The Ends of Our Tethers (12 page)

END NOTES AND
CRITIC FUEL

DEDICATION: Agnes Owens is the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors. I do not know why. It is not because she worked for years as a house cleaner in a district of high unemployment, since working class origins and experience are often put to an author's credit. Nor has she been ostracised by other Scottish writers. Liz Lochhead first read one of her best stories –
Arabella
– in the 1970s, when she met Mrs Owens at a writing group in the Vale of Leven. Liz introduced her work to several other Scottish writers who admire it. In 1984 James Kelman introduced to Polygon Press
Gentlemen of the West
, her first novel, which became a Penguin paperback. Two collections of her stories have since been published and four short
but perfect novels, the last (
Bad Attitudes
) by Bloomsbury in July 2003. Though not widely reviewed all her reviews have been highly favourable, yet she is never remembered when awards are handed out. Perhaps she is ignored by publicists because they cannot believe a creative intelligence can thrive long in a council housing estate.

BIG POCKETS WITH BUTTONED FLAPS first appeared in
New
Writing
9 published by Vintage and the British Council in 2000.

NO BLUEBEARD The naming of this
man's wives by number is taken from
Eventide
, a novel Roger Glass, one of my students in Glasgow University Creative Writing Programme, began writing in 2002.

JOB'S SKIN GAME was conceived as a monologue when eczema recurred to me after an abeyance of nearly forty years. I connected the monologue with ideas in the Book of Job when Lu Kemp, a director of Scottish BBC Radio, commissioned a modern story from me based upon that Book. This story, in a shorter version, was broadcast by BBC Scotland in January 2003 and printed in
Prospect
, April 2003.

SINKINGS. The two hideous experiences in this story befell my friend, Peter Gilmour.

AIBLINS is an old Scots word meaning ‘perhaps'. The tale is partly based on my experiences as a writer employed by Glasgow University between 1977 and 1979, and non-connected with my experiences as a professor (with J. Kelman and T. Leonard) between 2001 and 2003. Ian Gentle is a real person; Luke Aiblins a composite of several, but chiefly of myself. The
Proem
and
Outing
poems were part of a sequence I wrote in my late teens and luckily failed, despite many efforts, to get published, though my friend Robert Kitts recorded many of them for his television documentary
Under The Helmet
networked by the BBC in 1964. A shorter version of
Aiblins
was published by the magazine
Prospect
on 17 April 2003.

PROPERTY is based on what happened in Argyllshire to the sons of my friend Bernadette Logie.

15 FEBRUARY 2003 is based on a
Herald
article published on 17 February 2003.

WELLBEING was the last chapter of a political pamphlet,
Why Scots Should Rule
Scotland
, Canongate, Edinburgh 1997.