Novelist Louise Welsh made her professorial debut at Glasgow University on Tuesday with a call for collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
In an evening lecture entitled Sleight of Hand, the Art of Writing Fiction, Welsh, who was appointed professor of creative writing in June, said: “The potential for collaboration between writers and academics is increasingly recognised, resulting in fiction, poetry and music, helping the lay person to better understand and appreciate academic research.”
Pointing to crime novelist Val McDermid’s recent work on a forensic science course with Dundee University as “a great example of how writers and academics can collaborate”, Welsh also discussed her own project during last year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the Empire Cafe. This well-received collaboration with historians, musicians and playwrights was the first full-scale cultural examination of Scotland’s role in the North Atlantic slave trade.
The author of The Bullet Trick and A Lovely Way to Burn, whose debut The Cutting Room was longlisted for the Guardian first book award in 2002, Welsh has also written her first full scale opera for the new season of Scottish Opera. The Devil Inside, written in partnership with composer Stuart McRae and inspired by the Robert Louis Stevenson short story The Bottle Imp, will premiere in January 2016.
Choosing the subject of campus novels for the sold-out public lecture, Welsh examined the rich pickings that places of learning have offered writers over the decades.
Referring to the clutch of novels dealing with sexual harassment on campus, including JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Human Stain by Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Welsh argued that they were “responding to changes in what was considered acceptable in the wider world, but perhaps the idea of sexual transgression is so hard-wired in the campus novel that it became the ideal form to explore sexual harassment”.
In a confident and engaging lecture, Welsh – who gained an MLitt in Creative Writing herself from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde – wove a tapestry of quotations and anecdotes from a wide-ranging selection of writers, including CP Snow and Ruth Rendell’s alter ego Barbara Vine.
Discussing the purpose of creative writing courses, she quoted the American short story writer Lorrie Moore: “You will read somewhere that all writing has to do with one’s genitals. Don’t dwell on this. It will make you nervous.”
Advising first-time writers, she told the audience: “The novelist is like a detective – our job is to observe and glean from life then make it into fiction.” She added that she would supplement the advice “write about what you know” with “don’t restrict yourself”.
She also queried whether the characters writers create are ever entirely distinct from their creators: “Whether we like it on not something of ourselves inevitably bleeds through and we bequeath them some of our DNA. Perhaps that’s what the critics mean when they talk about the writer’s voice.”
