Remembering Lorna Waite

Dr Lorna Janet Waite

Born Kilwinning 27 August 1964. Died Edinburgh 12 August 2023

Lorna J. Waite grew up in the industrial town of Kilbirnie in Ayrshire. When she was a teenager, the economic and social heart was ripped out of her community by the closure of Glengarnock Steelworks. That governmental vandalism contributed to her conviction that an independent Scotland was the only way forward, all other routes stuck in the mud of an unreformable Westminster. The experience not just of community destruction but of the deliberate destruction of historical records became central to her work notably her poetry book, ‘The Steel Garden’ Poems by Lorna J. Waite – published by Word Power in 2011 (‘The Steel Garden’ Poems By Lorna J. Waite).

Valerie Gillies wrote of it: “in supple Scots Lorna Waite creates a way of holding hands with history, a workers’ history that needed her to write it down.” Like her poetry, her research carried out at the University of Dundee, which gained her a PhD in 2011, explored post-industrial folk memory, drawing on her personal insight into the destruction of industry and community. Her research had initial support from a Wingate scholarship awarded in 2002. Such concerns also deeply inform her fiction, which is, as yet, mostly unpublished. 

Another key influence was Lorna’s love of football, which led to her long-term membership of the Tartan Army. Football interacted with her writing in 2007 when she contributed to Football Haiku, edited by Alec Finlay as part of his iconic Pocketbook series, and the same year she made a related but more extensive contribution to 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, edited by Alastair Findlay. In 2014 a version of her poem The Ravens O’ Thingvellir was published in Scotia Nova: Poems for the Early Days of a Better Nation, edited by Alastair Findlay and Tessa Ransford.

Most recently her poem in praise of the great Gaelic dictionary maker, Edward Dwelly, written in Scots with a translation into Gaelic, appeared in Cruinneachadh: A Gathering, edited and translated by Marcas Mac an Tuairnair, and published in 2023. Lorna was awarded a new Writer’s Bursary by the Scottish Arts Council, and she was writer in residence at Hugh MacDiarmid’s cottage at Brownsbank in 2011, where she drew intense inspiration not only from C. M. Grieve, but from appreciation of his wonderful Cornish wife Valda. As Jessie Kesson Fellow at Moniack Mhor in 2012 she took her work further.

Lorna wrote in both Scots and English and given time might well have written in Gaelic also, for she had a long-term commitment to Gaelic as a learner, both at Home – Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (uhi.ac.uk) and in Edinburgh. She would certainly have become fluent had she been living in a Gaelic speaking environment for she was a good linguist, evident from her days at Garnock Academy, when on a school trip to Paris she decided to chat up French boys in a café rather than visit Notre Dame. She also had a good grasp of German and Latin, the latter a reminder that a knowledge of the classics has been fundamental to education in Scotland and that Garnock Academy at the time Lorna attended it was a shining example of that democratic intellect. The school also enabled Lorna to think more deeply about the local Ayrshire poet whose work she loved, Robert Burns, and no one recited Tam o’ Shanter with more insight and passion than Lorna. Among her teachers was the redoubtable advocate of Scottish literature John Hodgart.

She was the first of her family to attend university and at Edinburgh she had the good fortune to be taught by the outstanding social psychologist and visual thinker Halla Beloff. After her undergraduate degree in psychology, she was awarded an MSc with distinction in community education. She became a notable community educator setting up a gallery in Broxburn on behalf of Artlink, which brought special needs groups together with contemporary artists. A notable project, with Donald Urquhart, involved recreating a model of the solar system in the West Lothian landscape following the example of the Earl of Buchan, who founded of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in the late eighteenth century. That led to Lorna presenting on her work to the Society in 2004, under the title, To remain worthy of the land: the Earl of Buchan, the Kirkhill Pillar Project and the re-animation of Scottish cultural history. That was not simply a successful community project it reflected Lorna’s lifelong interest in astronomy, which led to friendship and collaboration with the then Astronomer Royal of Scotland, John Brown, and included a visit to Glenelg when that village was twinned with its namesake on Mars. 

Her awareness of the importance of peace and social justice was rooted in her childhood. At the age of eight, while visiting relatives in New York, she was taken to the United Nations building, and the significance of world peace remained with her from that moment onwards. That peace commitment was expressed through her passionate resistance to nuclear weapons which led to membership of CND, and arrest for protesting at Faslane. 

Her love of Scotland was further expressed both through her passion for football, not least as a member of the Tartan Army, and through by her wide travels in her ancient but reliable Volkswagen Polo, which took her camping, frequently to her beloved Glen Etive, and closer, to home, to the south side of Loch Earn. The joy she took in camping was part of her overall awareness of herself as part of the ecology of the natural world, not least as reflected in the words of Patrick Geddes or Duncan Bàn McIntyre. She was associated, through her friends Alastair McIntosh and Vérène Nicolas with the Centre for Human Ecology, and she was a strong ally of Mike Small’s ecological and cultural advocacy not least as expressed in a memorable event organised by Mike at Castle Toward.

Lorna had a distinguished period as an art critic and editor from the late 1980s, not least with Variant magazine, then edited by Malcolm Dickson. Her work was often linked both to Transmission gallery, and to the activities of the Free University of Glasgow, such as the Self Determination and Power event at the Pearce Institute in Govan in 1990. The previous year, 1989, she had been part of Richard Demarco’s memorable arts journey to Poland. Her writing was valued by two very different but equally radical photographers whose contributions are being more and more recognised today, namely Jo Spence and Maud Sulter. Maud commissioned an essay from Lorna in 1995, and, as a fellow writer of poetry in Scots, was a direct inspiration to Lorna’s own poetry. 

There is much else that could be said but her commitment to dance, in particular to tap dancing at Dance Base in Edinburgh, and to the wonderful dance techniques of the Margaret Morris Movement at summer schools at Kilquhanity in Dumfriesshire, must be mentioned.  She never played a musical instrument but made up for it by numbering among her close friends a number of very fine musicians, including the harp player Karen Marshalsay and the piper Allan MacDonald. Her musical interests ran from Bob Marley to Maria Callas. And central were, of course, the songs of Robert Burns. 

She died, peacefully, at home in Edinburgh, a city she loved, in the presence of friends, as a result of cancer. In the last weeks of her life she was able to visit her spiritual home of Loch Etive and made her farewell to the landscape and culture of the Gàidhealtachd, which had been so much part of her life.