Heather Parry on the Spectacle of Everything
The writer discusses her work, Scottish literature, working freelance, Scorsese's King of Comedy and the sometimes slow process of change.
A few weeks ago I spoke to Heather Parry, fiction writer and editor, about her work and some of her excellent projects. Among them is Extra Teeth, one of my favourite publications in Scotland, and the essential Illustrated Freelancer’s Guide. At the very end of this chat I have included an update with Heather’s reaction to the Scottish Government’s £6.6m cut to Creative Scotland.
Before we get into it, I wanted to plug some writing I’ve done recently. It’s a profile of Maysles Documentary Centre, a community cinema based in Harlem, New York City. They do some amazing work teaching young people to observe and investigate their, highly policed, neighbourhood. The piece was published by Boom Saloon and you can read it here.
You recently wrote about cooking: “making a meal for another person, and expecting nothing back, is one of the most radical things you can do—both for others, and for yourself”. Is it fair to say that there’s a recurring ‘collectivism’ theme in your work?
That’s so nice to hear. Yes. In fact, I wrote an essay a few years ago for Counterpoint Magazine which was about what we can learn from mushrooms - these collectivist entities, huge networks underneath the ground. I really believe in looking after other people. I like to look around and think ‘what can I do in this wider network of people’? That’s how the Freelancer’s Guide came about. Maria Stoian (illustrator) and I were freaking out as freelancers and didn’t know what we were doing. So, we decided to get this helpful information out there for free. There are things we all need and if we worked a little bit differently we could make sure we all got that. I’m a socialist, I don’t think that’s hidden in my work.
In your book Orpheus Builds a Girl, we see the exact inverse of that - someone whose personal needs seem to take priority over everyone else. It’s all about consumption and obsession. I recently spoke to Gemma Flynn about the nature of media nowadays and how it seems like we keep cannibalising people’s lives for content and entertainment. Does that resonate with you?
Consuming and being consumed pop up a lot in my work. I’ve been feeling so exhausted about social media… you look at Twitter and it’s just a reaction machine. I keep looking at it and thinking: why am I expected to consume all this information about people I don’t know? Why do I feel the need to consume it? We’re obsessed with what we are consuming and have to put that out to the world and then the content we create feeds these consumption machines - to the benefit of the rich white men who have always held the power.
Right. Being part of that machine kinda skews our perception of things like justice, connection, privacy…
Everything becomes a spectacle. Activism becomes a spectacle. But then what happens with the hard work of getting people in a room in order to do something for the benefit of someone who’s not there? I work for a trade union, my day job is about bringing people together. But there’s nothing spectacular about that.
You’re the co-founder and editorial director of Extra Teeth, a publication I just love. Extra Teeth’s mission statement mentions the flourishing writing scene in Scotland. Is the writing scene in Scotland still flourishing?
Oh my god, yes. There’s a flourishing writing scene just in my neighbourhood in Glasgow! There’s so much breadth and diversity of work. We’ve got people like Martin MacInnes in the Booker longlist. You’ve got people like Kirsty Logan. Like Ian Rankin - huge writers doing genre. Even people like Jenny Colgan, that’s not my genre but she sells millions of books. With the magazine we wanted to make a place for the weird stuff to get out there, beyond Scotland: the speculative fiction, the weird formatting… One of my proudest things is that lots of agents and publishers subscribe to the magazine. So, people have published with us and gone on to get good book deals and representation.
What makes a good nonfiction piece for Extra Teeth?
We’ve had a bit of everything. Dave Coates' essay in the first issue was about poetry and video games. We’ve had essays on identity and food, like Katie Goh’s essay on oranges. So, we love great writing and we are interested in new angles, people who are not afraid to play with form. It has to be bold, whatever that means to you.
This is not much of a question but I just wanted to be in awe of Katie Goh’s writing a bit…
Katie will go stratospheric and the rest of us will just hang on to her.
Agreed. I was surprised to see you recommending The Gulf War Did Not Take Place on your website. I found that book fascinating and complicated.
It’s very challenging. He doesn’t go out of his way to make it accessible. It’s very confronting. I’m a big believer that you don’t have to agree with every point, like that J. G. Ballard quote that you have to provoke the reader. By provoke I don’t mean like Jordan Peterson where you just say things that are not based in reality. I like to be provoked into a different way of viewing the world that seems rooted in a good base theory. There’s an interview I always think about between Foucault and Chomsky. It’s so funny because they don’t communicate at all. They’re literally and conceptually speaking in different languages - they’re not accessing each other. So, there’s a limit to highfalutin language.
We’re chatting the week before you introduce Scorsese’s King of Comedy (1982) at Glasgow Film Theatre. That might be my favourite Scorsese film. What do you like about it?
Sandra Bernhard steals that movie. You wanna talk about an unhinged female character? No one did it like she did in this film. It was her first movie as well. But in general the movie seems way ahead of its time in the way it talks about celebrity. The desperation behind the main character… he’s insufferable but you kind of have a little respect for the hussle? There’s a patheticness to it too. It’s a very complex character, which I love. You cannot predict what’s gonna happen scene to scene.
I always ask my interviewees: how do things change for the better?
That’s a big question. There are many ways… what I do for work requires a lot of slow change. I have to be so patient and diplomatic and those are not things that come naturally to me. But at the same time you have these explosive moments. We don’t always know when things will blow… I keep expecting it to happen in this country but we just don’t know.
If I died and left this newsletter to you in my inheritance, who would you interview next?
Alan Moore. I love people whose creative endeavour is tied to their politics while also being really entertaining and genre defining.
I love him. He had this incredible response to Frank Miller which I’d recommend. What’s been inspiring you lately?
I have found a lot of inspiration in the trade union movement currently happening. I went to the STUC conference in Dundee. It was incredible. The consistency, the project, the message are all great.
[After we had this conversation the Scottish Government reimposed the £6.6m cut to Creative Scotland, so I asked Heather to comment. She has also written about the topic on her Substack]
I think that many people who don't work in the arts will read about a 10% cut and think that's actually not that much. The context that these cuts are occurring in is very important: most Regularly Funded Organisations, which are the ones that rely on Creative Scotland funding, have been on standstill budgets for at least five years, some more. This amounts to a 25% real terms cut, meaning that these organisations are having to face skyrocketing utility bills, a cost of living crisis, the various issues around covid with 25% less money to achieve anything—while also trying to improve access, install ventilation for covid safety, programme widely and diversely, install equipment for hybridity and pay their artists and staff something like a living wage. Every organisation is close to breaking point, and now we hear that if the £6.6 cut remains into the next budget year, up to 50% of RFOs will not receive funding, and 2000 jobs and 26,000 paid opportunities for artists will be lost. We are about to see a widespread and serious collapse of Scotland's cultural institutions, both big and small. Not just the museums and cinemas but the local festivals, the performances for people with dementia or additional needs, the indie presses and magazines, the projects supporting queer artists and artists of colour. And on top of this, the bureaucratic nightmare of actually trying to get funding even before all this has left many people wildly burnt out. There is nothing left for anyone to give.
What's doubly frustrating is that the Scottish Government this year unveiled their Fair Work Framework, which is supposed to make Scotland a Fair Work Nation by 2025. The tenets of this framework include the payment of the real living wage, and supposedly organisations that aren't paying a living wage will not receive government funding (though neither the government nor Creative Scotland say it's their remit to police this, so it seems incredibly toothless). But the government hasn't provided adequate funding uplifts to support organisations to pay the real living wage, and wage suppression in the creative industries has been endemic, so a serious chunk of additional funding would be needed. Cutting the culture budget by 10% rather than increasing it means it is now all but impossible for organisations to pay artists and workers the real living wage without a vast and widespread diminishment of their output. It is wildly hypocritical for the government to put these demands in place without funding them.
In terms of its impact—well, this will be a decimation of the arts. Already major institutions like the Filmhouse are collapsing, and our national galleries are having to shut their doors over winter because they can't afford the utility costs. Currently a group of former workers are crowdfunding to save the Filmhouse, but this is a difficult task when there is less money in people's pockets—and it is ridiculous that an organisation that houses the Edinburgh International Film Festival, one of the many jewels in Scotland's festival crown, should have to be saved in this way. The long term impact is that Scottish arts will become white, straighter, more middle class, more conservative; with close to 30,000 opportunities lost in a landscape where payment for the arts is already dire, and the travel options expensive and unreliable, and the rents in the central belt out of control, what will happen is that the arts will become the reserve of the already wealthy. The underrepresented communities will become more invisible, the access to the arts—especially in rural or island communities—will be enormously restricted.
The Creative Scotland annual grant in aid from the government is £63 million; the creative industries in Scotland generate 5 billion for the economy. The return on investment for arts spending is incredible, and that's before we even begin to talk about mental health, community and other benefits. If the government doesn't reverse these cuts, the quality of life in Scotland will fall, and the arts will become closed off to all but the wealthiest. With how they've behaved on this issue, the government has shown that for all their posturing, they actually don't give a damn about the arts, or people's access to it. And I, and many other people, won't forget that.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.