Michael Pedersen

Image Credit: Hollie McNish

Award-winning Scottish poet and co-founder of the literary collective, Neu! Reekie!, Michael Pedersen’s latest publication is a poignant love letter to friendship. Born from the loss of Scott Hutchinson, Pedersen’s friend and creative collaborator, Boy Friends is an intimate mediation on the defining male friendships that have shaped his life.

Speaking to Michael in Summerhall, Edinburgh, was joyous. A natural poet, Michael speaks with an innate sense of rhythm and lyricism, and it was hard not to be spellbound by his thoughts on writing, friendship, and love, all delivered with a delicious turn of phrase.  

First, could you tell me about the process of turning what started as quite a personal diary into what became a book? And as a poet, why and how did it manifest as prose rather than poetry?

So, I started writing the book in a place called Curfew Tower in Northern Ireland; it is an artist residency set up by Bill Drummond. People normally know him as the founder of the KLF, the big pop band, and a lot of people know him as the guy who burned a million quid on the island of Jura – you get publicity for such things. But he’s an interesting arts provocateur, writer, and just a curious human to be involved with, and he’d offered us, Neu Reekie, the literary organisation I run, the keys to the Curfew Tower in Northern Ireland for a year. Being this sort of philanthropic head of the organisation that I was, I took the hard month of July – the hard summer – in this beautiful seaside town and sailing club. I thought, I'll offer everyone else the easier ones, I'll take the gristle of it myself.

So, I'd agreed to do that quite a long time in advance and I was intending to write a third poetry collection. I’d done the last one, Oyster, with Scott - he’d illustrated it and I’d done the poems. It was getting to the point when I thought I should think about doing another collection, so I thought I was going to go there and write.

Then Scott passes in mid-May. And the time from mid-May to opening the front door to Curfew Tower on the 1st of July, in a sense, was an emotional lifetime, but at the same time, was just this blur. And then all of a sudden, I found myself being switched from an environment where I was surrounded by people in the know, who were grieving, consoling, looking after me, me looking after them – this whole supportive bubble of every face imaginable – to going somewhere where I literally knew no one for this isolation period, staying in this old spooky tower on my own for the month. I thought it was risky in one sense, I was still quite tumultuous and in shock from everything that had happened, and I definitely still hadn’t got a grapple on it, but in the other sense, it was exactly where I wanted to be. I thought I was ready; I could think and steep in the memories of all this for a period of time.

So as a way to start writing, because it was quite a daunting task thinking about what I was going to write about, I started doing these little diaries about what I had been up to in the day – long coastal walks and weird things I found in the tower or the post I was getting, just really simple day-to-day activities which was really supposed to be a writing catalyst to get me ready to sit down at the page and talk about bigger, bolder things. And to my surprise, those came out in prose and diary form. I thought, well that's okay because we're just warming up to write something bigger; well, I wanted to write about Scott – it was consuming me at that point in time.

First of all, I wanted to write about this road trip we had recently been on because they were four of the most beautiful days of my life with this incredible human, and I wanted to separate them from what happened next. I wanted to almost break the two stories apart: of Scott not coming back from that trip, leaving this planet, to this really joyous celebration of a road trip. And I thought, I want to take that back on my own terms. So, I started writing about the road trip in hyper detail and that too came out as prose. I thought, well that's okay, it’s prose that will turn into poems at a later date. And then I got so buoyed up and almost healed to a certain extent, or certainly cauterised over the wound, by writing about some of those silly, joyous experiences, that I didn't want to stop. So, I just started picking favourite moments, going back to our trips to South Africa, to meals that we had eaten together, things that I felt made our friendship what it was. I found myself on this scavenge through my favourite moments in this friendship, which was still coming out in prose at that point. Again, I reassured myself that it was okay, because we would manufacture these into poems at a later date, and maybe I just needed to prove that I could still sit down and write in this state, and I was doing that.

And then the story of Scott and the friendship started unlocking memories of all of these other friendships. And I thought, well I need to understand who I am in this friendship with Scott, this version of myself, and I need to understand who I was in all of these other friendships which are no longer with me to some extent, that have elapsed in their time frame. So, it became this sort of stirring pot of ingredients about what friends made me who I am today. It was a scavenge that Scott sent me out on and it became slight obsession, just writing this big archive of ourselves through a map of different friendships. And months and months into that, I still didn't want to stop because it was such a cathartic experience.

Then, when I sat down with this abundance of prose, at a point where I felt comfortable, thinking, well it's probably time to do something with this writing, well of course we're going to turn it into a collection of poetry, it was stubborn, and it was obsolete, and it refused to turn into poems. Anytime I tried to transfer one of the prose documents into a piece of poem, it just didn't work; it downright, obdurately refused, and the poetic version of it seemed like it was lacking something of the authenticity of the prose version of it. So, I just had to sit down and accept that I had written a book of prose.

Then the daunting task began of trying to build it into an actual book with a narration because it wasn’t written that way. Poems are these stolen moments of time, they can jump around timelines, they don't have to make sense in terms of what came before or after them. I mean you can sequence them by throwing them all up in the air and then just put them in that order; all of a sudden, I had this responsibility to the reader to present this as something which was pleasurable to read. There are versions of the book that probably could have been a very uncomfortable and unenjoyable read because of how fast they darted around, because of my nonchalant-ness to any sort of overarching narratorial arc that came with them being the dress rehearsal, carrying the ambition to be turned into poems. So, the process of turning it into a book was much longer than writing it because I had to find a collective synergy, which I found really difficult to do. I didn't want to be as forensic as doing a straight chronology, I wanted to jump around a little bit, as it had been written. So, I guess the more laconic answer is that it’s a prose book entirely by accident on account of it refusing to be turned into a poetry book.

You mentioned something that I was hoping to ask you about - the idea of catharsis. I sometimes get the sense that a lot of people rail against this idea of catharsis, claiming that the writing of a traumatic experience can almost feel like re-living the trauma. So, I just wanted to ask you what you thought about that? It seems as though you're more on the side of writing being a means of solace and catharsis…

Absolutely. Writing this book entirely cauterised the wound. I was able to immerse myself in joyous moments by visiting them, steeping in them, with a hyper emotionality and a real dedication to reinvesting in that period of time, closing my eyes, trying to engulf myself in the moment of the memory to an extent that it almost enabled me to time travel. I didn't jump straight into reading grief literature or watching grief films, I did the opposite. I was watching fantasy films and magical realism and feel-good movies because that was exactly where I was in terms of exploring these friendships. I wasn't ready to tackle head-on the ferocity of the grieving process, it seemed like too much for me at this point of time, especially in this period of isolation. I knew that I could get into trouble with it, it could take me off to newer, darker places, and I'm no stranger to a forlorn bender, which I wanted to avoid at all costs because it was disingenuous to the ceremony or celebration of the memories I was exploring. So, it was entirely that for me, it was a crutch that got me through this period of time. 

By writing it down, I had to try and one, articulate and then hone and understand and analyse how I felt in that moment. But second to that, I had to try and write it, or present it, in a manner which was open, and allowed a reader to project their own life into it, so that the book had some sort of collective currency of conversation and thus had value as a book. If somebody read the book and weren’t reminded of one of their own friends or didn't leave the book finding incarnations of their versions of themselves within that point in time, then the book had failed. It wasn't just supposed to be a standoff diary-documentary of my friendships, it was supposed to be a call to action to celebrate friendships through giving all of these relationships I've had away.

So it was a very joyous experience, in fact, it was my main source of companionship and access to happiness throughout this period of time, because I was able to sit and spend time with the person I missed most in the world; it was as close to them being around as I was able to capture and I could continue talking to them until I was ready to realise that temporally, I couldn’t do that anymore. So yeah, I'm all for the cathartic. I wear it like a cape.

I wanted to pick up on the idea that Boy Friends is universal. I think sometimes people think of memoir as being a slightly distanced account of the details of somebody else’s life. But as you mentioned, you don't really get that with this book and you don't even – I don't know if this is wrong to say – get a sense of the details about Scott’s personality or his day-to-day life, it's very much about the feelings of the friendship. 

Absolutely. I mean, I recoil from the word memoir. Construed more widely it's brilliant, but I guess a lot of laymen, a lot of friends and family that I spoke to about memoir say, ‘what’s so important about your life? Elton John can write a memoir, but you're not ready to write a memoir!’. It's about getting away from the notion that it's somebody showcasing what an extraordinary life they've lived, and of course, the smaller answer is, all our lives are extraordinary in their uniqueness. But really, I've embraced the genre of a love letter to friendship. It is about reflecting on all these friendships, and I hope it is an active book. It was very much a call to action to reflect on your own friendships, an invitation to do so.

Sometimes we're not invited to celebrate our friends as regularly as we are our romantic partners, or children, or any of our own accomplishments, it's so rare to be invited and given the emotional permission to celebrate our friends, to think about how they’ve punctuated our lives because there’s so much push towards the romantic relationship, the family relationship, the tying down, the ceremony , the production of children, that friendships almost, in the biological sense, then becomes irrelevant to these things. But they’re such a buoy; they’re such a crutch for our lives. You know if romance breaks down, it's our friends’ arms we will fall into; sometimes our friends become a romance because it's the friendship that made the connection. So, I think memoir can be intimidating, I think ‘books of reflection’ would be a much nicer overarching theme for the genre. I'm definitely trying to carve this into the friendship literature which is so few and far between that it couldn't even really necessarily have its own bookcase in a bookstore.

Definitely. And maybe that is even more true for men? Female friendships are much more commonly examined in literature and culture than male friendships, I think. Even your title, Boy Friends, can bewilder some people because we rarely see that term used.

Of course, we're so far behind female friendship in literature, in movies, in life, in emotionality, in emotional permission and vulnerabilities. The power of female friendship is understood. Even if you go back to programmes like Sex in the City, there are so many programmes about groups of female friends. And the notion you used there - the trope girlfriend - people know, okay this isn't just a friend, it's someone who has your back, it carries a currency to it, it has a power, it's almost like your cabal, you’ve found your people. Even in Word processing, when you put the words ‘girl’ and ‘friend’ together, it recognises those two words separately as carrying another meaning. ‘Boy friend’ comes up as a grammatical error – it is not seen as a notion to have male friendship in that way.

We absolutely were exploring that with the title; we decided not to do a subtitle to offer further explanation because we knew how many questions Boy Friends was asking of someone: is this queer literature? Is this sexually provocative literature? Are these romance stories? What is this? It can't just be about friendship, or it would be called A Testimony to My Friends. Why have they called it Boy Friends? And then there were these two same words that separately are very easy to translate but, by putting them together, we tried to translate something which carves out that space for male friendship. I guess that's what the title was trying to do - carve out a little space for male friendship literature.

And we’re not going to give this book a subtitle that makes it easier for you to carry on a bus or train. We wanted it to be provocative. It shouldn't be provocative and that's why it is provocative. I like the cover of the guys embracing and of course, I didn't make it any easier by asking for a sparkly foil on the letters. I'm aware that lots of my own friends would be uncomfortable reading this book on a bus or train; they wouldn't like the presumption that people would make on account of them reading this sort of pink and purple, sparkly book called Boy Friends. I hope that at the opposite end of that, there were people who, by reading out in public for the first time, were making a testament to it.

At a time coming out of lockdown, at which point there was a sort of a loneliness epidemic between males in particular, because so many people were uncomfortable calling up friends for the first time when there was no access to pubs or sports grounds or communal activities. So many guys would shy away from saying, ‘look do you want to go for a walk in the park? Do you want to go for a walk along the beach? I know we can’t go to a pub or restaurant, but actually, can we just chat on the phone for a couple of hours? I’ve not had any outlet for all of these things coming out, spilling out of me, I've kept them all caged up’. So, it was this really difficult moment for male friendships. To have the book coming out at a time that males were re-emerging, at a time where they'd either stomached a lot of stuff and locked it up, or they’d let it out to friends for the first time, that they'd not been able to be part of that vital conversation, this invitation of a book at that same time was such a privilege.

I've never thought about it like that, but I don't think female friendships would ever shy away from that connection – I guess this is just to show that we are a little bit further ahead in whatever race this is. I think, in general, it's very easy for a girl to say to another female close friend, ‘let’s go for a walk, let’s have a chat’. Whereas I guess, as you’re saying, there is more of a need for a crutch between men, or more of a reason and an activity behind it – ‘we're going to go and do this and therefore we can do it together as friends.’ 

Michael and I at Summerhall, Edinburgh

You’re going away fishing. Sure, you’ll talk about your emotions there, but you’ve got this passport into another activity, you've almost got a safeguard, or qualification, or a banner in which to spill your emotions out of you. I guess I always grew up envious, I’ve got one big sister and I was always closer to my mum, and they had a lot of friends and a real physical vocabulary with their friendships as well - they were linking arms, they were hugging more, if they had sleepovers, they were underneath the covers, spilling secrets. I was bred on a much more stoic male friendship, and I guess exceeded the boundaries of that quite a lot, in a way that scared other kids off, or pushed them towards me too quickly at the same time. So, I had always been looking on to what I thought was the superior form of friendship from the rafters, and I guess that was just the environment I grew up in in Portobello at that time, with those types of males around me. I have spent my whole life trying to break out of that mould and to embrace that.

It’s definitely a cultural thing as well, I’m half Cypriot and the culture is definitely very different. There’s more of a tactile language across both genders.

Hollie McNish is a character in the book, and she writes a lot about that - she's got a poem called ‘Touch’ which is all about the survey of how often people from different countries touch each other. Up at the top was maybe Argentina, and obviously a lot of the other European countries that have a kissing ceremony ingrained into their culture were all very high on it, and the US was pretty low down, and the UK was internationally bottom with a minus figure in how often we touch each other an hour, just in general conversation. The UK was the weakest link internationally, culturally.

And then you become adults who don't know how to consensually touch each other. Learning this physical vocabulary of hugging and holding hands and knowing how to embrace someone is the sort of romantic utensils that you will then take forward when you want to build a carnal relationship with someone, you will have got comfortable with all of that. We don't have that from a friendship perspective, and it really weakens people jumping into romantic relationships for the first time and just not knowing what to do. And then you get these guys going straight into uncomfortable penetrative sex because clearly, they know nothing about sensuality. That’s an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. I think that sort of emotional vocabulary that comes with female friendships is so powerful, and the more it can seep into male friendships, the more beneficial it will be.

Do you think it will? Are you optimistic about that?

I think it's no coincidence that most people writing about masculinity are those that have felt excluded from it, due to either their sexual orientation or different qualifications. But I think we've got so many brilliant writers of our time, especially poets - Ocean Vuong, Andrew Macmillan - people that are really touching upon the sensuality of the male experience and promoting it. Even as sexually aware individuals like Harry Styles come into popular culture as well, I think there is a new type of masculinity which is embraced and has evolved. We’ve still obviously got so far to go, but compared to ten years ago, it's almost revolutionary. So, a long way to go, but I’m optimistic.

At the heart of the book is Scott and his death and I wanted to talk to you about the fact that the word death isn’t used very much, I was wondering if that was something that you chose to do?

I think there are two reasons for this: one, it would have been deliberate because it was a very painful memory to focus on and two, to write the history of our friendship, Scott dying and Scott leaving this world, is ten seconds of years of friendship full of memories. Losing him, in the sort of immediate sense, is a number of days for me, dealing with the finality of that. Whereas to actually do our friendship justice, to write the timeline of it, that's five or six year’s worth of brilliant meals, and safari trips, and debauched gigs, and staring up at the stars, and all of these different things. So, to write about his dying too much would be to discredit all of the beautiful living he did, and we did together. In terms of even just looking at the chronological abundance of memories I've got, 99% of those are while he was here and while I was experiencing them.

Of course, I deal with his death, but I leave the entry rightly short by telling the world how much he meant to me. I don’t really need to over-egg the death, or the significance of it, because I think by showing how much you love someone people can understand how much you miss someone. And grief is this universal currency as well – it’s unusual that we’re so trepidatious about bringing it up when there's probably not someone in the room that’s not connected to it. We often have these conversations just when they’re absolutely necessary and can’t be avoided, but to have these conversations beforehand, or to talk about the fact that we're missing someone because we've got all this love to give them and we don't know where to place it anymore, it's almost a rewiring of our currencies. Grieving is just a part of the loving process, and we swallow it up that way. So, the death stuff is minimal because his untimely death is minimal in terms of my archive of memories of him, so it is both deliberate but also reflective.

So, although there have been a few reviews and comments that paint Boy Friends as a ‘grief book’, it definitely feels as though you view it much more as a friendship book?

Yes, I read it as a friendship book, and I definitely didn't want it to be described as a grief book even though there's grief in the squat and belly of it all. But you know, most of the time I'm talking about Scott, it’s silly, it's smutty, it's sexy, wonderful, life-altering moments. It’s not about how he left but how he lived. And the fact that that triggered me to explore this whole galaxy of other gorgeous friendships that circled around it, just ended up becoming one more thing I was thankful of, setting me off on that scavenge.

We in no way wanted grief to be in the title of the book or any notion of it, or to have it put in grieving literature because it was grief literature insomuch as grief is one of the elements of loving someone, of accepting that they are not there. And all of the quotes that came back were things such as, ‘uncommonly romantic’, ‘laugh out loud funny’, ‘love letter to friendship’; the quotes didn't come back focusing on the grief. For a book that has an abundant and well-known death in the belly of it, the fact that nobody hooked too tenderly to the grieving prospect or wanted to call it grief literature was a real blessing because I think if anything, it's a song for survival in the face of adversity.

And my last question is completely off-piste, but it’s something we ask everyone we talk to. Do you judge a book by its cover? 

Absolutely, yeah, because of my own experience. Basically, the guy that did the cover is called John Grey - he did all of the Sally Rooney books, all the Zadie Smith ones; he's this beautiful cover designer. But the cover is almost a testament to friendship in itself - the book was out for auction, and I guess somebody at a publishing house had shown John the book to see if he’d be interested in it, or connected with it, and he broke protocol entirely and just slipped into my DMs and said, ‘look, regardless of where that book goes, I'd love to do it’.

He told me that he had just lost his best friend and mentor - someone called John Hamilton who was art director at Penguin for years and years, and a Glaswegian guy that went to Glasgow School of Art. I’d just lost Scott who also went to Glasgow School of Art, and who was also an illustrator, and it seemed the two of them had a lot in common. Then we ended up getting together, he said: ‘More than doing your cover, I would like to get together and have a drink and talk about friends’. So, we did that, and I guess it gave us both the opportunity to toast to the empty seats at the table, and out of some of the gaps that their friendships left in our life. We forged this new friendship through initially just talking about our friends, and then getting to know each other.

So, when Faber said, ‘can you do us a mood board for the cover?’, I wrote them a short essay about this newfound friendship that I’d forged with John Grey and how meeting and getting together and our unification of friendship was like completing a circle that our two friends had started drawing for us. They just said, ‘of course’. And plus, I knew he did Sally Rooney, and you know, they don't give the Sally Rooney covers to someone they don’t value.

Equally, I love the Fitzcarraldo colours, the two-tone colours, and the same with the favourite poetry ones. So, I love the complexities of covers, I love the deliberate simplicity of them, the colour pantones. I think there's so many dextrous cover designers in the world now, and the fact that they read the book and really engage with it in order to encapsulate that in imagery, especially when the writing’s very image focused, is a beautiful thing. So, I don't judge the book entirely on its cover, but I think it’s a good starting point. Especially if you’ve got sparkly foil on the front.