Featured Writer

Marion Montgomery

I joined Ayr Writers’ Club in September 1974, arriving at 24 Wellington Square to be greeted and made welcome by the late, great Dorothy Dunbar. I had written light verse and sketches throughout my school and early teaching days but never sent anything away. I did not even have a typewriter, and was mystified by phrases like ‘double spacing’, but the Club soon enlightened me. Elsie Miller and Ishbel Robertson encouraged me to send a poem about the Irish troubles to Life and Work. It was not accepted but I had a totally unexpected handwritten reply from then editor, Bob Kernohan. Howard Sergeant of Outposts – recommended by Dorothy – also wrote encouraging me to send more and that was me hooked
Not that writing poetry was my main intention in joining the Club. I hoped to be a short story writer – an ambition I had harboured since childhood when reading short stories. which I can still remember in John o’ London’s Weekly.
But I entered every Club competition, joined Dorothy’s Writing for Pleasure and Profit class and finally got into paid print as the result of a Club Night in which we were asked to write about a childhood experience that had taught us a lesson for adulthood. I refused to read out my effort after Dorrith Sim had read her account of leaving her parents behind in Nazi Germany at the age of seven – a piece which eventually became A Handkerchief in my Pocket. However, I did complete my less traumatic wartime travelogue and send it to the SAW weekend at Pitlochry where the then Scots Magazine editor, Maurice Fleming, pointed out the best parts. I took his advice, lengthened and strengthened those passages, and was delighted when he accepted the revised version.
That single Club Night produced at least two publications. In fact, competitions within the Club or at SAW weekends have often helped me into print, not always where I would have expected pieces to appear. A ‘radio talk’ about dream kitchens ended up on The (Glasgow) Herald’s Woman’s Page, a short story eventually appeared, a year after being accepted by one IPC magazine, in another’s Summer Special.
Meantime, I was flattered to be asked to become a replacement tentacle of Octopus, the Club’s earlier performance poetry group, and to have three poems included in their second anthology. A humorous poem from that was broadcast on Radio Scotland, but I was even more thrilled when a serious poem which won a Club competition, was accepted for the very first New Writing Scotland.
I also had some success in drama competitions in the Club or at SAW. One, for the first act of a pantomime, became a full length performance with a cast of seventy between the ages of three and eighty in the (then) Laigh Kirk, Kilmarnock. It was a great thrill to see it on stage and have it attended by many members of the Club responsible for its creation.
Ayr Writer’s Club has given me much support and encouragement plus friendship and pleasure over three decades. Long may it continue to foster aspiring writers.