Hugh Macmillan

Hugh MacMillan, Poet

DGU has been very supportive of my practice and my projects based around Dumfries and Galloway. I believe myself to be a local writer by which I mean a practitioner who finds local history and culture to be both a fascinating resource and a method of reaching things that are universally true. Think globally act locally as Paul McCartney says! Many of my most successful projects have been centred round local or regional legacy: ‘Forgotten Doors’, which explored people’s memories of extinct buildings in the town, ‘The Blash o God’ about an 18th century cult from Closeburn, ‘The Brownie o Blednoch’, a modern response to a famous Wigtownshire fairy story etc etc. In several of these projects I have collaborated with artists and writers, some local some not. Collaborations are always fun, leading to long term friendships and lasting antipathies! I think the region is very fortunate in having cultural organisations like DGU, the Stove and the Wigtown Book Festival all of which offer real support to individual artists, and all of whom have supported me personally.

I think this area is one of outstanding beauty matched by astonishing cultural wealth. I hope I’m adding bit by bit to the latter and honour DGU and its ICC professional development fund in aiding me over the years in this.

I usually have a few irons in the fire. Soon to be published is ‘The Leaves of the Years’ a volume of responses by contemporary Scottish writers to the great Galloway poet William Neill, co-edited by myself and Stuart Paterson. Another project I am very excited about is ‘Me and John Keats’, tracing the footsteps of the great radical poet John Keats and his mate Charles Brown who, turned away at William Wordsworth’s house and disgusted at the fact the latter was campaigning for the local Tory MP, set off on a walking tour of Dumfries and Galloway, from Burns’ grave in Dumfries to Burns’ birthplace in Alloway, a pilgrimage to a man Keats saw as a brother poet and a truly radical spirit. Along the way they reflected on food, language, culture, rheumatism, love, indigestion and a range of other topics, recorded in poems, notebooks and letters. I plan to trace the route as exactly as I can and add my own thoughts about old age and indigestion while paying homage to the landscape and to Keats himself. I might even write a sonnet or two.