"There is something of the night about A. L. Kennedy," says Rosemary Goring of the Glasgow Herald. And, let me add, something of the Day too. This is a feeble joke: Day is Kennedy's latest novel, a tour de force about a WW2 tail gunner. Other works include Paradise, a descent into alcoholic misery; On Bullfighting, which is just what its title implies; What Becomes, short stories, and one of my long-time favorites, from her or anybody: Night Geometry and The Garscadden Trains, her first collection of stories. Kennedy is a Scottish writer of outstanding wit and depth (the name Kennedy is as indigenous to Ayrshire and Dumfries, in the Scottish Lowlands, as it is to the 32 counties across the Irish Sea); she is also a stand-up comedian, no ordinary combination, and an unexpected one until you consider how a writer giving a reading to an audience inhabits another world from the audience, whom the writer perceives as from light years' distance. This is the stand-up comedian's psychic province, too.
Anyway, A. L. has an intricate and slightly spooky website that should be a model for all writers' websites. There's a special password-only section just for her fellow scribblers. In it she includes various essays and ruminations of hers, including a simply wonderful meditation on writing called Looking at Geese, from which this is a pithy excerpt (I hope she won't mind):
"The thing to remember is that writing in its purest form, is no more and no less than a monstrous delight in making things up. No one would keep doing it through the inevitable rejections, misunderstandings, plateaus of self-loathing, hours of solitary concentration and often a great deal of no money whatsoever, if writing weren't as fundamental as this, as deeply rooted in who the writer has always been and what they have always wanted, if it didn't feel extraordinary. Words felt great years before I'd even thought of sex - right after hot and cold, wet and dry, hungry and not - in came the words for everything."
I like A. L Kennedy a lot, even though she's won the Costa (ex-Whitbread) Prize, the Saltire Award, the Lannan Award, and half a bushel of other awards. She's funny, serious, hopeful, depressed, and a damned good writer.
