An Introduction

I grew up in a small town in a coal mining area near Edinburgh. My father worked as a miner, my mother as a cook or a cleaner. I was the youngest in the family, having two older sisters and one older brother. I was the only one to go to university, not because I was the brightest but because of the family's economic circumstances. I never thought of becoming a writer when I was a boy - such an ambition would not even be considered a possibility by anyone in the community I lived in - but my father was a great reader, and our house was always full of books - Byron, Shelley, Shakespeare, Upton Sinclair, Robert Tressal, Robert Burns, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, as well as many paperback novels ... these were the books I grew up with and, though not an avid reader, I dipped into them from time to time and gained a sense of literature as another world which reflected the real one in a magical way. I started to write poems at the age of sixteen, and, encouraged by a particular English teacher and my father, read a great deal more and began to do well in English at school.

Stories came later, when I was a student at Edinburgh University studying Philosophy and English Literature. I met other aspiring writers at university and we formed a poetry society, where we read our work to each other and sometimes invited a published writer to read. Somewhat later, a few of us began to give public readings of our work at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. At this stage public reading were more important to me than publication, though I was beginning to publish poems and stories in magazines and anthologies. The readings emphasised to me the importance of communication as literature's primary purpose. A strong sense of this also came from hearing older, established writers read their work before I read it in books, and the older Scottish writers in question (Edwin Morgan, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Garioch, Sorley MacLean and others) were extremely powerful readers of their own work.

By the time I left university I knew I wanted to be a writer, but of course it took many years before I began to publish my own books and earn my living as a freelance writer. In the interim, I did various jobs - in psychiatric hospitals, museums, restaurants, picking grapes in France, etc. - and I kept on developing my writing.

I see The Face as being one of a number of stories I wrote which were based on childhood experiences and growing up in a small mining community. At some point I think I realised that my own experience could be valid as the basis for fiction, if I could write about it well enough and find something universal in it, something other people might be able to relate to, even if their lives are very different from mine. In such stories the mind of a child is explored in quite subjective ways, because I was very interested in trying to capture the thought-pattern of a child, with all the questions, misunderstandings, fears, imaginings and mental games that entails.

Read more... The face - short story

Picture:© Kevin McLean