Bella as Lab and Testing Ground
I like the idea of Bella as a Sandbox, a lab for ideas, a space where people can run with things and try them out. This has had a few practical examples of writers trying things out that then went on to become fully fledged (& brilliant) books.
One such is Dougald Hine who’s a sort of one-man tour de force on ecological breakdown and deep responses to it. Dougald has said:
“When I moved on from Dark Mountain in 2019, it was Bella Caledonia that gave me a platform for the writing I wanted to do. The essays I wrote for them turned out to be the earliest draft of parts of At Work in the Ruins. Plenty of other writers have similar stories about the role that Bella has played over the years as an expression of the spirit of the “democratic intellect” that is the mark of Scottish culture and the liveliness of the radical Independence movement. Right now, they are fundraising to support their freelance contributors, expand the platform and host open workshops for new writers to broaden the range of voices being heard across Scotland. Please support them, if you can!” Go HERE to do just that!
Another who used Bella as testing ground for his writing is Dougie Strang – you can read his writings on Bella HERE. Dougie’s essays for Bella – including Cranstackie and Creag nan Uamh amongst others became the fertile ground for his magnificent debut The Bone Cave: A Journey Through Myth and Memory, published by Birlinn Ltd.
Another writer who has used Bella as a testing ground is George Gunn whose long-running column From the Province of the Cat became a book ‘a poet’s journey through Caithness, its landscape, people, culture and history.’ You can buy it HERE.
There’s lots of other examples of new writers who have found their feet on Bella other than Dougald, Dougie and George, and we’ll be highlighting them in the next few weeks.
We work every year with Mass the Mic (‘tackling the under-representation and misrepresentation of women of colour in Scotland’s public life and media’) to try and create more opportunities for women of colour, and we need to do much more to create a more diverse media in Scotland.
What we would love is for Bella to grow and thrive and continue to be a space for people to try out their writing and progress. For that we need your support, right now. Please give to and share our crowd fund project HERE. Thank You!
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‘Pass the Mic’
I’ve just been reading the introductory essay ‘Just Memory’ in Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which I think has a lot say of relevance to Bella’s recent posts on direction. Although Independence hopefully won’t require war, the process may still produce trauma and memory wars, just as business-as-usual politics does. Nguyen calls for an ethical approach to memory, writing:
“Art is crucial to this ethical work of just memory.”
but noting that “many artists are complicit with power” (p13). Vietnam War is refought on cinema screens. Hollywood is part of the military-industrial complex reproducing power and inequality, producing kitsch, sentimentality and spectacle strategically.
Now, we in Scotland are also part of this Anglosphere. Indeed, one globally-useful function of an Independent Scotland could be to develop counter-narratives to the national security cinema and other cultural modes that embody this ethical approach to memory… as long as our cultural base isn’t captured. And will these Independent Scottish artists represent fairly those aspects of history that may reflect badly on Scottish culture and people, or be bound up in euphemisms, glorious myths, noble ideas, identitarian victimhood, or just stuff to get people to wave flags and pay taxes?