Talking Therapy - Poetry, Performance and the Past With Tom Langlands and Lesley Buchan Donald

Transcript

Nobody give me sin for this That’s reason why I try both If all is cold I can see a thousand times all day If all is cold I can see a thousand times all day Out against mental illness There is a wider arts programme that centres around a local building, the Otorada Picture House If you go back in my podcast history, particularly if you go and listen to the episode before last which was an interview with Peter Leisen who is really the figurehead and the founder of this group Tom and Leslie run several parts of this group and form a very big part of the backbone of the organisation So I’m going to really bring this back to where I started with Peter which is talking about the value of arts in the community in the broadest sense and the value that can bring to the community and also to the individuals who are part of it So I’m not going to say too much more about that, we’ll get into the details of this as we go along but I’m going to hand over for a quick introduction from the two of them I’ll start with you Tom, go My name is Tom Langlands, I’m a retired architect, retired 12 or 13 years ago, originally from Dundee I’ve always been interested in the theatre, drama, writing, poetry and I guess that’s why I ended up at Otorada Picture House having retired to this lovely person I turned 3 C plus years ago Absolutely loving it here and I find the Picture House a wonderful place for the creative arts There’s so much buzz about the place and so much I’d like to think that I can bring to it and then meeting Leslie who’s going to talk to you today as well I think we’ve developed a very exciting drama and writing site to this town Brilliant, thank you and over to you Leslie I’m Leslie Buckingham-Donald, I was a bit researching in my former existence and I had to retire in 2016 due to the development of Parkinson’s disease which was not compatible with the continuing alphabet but that opened the door for me to do some things that I hadn’t been able to do before My job had really prevented me taking much on in the way of creative hobbies so I had always been a singer but there was no chance for anything in the way of writing or acting and when I took retirement I explored that area of my life and found it to be very fulfilling and suddenly found that I could write and then the creative writing classes by the adult education I met Tom and from there the writing just increased and we’re now learning drama and words and open night Yeah, we’re going to drill into all of that So you met via the creative writing workshops for local education, were you running that Tom? I wasn’t when I came here at first, I actually came to town and thought right what’s there in this town that I can get myself immersed in so I went along to the creative writing class that was being run by somebody else at that time they decided after a year that they weren’t able to continue for their own personal reasons and the class asked me at that stage if I would take over and lead the class which I did and that’s where it went from there So you’ve got plenty of experience with writing before? I’ve been writing in some form or other all my life, it goes back probably to when I won the senior writing, senior poetry competition writing at school that was assessed by a professor at university in Dundee and you wrote some very nice things about the poem that I submitted and I guess that’s how you get grouped into these things it just takes somebody to say something nice, to encourage you, try to win something and away you go, you realise that you’ve opened up a door to a lifetime of creativity in one way or another Hell yeah, and that’s why we do this and maybe we’ll get some time to talk about the work of the schools That’s really interesting to hear actually, funny because Dundee’s better known for its comics than its writing is it not? Is it DC Thompson? It is, it’s DC Thompson and of course there’d be no Nadandi and all the characters in there So I suppose I grew up with that, my gran always bought me the Hotspur magazine every single week I think that was a DC Thompson’s publication but she gave me the money and sent me down to the corner shop every week to get the Hotspur and I remember that was an interesting reading thing For me at secondary school the whole creative writing thing took off with an incredibly good English teacher who was sufficiently young to understand and appreciate what was then the contemporary writings of people like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and not just all the Shakespeare stuff, which we were doing as well, but he opened my eyes to creativity in literature and that stuck with me right through my life Amazing, yeah so cool, and Leslie you were a vet, I did not know this, that you were a vet I mean we’re in the middle of the country, were you one of those vets with your hand up of horses? Not horses so much, no first 12 and a bit years, large animal practice in Cumbria What does that mean, large? So big animals, so cattle and sheep at horse mainly Not people’s household dogs and cats No I did a little bit of that but it was most of the cattle and sheep and then I moved to Yorkshire into small animal practice and very latterly I was developing a special complications and interest in animal dermatology So it was a complete change for me when I gave up work and suddenly found I had time to explore other things that obviously were sitting in me waiting to escape So you didn’t really do much in the way of some arts and creativity before that it was all just down to well I guess science right? Yeah and because I was on call a lot of nights you couldn’t really get involved in these sorts of things And did you see the creativity, is that directly linked to Parkinson’s diagnosis in the sense that you feel that creative activities would be particularly effective in helping manage those symptoms or was it just I need something else to occupy my mind I’m not somebody that sits around, I keep busy I’ve got lots of things I’m interested in and obviously I’m a creative person that had never had an outlet before At school, some of my teachers certainly felt I should go into writing rather than betting medicine and I did have a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama that I could have gone to instead of vet school but vet school was the place I went and that shaped the next few years Yeah well I can imagine there’s plenty of animals and farmers and pet owners that were glad you went into veterinary practice Not something I know a lot about but there’s at least one other member of the wider career group who is still a vet, you know James Day, yeah it’s interesting He would rather be making films and filming stuff with his amazing set of digital movie making equipment but he has to spend his days with horses and things so we have all sorts but there’s a lot of vets around this part of the world as you can imagine Ok so you guys met, I just, yeah I meet lots of people but I don’t tend to end up writing stage plays with them How on earth does that happen? That’s a good question I’m not really sure I mean how long, I don’t know what period did that happen? Well I think the writing class kicked off when I was running it and we started to explore different forms of writing from prose to poetry to short stories to little radio sketches and then within that group we discovered that there were shared interests there were two or three of us that really enjoyed script writing there were four or five of us that very much enjoyed poetry and we expanded on that a lot and that’s how we ended up agreeing that out of that creative writing group in Okraader we created a drama group both writing it and then we found various people in the community we tapped into resources that were there, people who could act people who had a whole range of other skills that were necessary to make theatre work and also from that the whole poetry side took off we went to a number of open mic events elsewhere and thought why is this not happening in Okraader why does Okraader not have its own open mic nights and we thought let’s do it That’s pretty much it, yes So I think we’ve jumped some stuff so my history, I was one of the early members of the crew with Peter and we had a very strong focus on the visual arts painting things that hang on walls just because it was me it turned up and you guys weren’t far behind but I think you’d already done a pantomime by that point that was me it was me, 2000 and 21 something like that I decided one summer that I thought I could write a pantomime in the middle of summer and over a couple of nights when I wasn’t sleeping very well which is not uncommon I wrote a pantomime and I got together a few friends and we got permission to put it on in one of the local churches and it was well received except they said oh you will be doing it again next year so I had to write another one for next year and by the time I was doing the third one that’s when I think Tom had moved to Okraader and got involved in the band The band? The band that was supporting the pantomimes with live music by then Yeah I was playing the guitar in your band for your pantomime last days there were four or five musicians that got together and then we knew each other through that and through the creative writing class and it just sort of went on from there I mean so if we’re talking about the idea of community and bringing people together I mean it sounds like that was what was happening but how many people were involved at that point do you think? Oh well I was pretty much doing everything that wasn’t acting and acting so I was building all the set and props and everything and writing and then I’d say gathering together people and I think that’s probably one of our skills is persuading people to get on board and join us and explore other things that may be a wee bit out of their comfort zone We co-wrote our Modern Mystery Night together That was the first joint effort that we put on and we decided to broaden the net at that stage and think okay who else can we tap into who can act and strangely enough there were a number of people that we now have on in the drama group who were not acting at that time but actually proved to be very very good at it and we got there and we built teams at that stage I think it was the first time that it really started to happen what’s the good set building and make up and costume and again the band and we put on a Modern Mystery Night to test the water as it were in the town and see how well supported it was It was an absolute sell out and there were people were coming out asking us when the next one was it was very successful and that’s when we decided we actually need a drama group in this town a properly formed drama group with a whole… That’s amazing. I’m just sort of amazed by the breadth of different types of activity and all the people that must have been involved but Octorad, I mean five to six thousand people, we’re not in a big city the way you’ve managed to find so many people who would participate in something like that who maybe thought they wouldn’t have done so before and there was no real arts or performance or drama scene here that you’ve managed to sort of conjure one up out of nowhere I think there’s… we have quite a number of people now who, some of whom have had their own challenges in life in various health, mental health ways who have found the creative writing process, the poetry and the drama as a good outlet for making them feel comfortable and we’re also a very friendly group of people I think for us it was the move to the picture house or the decision to create the drama group within the picture house crew and be part of that creative hub that opened many other doors you mentioned James before, the videographer when we came here at first, Peter who runs the picture house, we said we could bring you a drama group and he jumped at the idea and said wonderful but if you want to put things on, please let’s make sure they are the best we can possibly do and not so much very armed drama but let’s aim high I think so and that’s been our aim ever since really to do that everything that we can do as professionally as we can do even though we’re amateur most of us well let’s put that into bit of context I was trying not to have us jump around and do a bit more linear we’re not going to do that are we? So let’s just jump around a bit so last year in, well it was October right, you put on a show next door in the picture house which for those who haven’t listened is a derelict 1920 cinema that I live next door to and you put on a, it was called Spectres of Cinema and it was a, I’m going to let you explain this but it was what I would call an immersive theatre event in that space which when I was going to go into it well when I heard about it I thought it should be interesting if nothing else I don’t know what I had in my head but when I experienced what was actually delivered I would not have believed that was even possible so it was really really very impressive and sort of was a combination of I think this programme to that day but I’ll let you explain it and what went into that who was involved, how many people and Jesus the whole set up was mad I think it started on the very first meeting we had in this building with Peter we were talking about coming along and bringing a drama group and perhaps making this our home and he said you know I’ve always wanted us to be able to have something on in the old picture house in the States it’s in just now some sort of drama, spectacular drama event and we blithely said oh yes we can do that he suggested a ghost story, he said it would lend itself to a ghost story and we just said oh yes still we can do that and then after we’d gone we sat and thought about it and thought where are we even going to start we’ve got no idea what he’s wanting but within a couple of weeks we had the basic story the basic idea of characters that could have been associated with the picture house it’s historical yeah historically and how their lives had developed and what had happened to them and it just grew from there and we got James the videographer involved and said okay what happens if we filmed characters from the past to fictional characters it might have been in the cinema and let’s project them up on the walls of the picture house as they would have been telling their story of what they did there and what their role was but also the things that were going on in their personal lives at the time that were troubling them before they eventually died and then as these pictures were projected up on the screens and these actors were talking to us from the past we brought them out as ghosts completely wiped into the middle of the auditorium which was standing them on, there were no seats it was a 45 minute one hour production and we got the ghosts to walk in amongst the audience talking about what had happened to them since they’d died or what had troubled them in their lives you got the duality of living people from the past versus ghosts from the present I mean it was spectacular and so just to give the listeners a bit of an idea of that the main auditorium of the picture house, I mean it’s big very very very high ceilings with a balcony probably bigger than most of the cinema screens you would go in now by quite a way and we were stood in the centre of it as the audience and every wall apart from the one, well actually no every wall I think had something projected on it which was sometimes people, actors that they’d previously filmed but there was a bit where the cinema was on fire so we were immersed in fire there was lights everywhere World War I at one stage God that was mad and we had the soldiers all around us and the sound was coming from every direction as well then actors on the balcony so you were encouraged to sort of turn around and then there was actors in amongst us saying they’re pieces walking around as unhappy ghosts there was moments of comedy, moments of pathos and very sad moments and all of this squished into under an hour and a fairly big cast and massive supporting we wanted to capture human emotions so all of them, so we deliberately went out of our way to show these ghosts sometimes as happy people so we had the cleaner upstairs in the balcony and the cleaner downstairs chatting to one another up through the space and then we had tragedy one of the Usherettes had lost a young child we had the money man of the cinema who had embezzled money and ended up hanging himself but we also, one of the things we did enjoy doing and we still do to this day when we talk about community we want to engage the widest possible community in this time so you, as they went to talk to the local dancing group and what them involved? Kirsten brought along some of her young pupils and they were absolutely fantastic, they were really good they rehearsed a wee separately from us so we only saw them later on as we were practising and they were really very very good you’ll remember they came out from behind a black screen all dressed in black with skeletons on that under fluorescent light they were like, how old were they though? 12, something like that so just youngsters but really really good and it was very effective and then the teacher Kirsten came out as Chava Chaplin as well at the end so it was another way of reaching another group that perhaps we wouldn’t have been able to involve otherwise if we can get the schools involved, if we can get the dancers involved, choirs involved if we can bring them in even in part into our productions it’s what we want to do, it’s a lot of what drives us on I think the reason we use Kirsten as Chaplin in our productions we’re always keen to root our drama at the moment in something that’s relevant to this town and Charlie Chaplin’s In The Gold Rush was the first film that was ever shown throughout the picture house so the story revolved around the owner and the architect that designed the cinema opening the evening back in time, 1926 it was with a production of In The Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin and the whole evening of ghosts and skeletons and Charlie Chaplin and kids being lost and emerging from the pits was all rooted in that history of the cinema and that’s important to us when we write things as we’re doing just now we’ve just finished writing a news production for the picture house and again it’s rooted in the history of the town yeah amazing, it was quite something so you had, as we said, some school aged kids spotted some teenagers, I don’t know the girl’s name, who was singing she was amazing, right through till you guys are retirees but there was many other retirees involved I don’t really feel like I saw a skew in the sort of age groups or anything like that, it felt like it was quite representative I think we covered all these groups, we were there from very young right through to very elderly but also it’s not just about the acting, which is obviously key to how an evening like that unfolds but the production team in the widest sense that lay behind that spectre was big, very big there were costume, make-up, sound effects, tech, lighting, resources from film libraries there was all sorts of stuff went into that production to make it what it was so you saw 45 minutes to one hour, and it would be the same as anything to you see a one hour production that has taken months of planning behind the scenes to make it happen we’re busy planning one for Christmas, which is now in the edition stage for the actors and it’s already been 3-4 months and well, as of the concept goes way back a year at least the development of the script to where it is now and our outlining of all the tech and special effects and roles that we need to make it happen has been happening over the last 3 months we’re now at the stage of let’s make it happen I’m almost frightened given how much I saw went into that last one I did my little bit, I put some of my paintings up on the wall I think that’s about as much effort other than turning up and watching it and being supportive so at least I’ve got a little bit of advertising out there so I can’t wait and so Leslie you acted in it which was quite amazing you directed it Tom I believe, right? I’ve been involved with theatre most of my life in one way or another so I have directed things in the past and written things in the past I was a member of Lockerbie drama group for many years and in Annin, my home town, well not my hometown but the previous town where I lived for 30 odd years I’m originally from Dundee but spent 30 odd years in Annin I wrote a couple of very big community pantomimes and they were aimed at pulling the whole community together we had 70 or 80 people involved in each of these productions the cast was probably only 8 or 9 but behind the scenes it was around 60 people involved in making it happen and that’s what I’d like to bring here I want to see us engage with the wider community so as I was talking earlier about schools, you mentioned schools we’re very keen to get as many people involved in it as possible if they can work with us in a way to make things happen everybody is happy with it at the end of the day yeah, absolutely and so there is a cliche about theatre directors in that they are loud, quite angry prima donnas do you feel that you fit into that archetype or you ever spilled that? maybe you lose it as well, Leslie Leslie! I couldn’t possibly find that well, as much as I experienced you directing it you sat in the corner quietly with a headset on directing from behind the scenes as it were and I didn’t experience it I think that was after it had gone in the production phase where we didn’t really have a stage manager so I ended up having to stage manage it in the corner all the directing took place in the rehearsals long before that is the amount of tech that they squeezed into that place it was quite impressive and so yes, I can’t wait to see what happens next and one assumes it’s one of many and at some point they’re going to redevelop the site but I think if you like my bits of the crew you’re going to keep using it keep milking it while it’s there and then hopefully use it when it’s being regenerated well you mentioned tech there I mean the tech that went into Spectres or the cinema was massive we did suggest at one stage that projection might be a good idea thinking in the back of my mind that one or two projectors and the next thing is we’ve got at least 12 projectors running simultaneously all over the cinema walls and then we spoke about sound effects and the next thing is we’ve got a full surround sound system actors all mic’d up lighting was absolutely superb there was literally thousands and thousands of pounds worth of tech went into Spectres or the cinema you’re almost afraid to suggest things to Peter sometimes because he’ll just go and do it and that’s what happened to me and also we don’t do it by half so that happened with the whole exhibition thing it’s not quite on the same scale but I was going to stick a few boards up and hope for the best and we have those display boards that you see everywhere now the cultural, professional, wide lighting and it’s really quite something so I think Peter’s energy and resources certainly, I don’t think, I think you know, it sounds to me like this would have happened anyway you probably wouldn’t have had the scale and the technology quite in the same way but I think that this isn’t all about Peter and the picture house this is about people working together in the community to deliver something that matters and we’ve got this amazing vehicle to help us do it it’s this community focus that does it and we’re all community focused people that are now involved from the book hub to the photography to the art, to theatre, to spoken word everything we do is for the community and should involve the community I think that’s very important it’s certainly important to me and I know it’s important also and I think it’s the relationships that you build with people and they build among each other I find it very rewarding to know that something I’ve been involved in has brought people together there’s friendships that exist and bonds that exist and ideas that have been exchanged because of something I was involved in putting on or something by the part of the group did and I think it’s made a distance of the social fabric of Octorada quite dramatically in a very, very short time I think it’s these individual crew groups that we’ve now got the crew groups, true photography, true music, true drama whatever it is, we now all sit down together about once a month and we tell each other what our current plans are and inevitably somebody goes oh I can help you with that or I can do a sign on a wall for you as you’ve just suggested for standalone Alex and we bounce ideas off each other and the next thing you’ve got things like the creative youth day or youth creative day that involve 100 kids from the local school coming up here yeah how terrifying was that? it was wonderful, absolutely fantastic day but we create, we now actually we talk about the whole being greater than some of the parts it absolutely is, no? yeah I really think it is it’s quite a pleasure we talk a lot about the theatre side of things but obviously you’ve got crew words do you want to just tell me what that’s about? well that grew out of the adult education course that Tom eventually ended up running most of us said it when we were asked or were prose writers but he’s a poet and somehow he managed to convert quite a few of us to writing poetry and from that we went out to, poetry has to be performed it’s not something to read, you have to hear it so we decided to go on to a few open mic nights and that made us think, well why don’t we have one in Okterada and that’s where the open mic night came from and it’s really, it’s been very good for bringing different people together people that maybe wouldn’t normally have considered going to anything with creative arts or poetry particularly to a serial they’ve come along to the open mic nights and we’ve had quite a range and our last open mic night we had, we’d just heard that one of the people that performs at open mic nights was World Slam Champions Christmas, he won the Scottish Slam Poetry Championship last year and while we were having our open mic night here last month he was actually the very same night performing in Paris in the World Championships that he won and he’s coming back to headline for us but now you’re also right, then what’s happened on the back of that is we’re now in a very fortunate position we started looking for headline acts for each of our open mic nights and the next thing was we had them queuing up we had people contacting us saying could I please headline at your art now these are big names across the whole poetry and writing scene of Scotland we’re attracting readers and writers and poets now from Glasgow to Edinburgh to Dundee and way out into other areas across Fife, Lothian they all come now to stand alone so it’s the last Wednesday in every month and we have a headline act and we run for two hours and anybody’s welcome to come along and read but you’re also welcome to just come along and listen people come along and have a drink, have a cup of tea, pull up a chair and I think people have a misconception as to what poetry is and I think that’s what happened in the writing class when I said right we’re going to look at poetry, everybody goes oh no you’ve got to go yeah let’s see where it goes and then all of a sudden you realise it’s vital it’s exciting, it’s moving, it’s full of energy, full of emotion well it’s kind of whatever you want it to be which I think was a real learning for me not being much on poetry although it does come tumbling out of me from time to time but going to that, the stands alone firstly the amount of people that turned up was just like how is this happening and then I was sitting there going well you know is anyone really getting up it’s all the same people that are just coming round and doing the rounds that are always done I’ve always done this and do it all the time and of course they were there but more and more people I saw that were standing out were just part of local community I’ve seen them round above the local groups, have been in your writing groups and then other people that have come in from further afield clearly weren’t intending to do any readings just got up, found something on their phone and did a reading which inspired me to do it as well and I got up and read some of my bits and pieces it was something I absolutely did not ever think I would do I don’t mind an audience but poetry really but I actually thought it was amazing and I was really inspired by that and I loved the idea that you can just turn up and anyone and it’s really the ethos of the whole crew is you come along and you’re part of the group and it doesn’t matter what your experience level is if you’ve got something to say come say it and you’ll be able to say it alongside someone who’s really experienced maybe a published author or a professional artist or whatever a world champion I remember the night you read well and you got a great response from the audience and that must have encouraged you and that’s what it does to everybody they stand up, they read, even if they’re completely new on the poetry scene they give it a go and they’re amazed by the response and that’s the encouragement that you want people to have and that’s one of the best things that we’re writing more and asking if we can come back and do it again please I think they’re a very comfortable safe place to start reading you don’t feel anybody’s judgmental you feel supported and encouraged to stand up and perform your poetry I think that’s one of the things that we’re good at we make it very clear, no heckling, no chatting, no discussions about the poems that are read just sit back, listen and join and take out on what you want you might not agree with what the person’s saying they might have opinions or ideas or something they want to say that you’re not happy with but you’ve got to let everything in to find the good stuff and for some people it’s therapy and I think that’s vitally important to say that because some people have come along to our poetry nights and we’re amazed at how they open up about things in their lives that have troubled them from relationships to lost children to all sorts of things and we have people who have reduced themselves to tears reading their poetry but I’ve actually found immense comfort from the reaction they get from the audience both at the time, but when we have a coffee break in the middle or at the end of the evening the support they get from people gathering around them to see that was really important that you said that I couldn’t agree more one of my earlier episodes I was talking about Emily Dickinson and how basically she published a few pieces and then largely kept it to herself and her work was only discovered after she died and that’s cool, right? If you want to make pictures or write poetry or do whatever it is you want to do and keep it for yourself, absolutely do that, right? You have that right and maybe that’s perfect for you but if you can get out there and share it if you can cross that line and become someone who is able and feels empowered to do that the extra benefits on top of the benefit you’re already getting are incalculable and I think that a lot of what the crew does and particularly stands alone gives people that sort of confidence and also the platform to do it because otherwise I actually know where to start even if you want to share stuff, where do I go? You don’t know where you sit alongside your peers in terms of the quality of your work but it’s not just about the quality although that is important it’s about how it helps you you and I were talking the other day last night about maybe we should introduce it with creative writing plus the idea of these diaries where you enter something every single day that’s important to you about your emotions whether you’ve been happy that day or you’ve done that day how it made you feel, how it coloured your view of the world on that particular day and we should encourage people perhaps at our writing group to come along we might make that a session actually, come along to the next writing class whether the journal or for the last seven days just a short entry in a creative format of what every day has meant to you You can tack on a session of Primal Screen Therapy at the end I certainly do write some stuff about Parkinson’s I’ve written quite a few things now partly for therapy for myself but exploring it but also in the thought that maybe it lets other folk because Parkinson’s such a very varying disease maybe let other folks see that they’re not alone in having these symptoms or these feelings and I’m hopeful that maybe it gives some comfort to some people and also that it doesn’t and mental health and other sort of chronic ailments, whatever they may be they don’t have to be the end of everything that you love they don’t have to stop you completely and you all actually did have to massively change your mode of existence but you found something else, something beautiful elsewhere and that in itself is treatment that in itself is therapy and it’s going to help you to develop but also to treat the symptoms and I think that’s really important I consider Parkinson’s a silver lining really I wouldn’t have asked for it but it’s hugely given me another life that I would still be working all the hours God sends and doing nothing else really I just think that’s amazing to hear and always a little bit, being autistic I don’t sometimes read the room as well as I should so I’m always a little bit hesitant to sort of raise things like this and drill down too hard because if I don’t read the response well I’m going to offend but that’s such an amazingly positive message to hear I’m really pleased we’ve got it down here so I hope people can hear it so thank you for that the other thing I want to pick up on you Leslie is that we’re talking about language here and writing but you don’t always just write in English no, no I’ve been encouraged by the creative writing tutor Tom sometimes poems want to come out in Scots I don’t speak Scots as you can hear, I’ve got Scottish accent and a smattering of Scottish words but I’m speaking English most of the time partly because it wasn’t encouraged to speak the mother tongue when I was at school it was considered that you had to speak English to get on so although I had a father who was a native Doric speaker and my mum was Glaswegian, a very great Glaswegian I had the luxury of growing up in Perthshire and all that background to language floating around me but I was still speaking English most of the time but now when I’m writing quite a lot of poems just want to come out in Scots Scots is such a, I mean being English is so lovely to hear it’s got such a lyrical poetic, just like the Scottish accent in general there’s a reason that Burns is so famous it sounds good, like Irish right? I consider my Scots a mongrel tongue because it’s a mixture of Doric words I don’t even know what Doric is sorry from the North East of Scotland the particular local accent that they have there or dialect that they have there but everybody has their own, I mean I use words sometimes that Tom won’t know Tom won’t use words that I don’t know because they’ll be Dandonian words I don’t profess to know the Scots language that well I understand most of us as poems every now and again there’s a word or two where I have to say to her I don’t know what that means and she’ll explain it to me I can’t write in Scots language I don’t know it nearly well enough to be able to write in it but I can understand it all my own personal work is in English but I think there’s a fantastic market out there for people like wisely with the Scots language there are magazines and editors and there seems to be a particular rise in or resurgence in the interest of Scots language at the moment that renders great outlets for people like wisely I think that’s amazing, but the funny thing is though you say you slip the odd word in there that most people are not going to know but it doesn’t matter how many other poets, I mean it’s the same with some of the Irish poets as well that actually make up words or just stuff that fits or takes words that have a particular meaning and just use them in the wrong context to paint a picture and I think as you say about poetry needs to be performed and it makes so much more sense when it’s said in the right way at the right cadence at the right time do I know what that means? No, but I can probably guess take a gist of it and if I’ve got the right fill for the overall piece then it doesn’t matter, I’ve taken the spirit of it away and there was enough of it in there that I could just make sense of it we had a lot of fun at the Writing Plus in one particular session where we started to explore nonsense poetry and you think, yeah Lewis Carroll, people like that you start to think, I don’t know what every individual word means but it doesn’t matter, there’s a rhythm and a cadence to it that allows you to understand what it’s about so we actually had some people come back one woman I remember in particularly created her own language utterly so the words were entirely different was that you Lesley? Yes I’m sitting here thinking, who was it? It was Lesley she wrote this entire piece in her own constructed language and yet you understood it Yeah, I love that, love it Norse speak, it was about a betrothal wasn’t it? It was just a conversation between two people one asking for a hand in marriage and it worked because the roots of the words were vaguely understandable but they were embroidered in a bit and I’ve worked on that language since then so I have got on it I’ve loved that, it’s not quite click on No, not exactly, but that would be amazing to create your own language and then suddenly it’s adopted and they’d be speaking everywhere There’s an Icelandic band, you’ve almost certainly heard their music or Sigur Ross, they did the music for, I think it was one of the Attenborough sea ones was it one of the big Attenborough documentaries and they sing in a somewhat Icelandic but mostly made up language and it’s soundscapes, they create stories with sound and in some ways the language doesn’t matter, they just want voices in there of course they could have just sung it in Icelandic and everyone else would have gone, might as well have made it up but they actually did make it up and of course we have Tolkien and his meanders into made up languages That’s another thing we’re starting to explore is music in a writing group as well we’ve got a few people who sing and a few people who play musical instruments they will now explore in songwriting in various ways Yes, I would love to see that Do we actually officially have accrue music yet or is it still nascent? It’s nascent We think it’s about to hatch What we’re actually looking at, I don’t think there’s any secret about it at the moment we have formed a sub-committee, again it’s a mess from the creative writing group and this sub-committee or group is looking at the possibility of creating an annual music words festival in the town, other towns have their jazz, music, blues, festivals over a weekend there’s the calendar one, Walkerby used to have one, Dundee’s got one, various other places Why does Ofterarver not have a music words event that’s taking place for say a Friday to a Monday at some point in the year and we use all the available venues in the town the pubs, the hotels and we bring artists to them and on the back of that there’s the economic benefit for the town not just for the venues concerned but the B&Bs, the hotels and let’s make it happen So Wesley and I are very much ideas people, we have wild imaginations my family tell me most of the time that I’m of the scale somewhere in terms of imagination I need to be controlled, they’re probably right but we need to make these things happen, this is a small town I keep talking about this town relative to Pitlockry Pitlockry is a small town and until somebody had the imagination of once creating a theatre in a tent in the middle of the town that’s where it all started it has now grown into the Pitlockry Festival Theatre which breaks out into winter words, the enchanted forest loads of other events that are all centred around Pitlockry Festival Theatre that is the creative hub of that town and look at the spin off of the B&Bs, it’s annual now, it’s year round B&Bs, hotels, restaurants, pubs are all benefiting that should be happening here or it could happen here yeah well all it takes is one person or a few as the case may be here so I’m really looking forward to that and there’s obviously lots of opportunities for all the other arts groups to benefit from that as well so I’m really pleased, I do play the guitar I’m not, one thing I’m not allowed to do is take on new activities because I’ve got too many as it is so we covered, we covered the things that you’re actually doing or if I miss something here we covered most of the things in there oh yes, that’s another one, yeah I forgot about that the other culture trail yes, that’s another one of the ideas that’s well we started developing that it was an idea that perhaps instead of the QR codes that you commonly see on historic buildings or where there’s been historical events giving you just purely a bit of text telling you the history of whatever happened or the person that with our background in drama we could have an actor dressed appropriately we’ve got a very good wardrobe team telling you the story, it’s so much more interesting a bit of script, it’s so much more engaging so we have been to the History Society and asked them for some hints about events and people associated with Dr Arder and we’ve gone through that list narrowed down we now have a list of places in the time that we want to contact very soon to discuss whether they’d be willing to permit a QR code to be put onto their building and that QR code will, as Leslie says, we’ll have the videographer that we worked with before pre-record our actors and again we will write the script for those actors to perform, film, link it to the QR code and link it back to a host platform that I think you’re involved with on it and the benefit of that is not only can we say for example of a Roman solver standing at a point in the time talking about how it was like when he invaded here x thousand years ago but at any time in the future we can switch where these QR codes take us to so we can change characters so for instance we could change characters for Easter or Hognonné or Halloween so that when you go to the QR code you’re presented with something different every time so that I think has a lot of exciting possibilities and that’s something we’ve already got the first QR code sample made up, the aluminium plate with the code on it and the very first one we do will probably be the picturesque itself just so that we can demo to other people what we mean by the project I really like the concept of I mean we can all get together and be creative it’s cool right but grounding it in local history it’s a bit obvious actually in some ways you know of course we’re going to do that Arcturada has a rich history around the Langtoon and a lot’s gone on there there was a tiny remnants of a castle which has enough to warrant a Wikipedia page but there’s a lot that’s happened here and I won’t profess to know a lot of it but the bringing, that’s sort of the glue that binds this I think some of this stuff can feel a little bit disparate and we’ve got the Warhammer miniature paintings on Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons which has come from a creative perspective it’s amazing but like what’s that got to do with the books, we’re in a book hub at the moment and what’s that got to do with the theatre shows you’re putting on well of course we’ll find a way you know what I mean it really says to me there’s obvious ways I could see that stuff being made at dinner and that we can bring all these threads together behind something that really roots it in the local community and the history there’s another project we did that I just remembered in the last year we were approached by St Keswick’s Church and asked if the drama group could put on something there for an evening of entertainment I’m not sure that we just do evenings of entertainment if by that you mean you know a few people acting out some sketch so what we did was we went to St Keswick’s Church had a good look round and realised that its history is rooted again in a particular family, James Reid and his wife historically involved in this town I think they lived on the family of the one stage off their other house so we brought the whole story of that family and the church and a lot of other things that go on in this town that have a history attached and we brought them all to life that night in St Keswick’s Church again, drama, some projection and music and I think that’s what we’re always in to do and you touched on it yourself there when you said I don’t profess to know everything that’s gone on historically that’s true of 90% this town you’ve got to remember that most of us, including myself are, we’re in-comers the number of people in this town that actually really understand its history or why it’s come to be or what it’s truly about is very small and I think it’s our job apart from entertaining and having fun and being creative people is to raise awareness of the environment that people are living in Yeah, I couldn’t agree more when we did open studios and various other things we’ve done next door when you get people coming in there’s this old couple who came in and I think it was her wife who was getting really excited she used to go to the cinema there and she was like I can’t believe you’ve got this here and there’s art in here and she wanted to ask all these questions and I was like why are you asking me you were here and she was just so excited and it sort of felt like I want to thank you for letting me use your space all we did was turn up and put some paintings I did already up here but look where I get to show it and how amazing is that and people will come in and talk to you about it and I used to come here as a kid and see films and we used to do this we used to play tricks on each other and so on and all these memories there is a lot of pensioners around here and many have been here their whole lives and they’ve got all those stories to tell and it’s got quite a rich history and a vibrant culture around it and I think with all the new builds that have come into town obviously Octorata is getting bigger that benefits the local economy but these locals must be worrying that it’s just going to dilute what this town is and I think that the fact that us as newbies can come in and especially you guys really start to root the things you’re doing in the local history I think that’s really important but I think it’s important that Octorata rather doesn’t lose its identity I look at things like St Margaret’s Health Centre how many people in this town even know why it’s called St Margaret’s? I have no clue there you go you see it’s all connected to Malcolm, King Malcolm and the castle and even goes across to Queensferry and Eredinburg it’s all rooted in the history of the figures that were important in this town amazing and they do amazing things for lots of people as well I think it’s a real credit to the community I landed, I mean Octorata accidentally, right? It might sound odd so did I, absolutely absolutely this became the only option when we needed to move up here after the first lockdown and this was the only place we could find a house bar I hope it’s not a complete hole it didn’t look like one but you never know the moment the sun goes down it’s like everyone’s beating each other up I don’t know, it looks alright at the moment and I just can’t believe my luck you know what I mean? How amazing to have landed here I’m exactly the same as you I never intended to come here I’ve always had a desire to retire to Perthshire but I didn’t necessarily plan to come specific with Octorata and yet sometimes when you come to a place you wonder why this, why did this happen? because since I’ve arrived here it is taped every single box that I could want both in benefit and development for me but also in what I feel I can bring to the town and to the people and what I can make happen this is a very culturally interesting and responsive town other towns are not like that you could find yourself in a complete cultural desert this place is exciting, vibrant and the people that you talk to like I talk to you, I talk to Leslie, I talk to Peter at the cinema I never get this, oh I don’t know if that would work I’m never sure if that would happen everybody’s kind of, right let’s explore it, let’s make it happen let’s see what we can do that’s dynamic, I love that that is it, you ask forgiveness not permission and I’ve displayed a couple of artists over the last few years that have raised a few eyebrows you’re sort of sticking out or whatever, go for it if you don’t like it, don’t look here, leave on everyone gets a chance and if someone wants to be a bit more challenging bring it on, right, and that’s it does this belong on a wall in a town like this? I don’t care, right, someone’s come along they’ve got the generosity to bring something and to stand there with it and talk about it they deserve that platform another thing we do is temporary as well so it’s memory rich, it embeds memories in people it brings memories away from people but at the end of the day it moves on so there’s something you didn’t like that you’re talking about then you just move on, the exhibition will be done in a month’s time and gone and you can forget it if you want or you can take from it what you thought was important or what has triggered something inside you and it feels very much as if we’re right at the beginning of something that is just going exponentially, you know, wonderfully well it really does feel that there’s an energy behind everything just now and it’s actually explored it’s so the opposite of the way the world feels it’s filled with positivity everywhere else feels like it’s just going to explode like LA at the moment or whatever and I think that’s amazing it does have that sort of feel and there’s a certain energy about it and I sort of listened to you about your writing class and I’m sort of thinking back to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood but I probably should be referring to some sort of poetry collective that I don’t know about but where you’ve got these little groups where all these amazing creators have come out of like Manchester in the late 80s, early 90s and places like that where really, you know are we going to produce the next Oasis? I don’t know but like, you know I think we’re the nearly dead points to say yeah why not, why not and we’ll just be making ghost stories after that as well so I’m going to bring this to a close do you guys have any sort of closing words or anything anything else you want to say? I’ve said a lot I don’t think so I think it’s been interesting to chat with you and exchange ideas and thoughts I can get the chance just to sit down and have a chat about what have we done, why are we here and what do we hope to do so it’s actually really interesting just to sit round the table here and ponder about how we’ve ended up here very amazing, thank you and if people want, who are like a want what if anyone wants to find you, join in what are you saying? Please do, we actually really encourage that and we’ve got a drama group, Facebook page the Otrada drama group, we’ve also got the Otrada stands alone poetry page which covers all the open night nights and these pages we use not just for promoting our own stuff but we also use them as hubs if you like for where people can find out about what’s going on in the poetry community across Scotland or other drama groups, we’re quite happy to connect with as well someone is local, they want to join the drama group but they’re feeling a little bit shy come on and talk to us come on and chat we’re in the main picture house upstairs every Tuesday evening so people can just rock up you can rock up, have a chat with us sit in for a whole evening, no obligation and just see what we do and listen to us and meet some new people we’ve had people turn up at the stand alone night just as you say, we thought I’m just going to come along and see what this is like this is not my thing and now they’re coming every week and stand alone is not ticketed, it’s all free everything’s free, nothing’s ticketed and if people follow you on Facebook most of this should come through there so start with the Facebook pages if you want to join in, just turn up same goes for basically anything else that crew puts on it’s been wonderful talking to you it’s been amazing stories I think we probably could have gone on for quite a while longer but it’s Saturday afternoon I feel the pub might beckon so I will bring this to an end but good luck with your massive array of things coming and I look forward to seeing what you produce it’s very exciting Thank you guys Ask Against Mental Illness