William McIlvanney by John A. A. Logan
Last Saturday, the Scottish novelist, William McIlvanney, passed away. 22 years ago, at Aberdeen University, he was the first, and the only, creative writing teacher I ever had. For six weeks in the spring of 1993, 15 of us would gather in a room, for two hours, twice a week, on the Monday and Thursday, and you’d never know what to expect in that room next. I don’t think we were really conscious of him teaching us, he sort of let us get on with things, didn’t tell us, above all, what to think. He did tell us that we should consider our group a “subversive unit within the English department”. One day he told us that every one of us had something inside us, in our past, something terrible that had happened, which perhaps we had never told anyone about, or ever written about. When he checked with us that we did indeed have something like this, only one guy in the room put up his hand to say no, he had nothing of that kind in his past, or his self. Then Mr McIlvanney (...