ORKNEY BOOK FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

The programmes are out and about now locally for the second Orkney Book Festival running from the 11-14 April.

For those not lucky enough to be here in the 'small green isles', you can find the whole programme by clicking this link to the GMB Fellowship Website. 

After a week of gales and sudden furious snow flurries, the sun is shining and the sky is the colour of the sky in the poster above. Mind you, you'll still need storm pegs to hang out your washing if you don't want your clothes festooning the fields round about. Or worse, ending up in Norway! Have a look at mine today by clicking the link above.

I'll be blogging about the different events in the weeks coming up to the festival, but here is a taste of two poets to feature in the festival:

from Storms

I wished for a storm to test my strength against.
I cried for the gale-force wind,
For electric explosions,
For sheets of rain.
I looked to the motionless wisps of cloud,
To the serene blue of the sky
And wished them transformed.
I wished to be battered and to emerge triumphant ...

From Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings, edited by Sarah Neely

You can hear this poem in full read beautifully by Gerda Stevenson in the film Margaret Tait: Film Poet, 
to be shown on 
Friday 12 April at 7.00 pm 
in the Pier Arts Centre.

But if you want to see it, you must BOOK EARLY by phoning the Pier Arts Centre on 01856 850209.

The film was commissioned by Glasgow Women's Library and will be shown after the George Mackay Brown Memorial Lecture to be delivered this year by Sarah Neely.

There is also a rare chance to see Blue Black Permanent, Margaret Tait's only feature film. This will be shown by Mark Jenkins in a special screening by the independent film group, Westside Cinema, in Stromness Town Hall on Thursday 11 April at 7.30 pm.

Gerda Stevenson in Blue Black Permanent

 The film stars multi talented Gerda Stevenson, who will be there in conversation with Sarah Neely and later in the festival will read from her own poetry.

Sarah Forrest with Alex Pirie, husband of Margaret Tait

The first recipient of the Margaret Tait Residency, Sarah Forrest, will also show her film, That Now on the same evening.

Cragsman's Widow

He was aye vaigan b' the shore,
An climman amang the craigs,
Swappan the mallimaks,
Or taakan whitemaa aiggs.

It's six year bye come Lammas,
Sin he gaed afore the face,
An nane but an auld dune wife
Was left to work the place.

Yet the sun shines doun on a'thing,
The links are bonnie and green,
An the sea keeps ebban an' flowan
As though it had never been.

Robert Rendall from Collected Poems, edited by John Flett Brown and Brian Murray

You can hear more of Robert Rendall's poems read by Orkney readers:

4.00pm on Saturday 13 April 
in Orkney Library & Archive 
with the book's editors, 
Brian Murray and John Flett Brown 

They will be there to talk about the poet and the process of bringing out this fine collection of his poems.

A Still from Blue Black Permanent

Gunnie Moberg

From Stone

Many years ago, when the Kirkwall Library was still in Laing Street, I sat in the Orkney Room carefully turning the deckle-edged pages of a book.  

It was called Stone and was a collaboration between photographer Gunnie Moberg and writer George Mackay Brown and it contains photographs and poems about stone. 

I must have sat there over an hour looking at that one slender book. The poems were beautiful - a retelling of many of GMB's themes and tropes - and I have read them many times over the years. 

The photographs were astounding! I had never seen any like it. From inauspicious cracks and crevices in rock, from marks made by water, from pebbles trapped in narrow fissures, Gunnie Moberg had created stunning images, flowing, curvaceous, sensuous, some almost erotic. 

The book was a limited edition and is one that I have coveted for many years. But I am lucky! There is a copy still in the Orkney Room at Orkney Library & Archives and I have my hands on it again today.

Page 20 of the book, Stone

For today came the official announcement that all of Gunnie Moberg's work as a photographer - and much more - will be held in the Archives here and will be properly catalogued and stored and shown eventually to the wider public.

The work to gain funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund was started over two years ago by Gary Amos, Library & Archive Manager, and David Mackie, Senior Archivist, and at last money was granted to engage someone for two years to perform the painstaking work of going through all the boxes to see what's there.

Year one will see the cataloguing done. There will be no access to the collection during that time. But there will be an online presence - a website or a blog - set up once the project worker is in post. And the second year will see the new worker look at ways to exhibit the work.  

The Knap o Howar, Papa Westray, photographed from the air by Gunnie Moberg

What a treat that person will have once they have been recruited! There are 1255 items, a tantalising number of boxes with unknown contents: rolls of film, thousands of negatives, diaries and notebooks, birthday cards and letters all waiting for careful hands and eyes to create a definitive and detailed catalogue. Item 663 is a box labelled Manuscripts & Books of Old Orkney, a glimpse of how many treasures must be contained in 1255 items! 

I spoke to David Mackie this morning and his brief description of a tiny selection of the contents made me long to have a look myself.

The Archive contains everything to do with Gunnie's life as a photographer and as a public person.

There are cards from Peter Maxwell Davis and George Mackay Brown: one from PMD contains musical notes - a tune for Gunnie for her birthday! And from her long-time friend George Mackay Brown there is a handwritten acrostic poem using her name, something he did for many of his friends.

One letter from George in hospital apologises to her for being in a dark mood when she visited.

But Gunnie Moberg did much more than take photographs: she created a beautiful garden out of uncultivated ground around the house in Stromness where she lived with her husband Tam MacPhail, who runs Stromness Books & Prints along with Sheena Winter. 

Gunnie Moberg in her Garden - Copyright Alistair Peebles

And she took part with other activists in the protest in the 1970s against a planned seal cull, summoning Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior, and camping out on the uninhabited island of North Rona, a hundred miles or so west of Orkney, to stop the men commissioned to club the baby seals to death. The campaign was recorded in the book, Let the Seals Live by Sue Flint, 1979.    

One of her notebooks has diary entries detailing her interest in wildlife. In my notebook I discovered I'd recorded: 

Gunnie fed ravens below the Black Craig ...

It is like the first line of a poem!

I didn't ever meet Gunnie Moberg except through her photographs, but I have a - possibly romantic - sense that her life and her work were in harmony, almost as if her life itself was her greatest work of art. Her beauty and her personality certainly drew many to her. As GMB said in Shetland Diary (published in Northern Lights 1999):

'That's the way it is with Gunnie; people tend towards the brightness of her nature.'

A view shared by all it seems, as can be seen from this lovely film about Gunnie. (You can see it by clicking the link above.) The film was made by Mark Jenkins, a film maker based in Orkney, and was commissioned by the Pier Arts Centre.

Gunnie took warmly engaging photos of GMB and of many of the writers and artists who visited Orkney.

Seamus Heaney photographed by Gunnie Moberg

How lucky are we to have this body of Gunnie Moberg's work permanently here in Orkney Library & Archive.

Photo of Gunnie by Janke De Vries

Gunnie Moberg's and GMB's signatures at the end of Stone