Play With Gray - Entry Three

Process diary - Niamh Gordon - Creative Residency

Niamh Gordon is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Glasgow and a member of art collective Babe Station. From Feb-Oct 2025 she is on a creative residency at The Alasdair Gray Archive supported by SGSAH. This is a continuation of a monthly ‘process diary’ where she shares reflections on her developing projects. The first in a series of workshops with Niamh, an Intertextual Writing Workshop, was held on Wednesday 18th June. Keep your eyes peeled for details of the next one very soon!

Intertextual Writing Workshop, 18th June

A few weeks into my residency I spent some time reading through the archive of creative texts produced through AGA’s programme of creative commissions. That the Archive is busy generating its own creative archive seemed significant, and I used some of these texts as source materials for my intertextual writing workshop in June. I am interested by the nesting of texts within texts, as well as the way they ripple and refract across one another, opening direct and indirect lines of communication. In this process diary entry, written in April, I reference the commissioned essay ‘Rich Things’ by Chitra Ramaswamy, an excerpt of which was published by Tolka magazine. 

Letter to Alasdair from a place of ignorance

In Chitra’s text she addresses you directly, Alasdair, and so far I’ve not felt the desire to do that. But this morning, as I was walking in, you appeared on the canal path beside me and we journeyed together a while.

I’m in this transitional state, I was saying to you. I’m in between forms, I can feel things shifting.

You were silent but words from your ledger floated in front of us and arranged themselves into the picture of agreement.

The thing is, Alasdair, I went on, I thought I’d emerged on the other side of something already. I was talking to my mum just this morning about how a trip I took last year seemed to usher in some new and comprehensive transformation, and at the time I recall reflecting that this would be the start of something, that I’d look back at this moment and identify it as the beginning. Even so recently as two months ago I felt satisfied that my edges had firmed again. Yet now change is afoot once more.

You nodded.

It’s seasonal, I offered.

You shook your head.

So it’s real, then.

Your silence spoke for you. As we walked, we noticed the trees and bushes along the left-hand side of the path were sparkling. Someone had carved a series of six-point stars from the smoothed bases of beer-cans and hung them at intervals in the greenery (which is not so green yet, given that Spring is yet to spring). I tried to take a photograph of one of the stars, and you said—with your silence—that there wasn’t much point, since the photograph would consist of one image of one star when surely what I was really attempting to do was document the experience of discovering the stars, and the accrual of meaning that occurred as we moved past each new one. Essentially it was a problem of medium. I felt a little embarrassed by this, and the desire to photograph the synecdochic star then seemed childish and unconsidered. It served as evidence that there remains much improvement to be done, both in terms of my artistic vision and my compromised sense of self.

As we approached the bridge over the canal, I turned to ask you about the limits of my perspective. At this point I noticed you were no longer there, and as I sit here in the archive, staring at your books, at photos of you, your art, your trinkets, you’ve disappeared entirely.