'I'm convinced we need festivals like this'

Published on Tuesday 9 October 2007 00:37

I SPOT Louise Welsh before she sees me. Hands full of letters, with her short red hair and black-rimmed angular specs, the writer, still best known for 2002's The Cutting Room, is looking remarkably fresh given that it's not yet 10am on a Saturday morning. When I tell her that there's no photographer with me, she pretends to be miffed. "But I put make-up on," she says. "I even poked myself in the eye with the mascara brush."

Welsh, newly appointed honorary patron of the Glasgay! festival, the annual celebration of queer culture which starts this weekend and runs for a month, has only been back in her home city of Glasgow for a matter of days, having just returned from Germany where she has lived for the past year and a half. Taking up an artistic residency in Bamberg for 12 months, she contrasted her stint in the Bavarian countryside with six months in Berlin. "In Berlin no-one gives two hoots about anything," she says. "You see girls hand-in-hand and boys hand-in-hand and kissing. A bit too much kissing actually, mainly heterosexual."

Welsh is now settling back into her flat, struggling with the tribulations of getting her phone reconnected and broadband installed. "It's good to be back," she says. "I've lived here since I was 19, that's over 20 years now. I don't have to live here; I don't have family here, you can write almost anywhere, theoretically, but I choose to be here." Inspired by her travels, one of Welsh's resolutions is to buy a travel guidebook to Scotland so that she can explore this country and discover it anew. "When I'm on holiday I always buy a guide, so I thought I should have one for here," she says. "There will be places that I've never gone to and visiting them will be my new hobby.

"I was in Waterstone's last week and I looked up the gay and lesbian bit of a guide and it said something like, 'Most people are quite tolerant of gays and lesbians but public displays of affection might lead to a bit of trouble.' I thought that seems about right. Don't hold hands, don't snog your partner in George Square. Even in Berlin I wouldn't snog in the street, but that's nothing to do with sexuality, it's just repression."

Welsh, known for her suspense-filled novels that delve into the murky underbelly of life, often through a dark, dry wit, was in Germany as part of a group of six artists from Scotland that included two writers, two composers and two visual artists. She found it fascinating working alongside other artists - a term that makes her flinch when applied to her - enjoying unplanned collaborations and noting that composers "work like dogs".

None of the group really knew each other before they went, but a year living in a foreign country, knowing only a little of the language, certainly helped them to bond. "Most of the Scottish people who were on the residency are now in Glasgow," she says, "so I've now got this new network of people." She recently got an e-mail from one of the group suggesting that they get together to keep up with their German by doing classes at the Goethe Institute.

Glad to be back in Glasgow, Welsh is also happy to be around for Glasgay! where on top of being patron, she's looking forward to seeing Venus as a Boy with Tam Dean Burn, who played Rilke in the adaptation of The Cutting Room at the Citizens Theatre in 2003, and Amy Lam's show Mama Cass Family Singers, as well as, of course, Kenny Miller's new adaptation of her 2005 novella, Tamburlaine Must Die.

"I don't know anything about how Kenny's adapted it and I'm really happy with that," Welsh says. "I'm happy to go just as a spectator. Kenny knows exactly what he's doing."

The novella is a fictional reconstruction of the final days of the Elizabethan playwright, atheist and sexual outlaw, Christopher Marlowe. "There's a lot of jeopardy in the book," Welsh says. "The plague, intolerance in terms of religion and sexuality, intolerance to new arrivals - people who they call strangers and who we'd call immigrants or asylum seekers - and political instability, so I think there's a lot we can relate to. For me it'll be interesting to see what Kenny's left out as much as what he's left in."

Surely she's been tempted to go along to rehearsals to see what's going on? "With these things you've got to stand back," she says. "And you've got to be sure it's the right person. I don't feel any nervousness, but if I had adapted it I'd be really worried. It sounds corny, but as a writer you just feel really privileged that someone has chosen your work."

In Bamberg, Welsh wrote the introduction to a new edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, and a full-length play, and she's currently writing a short story commissioned by Radio 4, as well as working on her new novel. It's intriguing that adaptation is something that she hasn't tried.

"I'd rather write an original movie script," she says. "I'd love to write a horror movie. I've got a plan for one, with a synopsis and everything. It's set in Berlin and focuses on two women who are together. I think it'd be great fun to play with the female voice that is usually menaced and turn it around. It really lends itself to queer themes, the idea of the lesbian being distrusted and the idea of insanity.

"I don't know whether it would make people examine their own prejudices. Perhaps it would be an opportunity to use their prejudices against them," she says, laughing.

When the director of Glasgay!, Stephen Thomson, asked Welsh if she'd be patron of the event, she suggested, in typical self-deprecating style, that he might be better off getting someone better known. "I said, 'what about Justin and Colin?'" she laughs. When I tell her that I think that she's more recognisable than she imagines, she bats back: "Oh I hope not, the states I get in."

The fact is though, Welsh is among the highest profile of a group of writers that has emerged in Glasgow over the past five years (a group which includes her partner, Zoe Strachan). And, despite her modesty, Welsh is an ideal patron for Glasgay! not least because of the queer themes in her work.

The protagonist of The Cutting Room, Rilke, is a gay auctioneer. In Tamburlaine Must Die, Christopher Marlowe's eclectic and voracious appetites set the backdrop for the political intrigue and skullduggery of Elizabethan England. In The Bullet Trick it's the louche and smoke-filled world of Berlin cabaret clubs that Welsh recreates. Circumspect about revealing too much about her new book, a contemporary novel set in Scotland, starting in Edinburgh and Glasgow and then going up into the Western Isles, she says that there's less of a focus on gay issues.

"In this book I don't feel that queer themes are particularly present," she says. "It's not a conscious decision, it's just what fits the story. I think there will always be a gay/queer/transgender character in my work because that's just part of life for me. I can also guarantee that it will never be the queer person that did it, unlike some of my fellow Scottish writers who I won't name. There are a couple of them that you think, 'ah, now I know who the killer is because I've spotted the queer person'. It's just irritating, politically and in its obviousness."

Careful to point out that she's not making a political point when she writes, Welsh does acknowledge that visibility is important. "Sometimes you wonder whether we need festivals like Glasgay! but I'm convinced that we do. When you think of places in Eastern Europe, China, Africa, even EU countries where you can't be a teacher and be openly gay or you'll be out on your ear, when you think of that, we're obviously in a hugely privileged position but that doesn't mean that everything is won. To be visible, if you can, is a good thing."

• Glasgay! runs from 12 October until 11 November. Tamburlaine Must Die is at the Tron, Glasgow, 3-11 November. The full Glasgay! programme is available online at: www.glasgay.com