AN announcement was due to have been made any day now about the appointment of a new Makar, Scotland’s national poet, to replace Jackie Kay, who is coming to the end of her five-year tenure of office. The National can reveal, however, that a completely new selection process is being introduced for the post, Kay was announced as Makar on March 15, 2016, and it was anticipated in Scottish literary circles that the appointment of her successor would be confirmed shortly as she prepares to stand down, even though the usual speculation that surrounds any such announcement has been conspicuous by its absence.
In one way, I’d been writing the poems in
The Adoption Papersfor my whole life. I’d been making up an imaginary birth mother and father with my adoptive mother for years, since I was a kid. She would say of my birth father: “I’m picturing a Paul Robeson figure, Jackie, perhaps with a bit of Nelson Mandela mixed in.”
In another, I started writing the book when I was pregnant. It’s difficult when your writing infiltrates your life and vice versa, difficult to work out what actually happened and what didn’t. Your imaginative life
is your reality.
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