Rachel McCrum

Interview by Laura Waddell & Calum Rodger

Photo: Cassandra Cacheiro, 2021

Rachel McCrum will be a well-kent name to those familiar with the Scottish performance poetry scene throughout the 00s and 10s. A tireless promoter of others’ work and a bold and accomplished performer herself, her several years’ work on the circuit culminated in 2015 with her selection as the inaugural BBC Scotland Poet in Residence. This role helped catalyse the publication of her first collection, the brilliant The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate, published by Freight Books in 2017, and the fortuitous meeting with her now-partner, Québecois poet Jonathan Lamy, with whom she relocated to Montréal in 2017. Across the Atlantic, McCrum has continued to develop her writing and performance practice, bringing her Northern Irish, Edinburgh-inflected energy to a Québecois milieu. As long-time fans of her work, Gutter delighted at the opportunity to talk to Rachel about homes old and new, and the exciting directions her work has travelled since settling in Montréal and, latterly, the Québecois region of Bas-St-Laurent/Lower St  Lawrence.

LAURA WADDELL: Rachel, it’s a delight to have you here today. Calum and I were talking about how, as we’re both leaving the magazine after the next issue, it would be great to have a conversation with someone that we’ve worked or engaged with through our own time in the Scottish literary circles, and that’s yourself. And you’re quite far away, so we felt it’d be wonderful to have a catch up and just hear more about what you’re up to at the moment. And recently, someone sent me a screengrab of a performance that you were doing clad in this beautiful red/orange fabric…

RACHEL MCCRUM: Oh, I know what that was. That was really nice. So that is in the Pyrenees about two hours outside Toulouse, at an amazing residency centre there called Camp France—which youse would totally love by the way. They do amazing land-based practice, performance and sound. The reason I got out there was, I’m now living in Montréal—outside Montréal, which we’ll get to—but I do go back to Northern Ireland at least once a year. And I’m always sort of curious about what’s going on artistically. And I saw Array, the Turner Prize winners from Northern Ireland who won with their collective—the Array Collective—in, I think, 2021, which was a huge deal, because it’s a collective, and also the first time a Northern Irish artist, or artists, had won.

I went, and they have this amazing installation that’s been taken to the Ulster Museum, it’s been touring around in the UK. And it’s a pub. But it’s built out of protest banners, but not Northern Irish protest banners, kind of performance art, slightly dry, super feminist, super queer performance banners. And there was this sense of humour about it and, you know, a darkness and a seriousness and sort of a political tone, but a very Northern Irish vernacular, with an added layer of Irish mythology tied into it. And actually it was probably the strongest reaction I’d had to a work of art or a group of artists for quite a while. And I was like, oh, I need to go and see what’s going on with these guys. Then it turns out that three of them were doing a residency, a week-long teaching residency in France. So I went back to Montréal, looked it up, thought yeah that’s worth the investment, so then proceeded to fly to France to work with a group of Northern Irish artists—as you do.

And then I turned up, and the entire group was Irish, and Northern Irish women, apart from one, an East London Jewish woman, who was just sort of sitting there and she was like, I feel like an outsider at the best of times, this is not helping! (laughing) But we embraced her as one of our own. And so they took us through this week where they sort of let us layer up and layer up and layer up these performances, and I ended up creating a character, which I didn’t think I was going to go and create, I had sort of arrived with something else in my head entirely. And it was the Two-Faced Fence Sitter.

Because the idea is that you’re working with creating new archetypes for the world that we live in. And the real archetypes like these, these characters, these people exist, even if they’re uncomfortable, and what role do they play? And what role do they play in relation to, you know, the—it’s in the name—array? How do they work in relation to one another? Even if they’re doing something darker? How does that become part of the whole? And I just thought this was fascinating. The pictures of me draped in orange fabric—we went to a junk store in the south of France. I think we had seven euros each as a budget. So it’s a bit of orange curtain and some wool. And the guys were helping me to make a mask because they’re much more talented at creating props than I am. There’s pictures of all of us, there’s a gang of eleven of us all dressed up, having created these archetypes of these characters, and it was just fascinating. That was really interesting this year, it felt like a culmination of sort of some stuff I’ve been working towards as well.

Because during the pandemic, Jonathan Lamy, my partner, who is also a poet—he has, I would say, a more established performance poetry than I do in North America. He does weird things with poetry, bits of paper and water and things. Calum is nodding, he knows. We got asked during the pandemic to do quite a lot of online readings and we just got really bored. You know, there’s sort of this square box and you sit down when you’re used to standing up and reading, and there’s no movement, your body feels: oh God, this is getting a bit flat lads. So we started to get weird in the flat, because we couldn’t go anywhere else. I created a fake wardrobe out of coats and was reading from that at one point and there was a tent in the living room, and we had set up a sort of a TV with weird backdrops and Jonathan was lying on the floor, rolling the phone over his face and things like that. So a lot of this sort of creativity had actually come out of us sitting in our flat for two years and doing the readings and, you know, it’s amazing to be able to take that outside again.

LW: Sometimes, two artists living together can be a challenge for taking that art and actually getting it out into the world. It’s sometimes a challenge to not just keep it something between the two of you. Certainly in my relationship, I occasionally think: should Leo [Condie] and I do something in business together? But we’re so indulgent of one another that we we’d always say let’s just relax when it comes to doing anything to do with numbers and spreadsheets and marketing. So how do you find that balance? How do you understand what’s for you and him, and what’s for the world?

RMC: First of all, bravo to you and Leo for having the clarity to see that because it is really tricky. It can kill a relationship stone dead. There’s no romance in spreadsheets. But, interestingly, Jonathan and I have our own practices in publishing. He’s translating now and he works in French, and I work in English, and we can have some space around that.

He runs a poetry organisation called La Poésie Partout. And when I first came over, I think there was a kind of a notion we would work on this together and set this up. And at some point, I was like, no, we can’t, we can’t, this is your thing. And I will support you as a partner. But I’m not going to support you as a partner and a board member, because those are very different jobs, and I can’t do both. So choose. Luckily, he didn’t say yes, if you do the board, because otherwise I would have come back to Scotland quite quickly. But still, you know, that was probably six years ago,  we made that decision. So we keep that separate. And what that means is that we have been able to pick and choose the creative stuff that we’ve done together. Now, he translated my book, which was published, by Freight Books. (All laugh)

CALUM RODGER: We’re going to censor that. Redacted.

RMC: You know there were people who worked really hard on that Calum, and I’m very grateful to them.

CR: It’s a magnificent publication.

LW: It’s a brilliant fucking book! It’s a great book.

RMC: It was a great publishing company in a lot of ways!

LW: It was fun. But that’s not always the recipe for corporate responsibility.

RMC: Then it went to Stewed Rhubarb, and after that it was published over here. And then Jonathan did the translations for that. So we worked very closely on that, for, God, about a year and a half—it was long, it was every Thursday morning. But we did schedule it quite tightly. We were like, right, we’re gonna go to work at the table next door. And Jonathan is quite meticulous, and, researches and likes to think about all the options, and I am an impulsive bugger with a magpie brain. So between the two of us that actually worked quite well, I eventually was like, ‘Just make a decision for me.’

That led to us doing bilingual reading and then that kind of trailed off and I think we were both kind of like okay, we need to go work on separate projects for a bit. But we’re quite good at talking it through and going, okay, now, I’m gonna go and do this, and I’m gonna go and do that. We don’t show up to all of each other’s performances—we’re incredibly supportive, of course, but I think we understand what the practices are. Having said that, we’re now in a band together. So ask me in a year how that’s going.

CR: What kind of band?

RMC: We’re poetry noise, Calum! We’re called Pigs and Wolves. That’s the yellow-coded textiles, if you see pictures wearing yellow.

Yeah, that’s really fun. The wider picture with Québec is they’re really not afraid of genres. So yeah, we’re gonna throw in a bit of dance or a bit of movement or a bit of music or, you know, projections or lights, or whatever. I was speaking to an acquaintance who was over from France, and she was saying she’s coming over here to study performance, because it’s so much more adventurous—I can’t speak to the rest of Europe—but in France at the minute, it tends to be quite introspective. Whereas, here I do get that impression that they’re really quite up for mixing everything, which is really fun.

CR: So from properly landing in Montréal in 2017, what’s the biggest influence in the development of your work since then? Has it been this milieu that has a more chameleonic approach to performance, or is it the place itself that has exerted influence?

RMC: I tend to work more in the French milieu—there are moments where they come back together, but generally poets in the English language and in the French language are quite separate, they run in parallel tracks, and there’s constantly attempts to mix them up. Actually, what’s interesting—this is another conversation, because translation, literary translation, is becoming more accessible, partly because of software and all the rest of it. There’s actually a lot more mixing of writers of similar generations in translation—that’s kind of a side thing, but it’s quite an interesting one to observe. But what I was interested in over here was that there are world class performance poets who are not known, or not known worldwide, because Canada, because Montréal is quite odd at exporting its writers. Which is not a problem Edinburgh has, perhaps.

So you’ve got the likes of Kaie Kellough, Oana Avasilichioaei Cat Kidd, Fortner Anderson, Moe Clark, and Louis-Karl Picard Sioui who are working in English, and they’re just these incredibly interesting, incredibly skilled performers who have an independence in the way they perform.

This was a huge shift to go through from coming up through Scotland and Edinburgh which, you know, those times were fun, we got paid to have an amazing time, and there was a lot of cutting teeth there. But there’s a particular way of talking to the audience. And in Montréal, in Québec, certainly, there’s more of an ‘I’m gonna get up and do my thing’. And maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t. But that’s for you to decide. And I’m gonna do it anyway. And there we go. And now I’ll get off the stage. There’s less direct talk or contact with the audience. It took me a while to get used to this, and I kept talking to them and they were like what? But to me it gives you a lot of freedom, because you just kind of do your thing. So that was one element that I think I wanted to get in.

LW: Clarify that, if you will, what do you mean, there’s less direct contact with the audience?

RMC: It’s even that thing of getting up on stage and going, hey, you know, how are you doing? Is everybody having fun tonight?

LW: Those bits are where I get the nerves out.

RMC: And me too! I came over and I ran a series of shows—overconfidently. I knew some poets but I didn’t know any audience members. And I was doing a lot of that. I was doing a lot of that chatting back and forth. And it wasn’t really landing very well—it was a big learning curve.

And that’s not to say it’s not a warm and engaged audience. They are. But it’s a different mode of interaction. And there’s still reciprocity, like, don’t get me wrong, they are not sitting there on islands, but being coaxed into a group reaction is not something that I think is particularly part of the culture here. Maybe because Montréal is an incredibly diverse city, and you can put everyone in sort of that communal box and expect them to react the same way. Whereas in Scotland, and Ireland and all the rest of it, people like being brought together in that communal space. And feeling like, yeah we’re gonna be part of this audience. It is a slightly more atomized culture I think. People guard their opinions. Doesn’t mean they don’t have them, but they guard them. And as I say, I think from a performance point of view, at some point it becomes kind of freeing, and liberating, so that was a big change.

I started to do voice work. I was in a choir, mainly because I was a bit lonely, and I can’t sing. And at the first rehearsal, he handed us photographs of concrete, the cracks in it, and said, we will now be singing the cracks in the concrete, and I was like, this is my jam! There’s a lot of vocal improvisation, and those are skills that can be learned. You do realise that if you if you go back week after week, and somebody’s patient enough to take you through this for a couple of hours, the voice will strengthen, the ear is trying, you develop skills and you develop a practice, and it was very accessible and it was cheap and affordable. And so not kind of professionalised to within an inch of its life, not something you had to access only in an institution, you know—this was in some fallen down church in a corner of Montréal. That sounds desperately romantic, but it was really, really fun. And then of course, the pandemic.

CR: You spoke a little bit about the challenges of performing in lockdown and online reading and so on. As things have sprung back to life again, have you noticed a change in the scene or the way people approach their work or performance?

RMC: Yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s an interesting one. It’s personally… Erm, I’m 41 now, Calum, you know, too old to run shows anymore (laughs).

CR: Yeah, I feel you!

RMC: Periodically something will come up and I’ll be like that’s too much fun not to do. Like, Michael Pedersen was over with Hollie McNish, and Omar Musa and Dominic Hoey from New Zealand. And there’s a brilliant venue called URSA in Montréal, and they were like, do you know anywhere to go and I said yes. But yes, shows and readings, obviously a lot of that stuff fell off. And I would say, although I don’t really do open mics as much anymore, things like that, I think there’s been a loss of that type of ground-floor access. And I think open mics have their issues and things, but they’re hugely important for people knowing where to go, and having access and being able to get in and find the community or find a community or find their community they want to join, whatever it is. So I think there’s been a loss of that sort of access.

Actually, I think there was a big change with funding, which we’re just seeing the impacts of. Canada is, or certainly has been, quite generous with its art funding, you get Canada Grants for the Arts, and at the provincial level, there’s various kinds of municipal pots. What it means is people get a grant for like, $30,000 to go and write a book, and then they get to sit in their place for a year and write a book and not necessarily have to—I mean they can and many of them do, but not necessarily—involve the community, or engage with infrastructure or development or workshops, or just keep the communal infrastructure going—that I do believe in a lot. It’s developing audiences, it’s developing readers. So I think while artists were actually doing okay, publishing houses seem to be having a really hard time, paper’s very expensive, shipping costs have gone through the roof, that’s been hard, but actually the artists and the writers were fine for a while because there was money for projects. That money has now run out because it was an artificially inflated budget.

Well, all that infrastructure that lost support during the pandemic, the venues, the nights, the whatever, hasn’t come back. So I think we’re just about to see really hard times for artists. I think the institutions are losing funding, the big organisations are losing funding, and I’m like, where’s the overview in this? This is a very strategic high level concern rather than a personal one, but we’re worried about it at the minute. We’re worried about it in Canada, I don’t know how much youse are worried about it in Scotland?

LW: There’s currently a discussion about Creative Scotland cutting 50 grand from the budget unexpectedly, so whether pushback gets that to change or not, who knows? But yeah, it’s really depressing, because it is all that infrastructure being eroded.

I am interested in the momentum of your writing and how it’s changed as you’ve lived in different places. Do you ever find yourself cycling back to subjects that you’ve moved away from; does anything come back into focus as being important to you? I did a residency for the first time last year and went to Finland for a month. It clarified some things for me; it got down to how the essential things that are always in my writing may have a different feel, a different atmosphere in a very different place. But it helped me understand a bit better what the core is of what I want to write. Do you think that having worked and written in different places has given you insight, has broadened your writing? What does it do?

RMC: Yes, I recognise that clarity. When I was in Scotland, during indyref, interesting times—and it was really interesting though, because I was in Scotland as a Northern Irish in Scotland—so not Scottish—and also someone who left Northern Ireland at 18, coming very much from a Protestant Northern Irish background which is, you know, a weird one, it doesn’t really belong anywhere. So there’s always been that theme of going, you know, what is national identity? What does that mean? Or who we are, and, you know, the values that we hold and how we conduct ourselves in the world? And is it important? Actually no, I didn’t question if it was important, I did think it was important. Because I think Scotland thinks it’s important. So I was in Scotland, and was kind of grappling with these questions. And that was a really interesting time to be in that position during the referendum. Because in 2014 there was this emphasis, certainly on a political level, on civic rather than ethnic nationalism, which I thought was really interesting. Did it bear out in practice? But there was certainly a move towards it. And I thought that was interesting, but didn’t really help the question of going, but hang on a minute, you know, who am I? Where did it come from? And is this important? And what are these values? And how does that mean I relate to other people and how we conduct ourselves in the world, and what are my responsibilities? And so, the opportunity to move to Québec, in some ways was to go, ‘Right, go on: really move, really go for it.’ Which sounds now in this year 2023 when displacement around the world is horrendous—you seem like the most privileged, like I’m just going to wander off to Québec, to see what it feels like to be astray again.

But Montréal being an incredibly diverse city of immigrants and languages and second generation immigrants, and Canada itself being culturally in a position where it’s questioning—they call it the post-national phase, they don’t really like to talk too much about being Canadian, not least because there’s this indigenous relationship and they’re dealing with colonialism and decolonialisation and all those things, which are hugely important. And it’s also really interesting to see, well what does it mean if you don’t define yourself by your national identity, what do you define yourself as?

And Québec is a really interesting place to do that as well. Because then you have the question of Québec national identity, where do they sit, and you know this Francophone population, which is not French, is not related to France in the same way that New Zealand is not related to English, you know, how do they fit in the world, in a province that is 79% French-speaking, and will discuss and describe themselves as colonised. It was an interesting place to move, to refine those questions or try and re-examine them through a different place and a different climate.

What I will say is, I also had to make a life here. This has been a slow progress, because there was living to be done and trying to, you know… I maybe feel like I had given myself a one way ticket when I was going over. And so I had to work, I had to find a community, and I was being a stepmother to a 16-year-old girl. And so actually, the biggest thing I’ve written recently is about stepmothers—which again feeds into a question of identity and how we define ourselves in relation to other people.

We’ve actually just finished the script—I’ve been working with a friend Amélie Prévost who’s also a poet-performer and a stepmother to a teenage girl. We don’t have our own children. But what we ended up doing was looking into the archetypes of stepmothers, and in a Western culture it’s really interesting to see where that comes from. You have your Disney stepmothers who are all—they all wear purple, have you ever noticed, they’re all coded purple. And then actually the reality which is incredibly compromised and negotiated, and strange, and, you know, the core question, which is, what does it mean to love someone else’s child and be loved by someone else’s child? And how do you build that relationship? So, for all that big talk about national identity for this question, that’s actually what I’ve been writing!

LW: So tell us about your current work and what you’re doing next.

RMC: Pigs and Wolves is something I’m really into we’ve got one video on YouTube, that’s how cool we are. So that’s poetry, noise and performing. And it’s hugely satisfying—we were in a rehearsal studio for two hours a week for like a year before we did a public show, and for me that changed a lot in terms of how I perform, it’s just really fun—and also what can be done with poetry and performance. For the stepmothers piece, we’re waiting to try and get our next round of funding to turn that into a performance. All being well that should be ready for September next year. It’s two voices, there’s an English version and a French version and Amélie and I are performing each in both versions. So we have to perform in our second language as well, which is going to be interesting. But we’ve got a really brilliant team, there’s a director, there’s sound, there’s costume—and quite a lot of them are stepparents as well so we’re really excited to sort of go okay, come on, what would you do with this. And I’m excited for that show—as part of the rewriting process of it we interviewed nine other stepparents—stepmums, dads, here in Canada but also in Scotland, and in Ireland and in England. And it was just a really interesting series of conversations about something that is not necessarily talked about very much, considering how common stepparenting is. And then we bought this house in the country, in Cacouna in the Bas St Laurent, which we are turning into writers residencies in 2024. You should come over, it’s really nice! We’re going to get rid of the mosquitoes. And apart from that it’s very beautiful. We’ve got coyotes, you can hear them howling at night, some lynx, apparently padding about the place. Pretty cool. So yeah, that’s what I’m up to at the minute, and you know, getting on with it.

CR: Amazing. Thank you Rachel—and that’s a great pitch for the residencies!