Heaney the Correspondent and Translator John McAuliffe 1.
In ‘The Conway Stewart’, a poem from his final collection, Human Chain (2010), Seamus Heaney puts letter-writing at the centre of his writing life. The poem describes his parents’ gifting him a fountain pen when they arrive for the first time to boarding school in Derry: the Conway Stewart pen’s ‘pump-action lever’ nods to the pen, ‘snug as a gun’, in another ‘inaugural’ poem, ‘Digging’; then, there’s a play on his distinctive sound-palette as he describes refilling the pen: ‘Guttery, snottery, / Letting it rest then at an angle / To ingest’; finally, the poem recounts the advent of one part of his writing life – as a boarder posting letters home, ‘my longhand / ‘Dear’ / to them next day’. These letters home will, though, be a way of keeping the lines of communication open rather than a place where the stricken child will confess how he feels. What he cannot say in letters will, decades later, be the subject of the poems themselves, including other heartsore memories in ‘Album’, a defining sequence in Human Chain.

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Kirsty Gunn Spending a fair amount of time on my own, as I do, in the Highlands of Scotland, I discover in myself a mighty will to forge patterns. The landscape is empty here – from the windows at the back of the house I see hills, and to walk out is to walk into a view comprising only the river, strath and moorland that is spread beneath them. All is in shades of grey green, ochre, purple, dun. There is restraint, a pared back presentation of colour and detail and little in the way of interference with the great plainness of things, the utter simplicity of that which is laid out before me.

Then my eye adjusts; I start to see variety. Next thing, imagination has answered the appearance of a chastened landscape with the gift of its generative powers: so, for example, now here I am, at that same ... read more

Isobel Williams I’ve been asked to draw outdoors, for a thing (unpaid). Drawing the naked model in life class, we have tea and biscuits. Out in the wild I’m offered fags and weed.

My territory is a market expanse bare of stalls for half the week in the shadow of the Westway, the A40, where it flies over Portobello Road in Notting Hill. This part of London is misrepresented in a popular film which shows no black people anywhere.

A white man under the influence is lying on the pavement with a zipped suitcase full of paperbacks. He tries to stand up for a paramedic and the police. His trousers slip down to reveal his bare buttocks. This is not a metaphor for publishing.

To the muffled swish and rumble of traffic above, people tell me about their lives as I sketch them.

A trim ... read more