In conversation
Dispatches from the first weekend of the Book Festival
Hello friends,
I’ve just got back from the first weekend of the Edinburgh International Book Festival – there are two more to go – and any worries I might have had, that it wouldn’t live up to last year, have been thoroughly dispelled.
I am continuing my policy of not playing it cool and practising maximum enthusiasm. This meant that, just as I did last year, I was waiting outside the gates when the Festival opened on Saturday morning, and that I used my lanyard to get into as many events as possible. I won’t always have this privilege, and there were many years when I couldn’t afford to do things like this, so I am absolutely making the most of it while I can.
There’s so much I love about the Book Festival. But, after the difficult discussions that took place earlier this year, and led to the Festival ending its relationship with Baillie Gifford, I’m also now second-guessing that love – or rather, wondering if I’m letting it get in the way of making the most ethical decisions I possibly could.
As I tried to convey when I wrote about this back in June, one of the most important things a literary festival like this gives us is the opportunity to have conversations with each other. In some instances these conversations will result in minds directly being changed, and discourse being advanced – in others the effect will be more subtle: we’ll get to practise listening; we’ll overhear people who conduct a discussion differently from how we might, and learn from them. We’ll get to spend time in a space – increasingly rare these days – where it’s safe to expressing conflicting opinions, to try out theories, to disagree without shouting. We all need a lot of practice at these things. The Book Festival gives us somewhere where we can do that.
But all along, I’m also worrying that this is a cop-out – that I’m just trying to find excuses to continue to something I enjoy and benefit from personally. Perhaps, I think to myself repeatedly, I am immoral for not having deserted the festival along with Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein and many others, in protest at its initial retention of Baillie Gifford as a sponsor.
I won’t stop having this conversation with myself, but after this weekend, I feel that I’m on slightly more solid ground. The theme of this year’s festival is Future Tense, and it has been taken very sincerely to heart by the programmers. Almost every event I’ve attended so far has, in all sorts of ways, asked the question of how we can build the future we all want and need, together.
One of the very first events of the festival was my discussion with JC Niala – a wonderful author from Oxford, who deserves to be much better known. We mostly talked about a project she undertook during lockdown, where she created an allotment in the style of 1918, using heirloom plant varieties and period growing techniques (though she eschewed the use of arsenic as a pesticide). You can read more about it here.
I was lucky enough to spend several hours with JC over the weekend. She’s a wonderful conversationalist, with a story for every occasion; the sort of person who, during a discussion about tea and coffee traditions across different cultures will casually mention that she once made a cup of coffee from scratch – growing, harvesting and roasting the beans before she ground and brewed them. (It took about nine months.) She’s also very good at drawing other people’s stories out of them. I ended up talking about myself a lot more than I usually do in this role, and there were several moments during our conversations where one or other of us made an unexpected connection between ideas, or came to see some aspect of their life more clearly as a result of something the other had said.
I hadn’t thought very much about allotments before I started to read about them in preparation for this event. But now, after talking to JC and reading her work, I am coming to see them as she does – as utopian sites, that show us how our world could be better. Unlike community gardens,1 allotments are communal sites on which everyone has a private plot, with which they can do as they please, growing whatever they want, and using whichever techniques and practices they think best. During the pandemic, they were an opportunity for people to be alone, and yet still together, and I felt touched when JC talked about people looking after each other’s allotments in their absence, scrupulously sticking to the allotmenteer’s preferred methods, even if they differed from their own.
There are a few parts of the world where this co-existence is reflected (I think London is one of them, because, for all its problems, you can’t live there without being constantly surrounded by people who are going about life very differently from you), but in general I think we have too few opportunities to spend time alongside people who are doing their own thing, as we do ours, and make no attempt to challenge, convert or conquer one another. And I think we would get along better if we could change that.
The next event I went to was a discussion between Sophie Howe and Ella Saltmarshe. Sophie was the first Commissioner for Future Generations for Wales,2 and Ella is a co-founder of The Long Time Project, which “aims to galvanise public imagination and collective action to help us all be good ancestors.”
I brought along my ongoing doubts to the session – can we really justify sitting around and theorising about the future, when we should be out there making it happen? (Am I wrong to keep bleating on about conversation being important? Should I go and chain myself to something instead?) And I was thoroughly reassured by these two very impressive speakers.
Sophie talked about her work within the Welsh government to change the fact that “bureaucrats and civil servants are told to leave their humanity at the door.” One of the many brilliant initiatives she mentioned was the appointment of writers and artists in residence in all sorts of odd places: clinics, offices, job centres, complaints departments. I would probably have dismissed such an idea as inexcusably woolly, but she told us how working with professional storytellers had helped people to better understand the experiences they had had within the system, to communicate them to each other – and in the case of the civil servants and bureaucrats, to draw empathetic connections between the work they did and its effect on actual human lives.
We understand the world through stories. As Ella pointed out, “culture is the soil from which everything grows. And if we want some different crops we’re going to have to start from that level.” She told us about the workshops she had run with policymakers and other bigwigs, thinking as she walked in “oh my god, they’re going to think I’m a massive hippy!”
In fact, she told us, everyone turned out to be very receptive to an approach based more around storytelling and mutual understanding than around processes and procedures. The fault is with the system as it currently exists, rather than the people working within it.
“People are keen to bring their humanity to policymaking,” she explained. “Art and culture give us the tools to do this.”
Later that day I went along to a ‘guided walk with theatre’, run by geologist Angus Miller (who will be leading our Inside Out session on Sunday the 25th). The performance introduced us to James Hutton, an Edinburgh man who’s generally considered to be the founder of modern geology, and who proposed the idea that we could read the Earth’s history in its rocks. (Our walk took us to Salisbury Crags, which partially inspired his theories.)
I have long been fascinated by Hutton’s idea of deep time, but what hadn’t quite occurred to me until this moment was the fact that this time goes in both directions. We are currently somewhere in the middle with, as Hutton put it, “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” There is a lot of future ahead of us, and we’ll only be around for some of it.
We can learn things by studying them, but we often understand them most viscerally when we’re told stories about them. Thanks to Angus’s storytelling, my vision of the future has now expanded.
The final event I went to that day was with Elif Shafak. I haven’t read one of her books for several years, but I was captivated by her wisdom and eloquence when I heard her speak at last year’s festival, and wanted to listen to her again. I was not disappointed, and I took many notes.
As if sensing my lingering doubts that books and stories are going to make any difference to the future that lies ahead of us, she insisted that “the novel is the perfect place to hold a nuanced conversation. Not social media.” And I really believed her. I then queued for a long time to buy her book, and I can’t wait to read it, once all this is over.
It was a wonderful weekend in so many ways, but possibly my favourite part was the session JC and I hosted at the Royal Botanic Garden on Sunday morning. We were joined by around twelve ticket-holders, some of whom said they wouldn’t consider going to one of the usual book festival events, but that their interest had been piqued by this one. Together, we walked slowly through the gardens, gently getting to know each other as we explored, and then repaired to the Botanic Cottage, where we drank tea made with herbs we’d picked along the way, and had the kind of conversation that I wish existed more in my life. No one dominated or controlled, and even though there were more people that you’d normally find round a table, somehow everyone had their say.
We didn’t discuss anything particularly mind-blowing – though there were moments of vulnerability and gentle controversy. Mostly, we just swapped stories. We talked about the tea (and coffee) traditions that most cultures have, and how complex and subtle they are. We talked about the ways in which growing, cooking and eating food connect us to our ancestors, and in some cases help us to access (or recreate) memories that might have been lost to us. We talked about badgers and wolves and food chains and predators and conservation. We talked about the towns and cities and villages where we all live.
And I realised that this was one of the things I had wanted to happen, when I started to curate Inside Out. Although I hadn’t fully articulated it to myself, I had been trying to create situations where we could all talk to each other even more than we already do at a book festival.
It’s amazing to be in the same room as an author, especially when you’ve read and loved their work, but it can be hard to find much space for discussion in the traditional festival format. There’s the signing queue, where readers wait, sometimes for hours, for a brief encounter with an increasingly exhausted author3. And a few people will get the chance to put up their hand and ask a question during the onstage event.
“This is more of a comment than a question…” has been rightly lampooned by people who attend speaker events – far too often it’s the prelude to a rambling, unnecessary, self-indulgent speech, during which everyone else in the auditorium starts fidgeting nervously, losing concentration, glancing at their watches, and hoping that the chair will somehow manage to interrupt and wrest attention back to the people onstage. I once spoke at an event where someone’s “comment” went on for so long that most of the audience walked out, which meant the eventual ending was a bit of a damp squib, with hardly anyone left to applaud.
All of that being said, perhaps it’s important to create a situation where we all get to ask our questions, and share our comments, where no one needs to hog the mic, and there’s time and space for everyone to have their say. Where we meet as equals, rather than across the footlights. I’m not saying we should do away with the traditional format – superstars like Elif Shafak would be mobbed if we tried to host a discussion among all the several hundred fans who came to her signing. But, here and there, I think we can make it happen.
There are still almost two weeks left of the festival, and many more conversations to come. I’ll keep reporting back on where we get to. But in case you didn’t already know, many of the events are also broadcast online (free, or pay what you can), and you can ask questions of the author just as if you were there in person. There are also a lot of free events, and there’s a whole back catalogue of events from previous years, available to watch and listen to.
Until next Monday,
Emily
Which are wonderful in a different way – have a look at this article, which was published in the Guardian just this morning.
A position that I’m told had never existed anywhere else in the world, but has since been emulated by numerous other countries. The UN has also committed to adopting a Declaration on Future Generations. I am very proud of my home country for pioneering this.
Although many authors I have met over the years handle this situation with extraordinary grace. Elif Shafak, despite having hundreds more people to speak to, held onto my book when I tried to take it from her after she’d signed it, looked me in the eye, and said “I hope our paths cross again one day.” I hope so too, but even if they don’t, I will always remember how she made me feel.
I’m new here, but i absolutely love this “I am continuing my policy of not playing it cool and practising maximum enthusiasm.”