Govanhill Festival: An Interview with Poet, Harry Josephine Giles
Ahead of an event at Bee Knees cafe as part of Govanhill International Festival, we catch up with author Harry Josephine Giles to chat about their 2013 residency at Govanhill Baths and their latest work Deep Wheel Orcadia.
One of the poems from Harry Josephine Giles’ pamphlet ‘Oam’, produced as part of her residency at Govanhill Baths. | A picture of the poet by Rich Dyson
By Jack Howse
Blue ghaists aye swith up n doun the puil.
Two hunner tuithie ghaists cheer fae the balconies,
clap ghaist haunds,
n skinklin ghaist swees fae the ghaist trapeze
ower the ghaist watter.
So starts the poem Blue Ghaists in the poetry pamphlet entitled Oam: poems fae Govanhill Baths. The pamphlet was written as a culmination of an artist’s residency that Harry Josephine Giles undertook at Govanhill Baths in 2013. Ten years on, the Orcadian is back for an event (and to catch up with some spooky friends) for Govanhill International Festival. Catch her in conversation with Councillor Elaine Gallagher at Bees Knees Café on Wednesday 9 August.
Since her residency, Harry Josephine has continued to publish poetry, essays and articles as well as running poetry nights in Leith where she now lives. She has been shortlisted twice for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and last year won the Arthur C. Clarke award – whose recipients have included the likes of Margaret Atwood and China Miévelle – for her latest publication, Deep Wheel Orcadia. The science fiction verse novel is, like the rest of her work, written in Orkney Scots but central to Deep Wheel Orcadia is Giles’ page-by-page playful translation of the dialect into English.
Hi Harry Josephine! I just wanted to start with asking you about your residency you had at the Baths in 2013…
I was writing new work and we did some events with some workshops. So it was a writing residency as well as kind of doing some community-oriented stuff.
We produced a pamphlet at the other end of it, called ‘Oam’. Which is the word for steam, or smoke or smell – like a general warm atmosphere. We pulled that all together for the end of the residency. It was a five month period of quite intense writing and then publishing. And we did a relaunch event as well, which was really nice.
It's a dozen odd poems written in Scots. I grew up in Orkney, so I grew up with a very rich form of Scots and the form of Scots that's spoken in bits of Glasgow is very different.
I've been writing in Scots for a lot of my career and this was only the second or third thing that I made publication wise. And it was all about the Baths.
What kind of community outreach were you doing as part of the residency?
It was all literature and poetry stuff. We did a couple of live events and a couple of workshops as well.
That was before any of the pools were filled and when it was running as an artist-led centre in part of the building doing community engagement stuff, and to build interests and funds. It was to show what was possible with the building.
And do you get over much to Govanhill these days?
Yeah I do. I have a band that’s based in Glasgow and we’d been practicing in Govanhill the last couple of years before moving just across the river. But, there's such a big artist community and there's so much going on in Govanhill.
And I'm a community shareholder in the Baths as well. So I have stayed close to them. So I get through as often as I can, and when I'm in Glasgow, it's the area that I want to be in.
I read Deep Wheel Orcadia recently and I loved the play between Scots and the English translation. I wanted to ask why your work has always been rooted in Scots language and its dialects.
It’s because it’s the language I grew up with. When you grow up with that part of your mind and part of your heart is always in that language. So when you seek to express yourself, you kind of need it.
But when you're dealing with minority languages especially when you're dealing with languages like Scots where there isn't that established in ethnography or that big a literature, it's a bit of a struggle to figure out how to do it. You're constantly having to reinvent the language as you go. Which on the one hand is a bit of a pain, and it can make it harder to get it out in the world, but on the other hand, it means that you're always thinking very deeply about how language works. And that, I think, is quite good for a poet to have that level of attention.
And was the English translation always a part of the novel through its various drafts?
No, I tried a few different things and then I learned that translation style from the Gaelic poet, Rody Gorman. Which he calls ‘intertonguings’ which is quite fun because it's a direct translation of the Gaelic word for translation which is eadar-theangachadh.
And I think this translation style is about destabilising English, about making English not seem normal, about taking some of the ease and transparency away from English, which is the globally dominant language. And that dominance has quite malign effects. And so I find it helpful to get some, get some wedges in and crack it open a bit.
Why did you decide to write the verse novel as science-fiction? I guess I just ask as the locations are somewhat rooted in the real world especially with it written in the Scots dialect.
The first impulse was just to say ‘this is a language that is suitable for the future, this is a language that can live in the future’. And then by doing that, it sort of wills the future into the present by saying, this is how the language might be in space. So that kind of pulls that future imagining of the language into the present.
And then, once you have the idea, you have to make it breathe. So I got interested in all the metaphors and ways of thinking about islands and so-called peripheral places And working on like, the big canvas of the future and the big canvas of science fiction. And it just kind of amplifies all of that stuff.
I guess following on from that, why do you think there is such a richness of trans and queer stories in science fiction and fantasy writings?
I mean, you want a different world, right? You want things to be a bit easier for you, so there's that impulse. I think also an interest in monsters, there's an interest in things that are other than human, more than human. And identification with those when you're placed in something other than human You want to explore the boundaries of the human and I think there's a will for like bodily transformation that is made possible by those genres.
Are you looking forward to your event on Wednesday as part of the festival?
Yes, me and Elaine have met many many times over the years, so I’m looking forward to us interviewing each other. It'll be nice to come back to the baths and to mark 10 years since my residency. And I've had an enormous amount of respect for the Baths as an organisation from the start. I think it's roots in community and its activist orientation towards community development is a really vital thing. So I'm always glad to keep that connection and maintain some, some way of working.