Weegie Wednesday

‘Weegie’ is a term of endearment used by the people of Edinburgh for their neighbours in their sister town of Glasgow. ‘Weegie’ is short for ‘Glaswegian’ and Weegie Wednesday is Glasgow’s response to the Edinburgh Literary Salon: Glasgow’s literary salon.

But we prefer to call it a social and networking event. Perhaps because Edinburgh Literary Salon sounds a bit posh and therefore exclusive, (though actually I've been and it's very friendly) Weegie Wednesday, in the style of all good sibling rivalries, emphasises the egalitarian nature of its events. Our focus is on friendship, facilitation and welcome.

We are writers of all kinds including fiction, non-fiction, journalism, sci-fi, graphic novels, screen, stage, poetry and more, but we are also publishers, agents, booksellers, editors, translators and so on. In fact anyone with an interest in publishing and writing would enjoy these evenings. Given that we all have to be multi-tasking polymaths these days, this is handy.

We aim to greet newcomers as they arrive and station at least one committee member on the lookout for the first hour or so. This is to enable people to come alone if they have no literary friends. We also make sure no-one is left by themselves and try to introduce people to one another, especially if they have a particular purpose in being there.

We have either one speaker who talks for 15 minutes or two for 10 each. These are not opportunities for anyone to sell a product, but are about our experiences in our various fields. Previous speakers have included Bernard Mac Laverty, Ian Rankine, Fiona Brownlee, Nicola Morgan, Lesley MacDowell, David Greig and more. Next up, in June 2015, are Rally and Broad.

But the main focus is the socialising. This is the one night of the month when I feel completely sane and meet other writers who live strange lives similar to my own, or I make sense of the mysteries of the publishing world. I feel supported and heard, plus I had the added luck of finding my publisher right there at Weegies. This is so often how deals are done, in person, because you can get a proper feel for how you will work together. Many others have been similarly fortunate at Weegies.

We are so inclusive we even have members who travel through from Stirling, Kilmarnock and beyond. There is even a contingent from Edinburgh who travel through every month and which includes my brother the non-fiction writer Colin Salter. People from as far away as Inverness and Aberdeen have visited us to see how it’s done, and gone on to set up similar events in their areas.

There will soon be a new, more interactive website for Weegie Wednesday, but in the meantime go to www.weegiewednesday.org where you can read our manifesto, officially join or just get more information. Or turn up at the Terrace Bar in the CCA 350 Sauchiehall Street Glasgow G2 3JD after 7.30pm on June 17th and ask for me.

A quote from happy attendee: 'The atmosphere is incredible, the people are great and it’s fantastic to have such a great venue full of similarly-minded people.'

Champagne Moment!

Mavis’s Shoe has been bought by Bertrand Brasil of, er, Brazil. I don’t like to change a country’s own spelling of itself but it seems to be the way with Brazil. Mavis’s Shoe is to be translated into Portuguese. This, by the reckoning of an online translator, would be into Brazilian Portuguese and would make it ‘O Sapato do Mavis’. To my Scottish ear this sounds kind of cute, or am I just excited at the prospect of Mavis crossing the Atlantic? This is something I have never done myself. I would of course be very pleased to follow in Mavis’s Shoe’s footsteps (if that’s not confusing metaphors and idioms and such-like) and indeed, my friend Isa MacKenzie who lived through the Clydebank Blitz informed me tonight that she travelled to Brazil with her husband a couple of decades after the war on a mission for Singers sewing machine factory. Meanwhile my own beloved is being persuaded to travel to Brazil for work and the first song I heard after getting the news was on good old Sunny Govan Radio on their world music programme and was by a Brazilian band whose name I was too excited to remember. Perhaps there is such a thing as synchronicity. Or perhaps Brazil is so much on the up just now that everyone’s talking about it.

Anyway this means Mavis’s Shoe is being launched on ‘South America’s biggest media market’ so-called by the BBC, but not in the style of an Iraqi in the company of George Bush. I’m hoping that the arrival of Mavis’s Shoe in Brazil is welcomed. Brasil does after all have a population of 196.6 million which is nearly 38 times the population of Scotland and the tune of its national anthem, although not particularly carnival is suitably jubilant. I know this because I have been playing it all morning and you can too by going here.

But what is really exciting is the translation of Mavis’s Shoe into another language and perhaps another culture. Will Lenny be given the voice of a girl in the favelas of São Paulo? What will readers who don’t know anything about Scotland never mind Clydebank or the blitz or even WW2 in Europe, make of it? Will I ever know even a fraction of what they think when I don’t speak any Portuguese? Is it time finally to learn?

A couple of weeks ago I participated in an event run by the Scottish Writers Centre at the CCA in Glasgow. Our subject was the languages of Scotland and with me on the panel were Alan Riach of Glasgow University, Catriona Lexy Campbell a Gaelic writer and translator and Kusay Hussain, my Iraqi co-writer (who always keeps his shoes when not at home) (see previous post) and we were chaired by Leela Soma, another writer. In researching for my input, I found the following statistic: In France 15.9% of new books are translated from another language. 60% of these are from English. I found no figures for Scotland but in the UK only 3% of our new books are translated. I found no figures for Brazil either. Pause for thought. Are we being insular on this ‘island’ of ours?

Meanwhile I have been congratulated on Mavis’s Shoe’s latest success by lots of kind people. Martin Stepek said, ‘Muito bem!’ which means ‘very good’ or ‘well done’. And Craig Munro said, ‘Está uma mulher,’ which means ‘Yer some woman.’

To which I reply, ‘Obrigado!’