Reflecting on Home

I absolutely loved our most recent workshop with Morna Young. Morna was so lovely and articulate and joyful, and I felt really lucky to be able to be in her (virtual!) company for a little while. I’ve also reflected on the contents of the workshop and the things we have discussed frequently since. 

The focus of the workshop was on language, which is something that has always been completely fascinating to me. We talked about how people speak; what words we use and why, and how we say these words and why. We discussed different elements of speech and language, such as vocal patterns, hesitations, repetitions and unique habits that every single person has when they talk. Morna played extracts of interviews she had done for her play Lost At Sea with members of the fishing community in the North East of Scotland. Despite being from the same place every person being interviewed had a completely distinct way of talking - there were variations in the dialect and accent, different vocabularies and speech patterns. Some of the interviewees spoke a lot whilst some used less words. This attention to language and speech habits is something I’d love to take forwards with me into whatever I write next. I felt really inspired by Morna’s research and her interview process generally, and would be really interested in doing something similar one day. I’d love to interview people from my home town and region, and focus not only on what they say but how they say it. 

We also talked about the importance of our own voices as writers. Morna writes in Scots, which is something I’ve never done within my own writing, and I realised that this is because I felt quite conflicted about my right to. I remember reciting Scots poems in primary school and working on Burns in English lessons in secondary school, but asides from that my connection to the language have felt a little tenuous. Despite having lots of family members who speak in Scots, I don’t in my daily life (or at least I thought I didn’t until Morna’s workshop) and so I questioned whether using Scots in my writing would be authentic. I don’t have a particularly strong Scottish accent either which is something else that I think fed into my hesitation to embrace using Scots. However, I realised as the workshop went on that I had much more of a connection to the language than I thought. We chatted a lot about words that we felt were unique in our own families or hometowns, which in turn turned into a discussion about Scots. I realised that I not only understood the majority of these words but used them myself as well. I came away feeling so excited to experiment more with language in the future and also with the increased confidence to do so.

This connection to home and language that the workshop highlighted feels particularly poignant for me right now, as I get ready to move to London for the first time. I’m moving in mid-August for a new job at the National Theatre and really can’t wait to start what feels like an exciting new chapter in life, but there’s also mixed feelings of nervousness and sadness at leaving the country and people I love. Though it’s comforting to think that through experimenting with language I can bring some Scotland with me to London in my future writing.

Eilidh Nurse

Eilidh is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2020-2021