this. There are map coordinates at the back of the book so people can go places, and one of these simply doesn’t exist.
Probably that drystane dyker called Willy McMeekin. He seems to sum up the whole spirit of Galloway – a complete scallywag in so many ways but providing a link back to generations of dykers and a great storyteller.
The commission first came to me at Wigtown Book Festival, the reason the book was written in the first place, I didn't have a lot of time to write it. I've improved it as time has gone on.
The latest issue is much better than the first one.
Generally speaking, it is the way I wanted it to be which is not only a journey through Galloway but a journey through people I have met, my imagination and my own experience of travelling.
Dumfries and Galloway is one of these impossible regions where it's really hard to get to places even when you live in Dumfries and Galloway.
Some of the places were extremely hard to get to and when you got there the pub was shut.
Travel, stories and people's memories.
It was kind of based on MacTaggart’s Galloway Encyclopedia, which this was a sort of response to.
To begin with, it was meant to be MacMillan's Galloway Encyclopedia, but that was thought of as too sort of derivative.
I’m quite pleased with the way it evolved, but it came about as a response to Mac Taggart’s original.
____________________________