THIS WEEK’S MUSE
IAN MCMILLAN
“Mine is a small life that has happened in a big century.”
Ian McMillan is an English poet and playwright. He lives in Darfield, a small town in the north of England, in a house just a few yards from where he was born in 1956.
When first reading McMillan’s work, you might be forgiven for seeing him as having a somewhat narrow viewpoint. He seems only to write about his town and the few streets close to his home. He tells stories of home and family, of the real people around him, and what they might be doing ‘today.’ But while he very deliberately puts those streets and the life they contain center-stage, dig a little deeper and you discover his poetry weaves a much wider territory. “It’s so interesting to be part of a longstanding community,” he explains. “You see the universal in the local, in the few tight streets you live in. I can do my job from anywhere, but it’s more than that. If I moved away, I’d move from the wellspring of my inspiration.”
McMillan’s town grew up around a coal mining industry that served and nurtured the region for decades. That industry is now long gone and as a result several generations later his community is still trying to recover, seeking a new identity. There is a tendency, he posits, for his town—any town—to yearn for the ‘good old days’. McMillan is looking for the opposite – he wants to know how the community looks to the future. Remaining still and perceiving the changes as they happen around him is his inspiration.
This ‘stillness’ is his runway—his take-off point—to allow him to write from the local to the universal. Post-industrial towns looking for a new identity can be found all over the world. What he writes about Darfield can relate to thousands of other communities, all searching for something new. All kinds of changes that are happening all over the world are happening in microcosm in his town. By writing about his community, he is also writing about a wider world.
He cites two reasons for becoming a writer. First, because his parents met and fell in love through words. Introduced as pen-pals, they wrote to each other for several years before finally meeting to marry. Second, his school had an unusual remit for the time – placing a strong emphasis on children’s creativity within the curriculum. Thanks to his school’s novel approach to learning, he was encouraged to write and create from the start.
This encouragement was evident almost immediately for McMillan. When on holiday aged 11, and after learning about opera at school, he tried to write a libretto – which he enthusiastically named ‘The Diamond Studded Triceratops.’ It remains—so unfinished but looking back he feels it marked a time when he realized anything was possible; a philosophy he has adhered to throughout his career. As an artist “You always say ‘Yes,'” he said, “because it leads to amazing things!”
HAPPENING
Tuesday, October 11, from 10am–3pm
COLD WAX PAINTING WORKSHOP
With Elaine Tata
Explore the magic of painting in oil and cold wax medium.
$100 – Member, $115 – Non-Member