The Last Good Year
Lockdown. Social Distancing. Furlough. Stay Home/Protect the NHS/Save Lives. PPE. #ClapforCarers. Viral Load. Support Bubble. Zoom. Barnard Castle. Test-and-Trace. When the pieces collected here were written and submitted, SARS-CoV-2 was an unknown coronavirus, limited to mammal hosts such as bats or pangolins in isolated jungle areas. However, we now know it did not remain there; it made the zoonotic jump to humans, travelling along the trade routes of our interconnected, globalised world with devasting consequences.
Although the phraseology and new vocabulary of coronavirus does not appear in the current volume, the human concerns that are currently shaping our responses are present: fear, love, anger, and the fragility of the connections we make with one another and the environments in which we find ourselves. Sharon Gunason Pottinger’s poem ‘Waltzing with Morpheus’ imagines the terminal lockdown of long illness; Larry Butler’s short piece is a last text to the Glasgow poet and writer Tom Leonard. Both demonstrate that the urgent need to reach out and connect with our loved ones, to hold them when we cannot, nay should not, is overwhelming. One of the cruellest aspects of the pandemic has been the essential distance we must take from one another. German Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up the paradox early on in the pandemic: ‘Im Moment ist nur Abstand Ausdruck von Fürsorge’ — ‘for the moment, you show you care by keeping your distance.’
Great writing is able to overcome distance. That first distance, between a reader and the text’s created world, is bridged by empathetic language and imagery, an invitation to cross over and out of one’s present situation. And this imaginative leap has become ever more important when we are confined, for the most part, behind our front doors. The pieces that Rachelle and I have selected here (from over 700 submissions) helped us make this leap, taking us out of ourselves but, importantly, opening us to those perspectives missing from our reduced purviews. Simon Brown and Samantha Walton imagine societies with a fantastic edge which are nonetheless resonant with our own realities; Olga Wojtas’s comic short story blends absurdity with a poignant tone; Dean Atta’s sharp poem plays on father–son relations; and Jeda Pearl’s poem beautifully highlights how a simple object can cultivate a multitude of emotions.
This is the first New Writing Scotland of the new decade and it is a difficult time to take stock of the decade just gone and imagine some of ways in which the next will unfold. For NWS to remain a snapshot of the literature written in the ongoing project of a contemporary, progressive, diverse, and vibrant Scotland, there is, as ever, hard work to be done. The way coronavirus has impacted on society has, again, highlighted the faultlines of our racialised systems, with people from Black and Ethnic Minority backgrounds made more vulnerable to the disease through racial inequalities in health, education, housing, and employment. The NHS nurses, doctors, and hospital staff that have contracted Covid-19 and died on the frontlines have been disproportionately from ethnic minorities. As Gary Younge notes, this is what systemic discrimination looks like: ‘Not isolated incidents but a range of processes built on presumption, assumption, confidence, ignorance and exclusory institutional, personal and professional networks all buttressed by the dead weight of privilege.’¹ This is just one major example of the systemic racism that plagues our society. Younge goes on to analyse the ‘connective tissue’ between high levels of mortality amongst ethnic minorities due to Covid-19 and the brutal murder of George Floyd by a policeman from the Minneapolis Police Department. Racial discrimination is a terrifying pandemic that runs throughout the structures of our economic, political, and social lives.
With all this in mind, the work of the Scottish BAME Network of Writers continues to be instrumental in highlighting what needs to be done for the literary sector to be truly inclusive of diverse voices. The newly formed Black Writers’ Guild is also a powerful force for racial justice; as publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove explains: ‘We want to help guide our industry to become leading lights in the global movement for racial equality.’² It behoves all of us to respond — as readers, writers, editors, programmers, publishers, organisers — with whatever leverage we can usefully apply for change. Rachelle and I worked hard in curating this current selection to provide a multiplicity of genres, styles, and perspectives but we hope that it will encourage even more writers of colour to submit their work here. In light of this open, intersectional stance, I also hope that New Writing Scotland can continue to provide a home for and promote Scottish LGBTQI+ writers, especially Trans writers who are one of the most marginalised groups in society. Scottish literature is a house with many mansions but some of those mansions need new owners and a total redesign, inside and out. Some need tearing down completely.
No one annual publication can encapsulate and contain all of the potent and important writing that is happening in any given year. I have enjoyed immensely reading the work submitted over the last three years, and it has been a privilege to contribute to this project. This year, new co-editor Rachelle Atalla joined the team and is a joy to work with (even if we could not meet in person for coffee and biscuits!). She, in turn, will welcome a new co-editor for NWS 39. The editorial revolving door spins again, and that is a good thing. In the ASLS office, Duncan Jones and Margaret Renton managed superbly in straitened circumstances and I thank them as ever. Krishan Coupland’s brilliant short story ‘The Last Good Year’ became the title for this iteration of NWS; in an age of perpetual crisis, each year sometimes feels like the last. However, with every edition of New Writing Scotland, and the writers that it showcases, there is always a little more time.
Order your copy of The Last Good Year: New Writing Scotland 38
¹ Gary Younge, ‘We Can’t Breathe’, New Statesman. 3 June 2020.
² Sian Cain, ‘Black Writers’ Guild calls for sweeping change in UK publishing’, The Guardian. 15 June 2020.
