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Pause for Applause!
"Willy Maley is an ebullient, schtreet-schmart, Derrida-reading
facilitator of so much modern Scottish literature, as head of creative
writing at Glasgow University. He's also a pal I don't make enough
of (New Year resolution No. 303). But after denying himself the
right for years, he's now writing himself, and the results are as
impressive as I would have expected. (BTW, his Glaswegian dad fought
in the Spanish Civil War as an anti-Fascist communist, so you can
imagine that in the West of Scotland, Maley can dine out on that
forever)." "Trickster,
enthusiast, wily wordsmith, potent punner, speed-talker, scholar,
encyclopaedist (with much between the lugs), Maley is the warm-hearted
dynamo that nestles at the centre of so much that is good about
Scotland and its writing. No-one can match him for sheer energy
and generosity of spirit, for his wild spinning of first class ideas,
for the recognition, joy and encouragement he brings to new work
and new writing. If he didn't exist it would be necessary to invent
him, though how one would go about getting the recipe is anyone's
guess. Most of all, it's the democratic spirit he brings to art
and to life which is so necessary and meaningful. If he was a sign
in Scottish semiotics he would read: THE FUTURE IS NOW!"
"Willy Maley is Glasgow University's finest literary cheerleader,
a great supporter of writers at all stages of development, and was
key in encouraging me long before I showed any real promise. Without
Willy, me and others like me may never have become writers at all.
But as well as being a fantastic talent-spotter and teacher he is
also the University's High Master of Bad Puns, something I thoroughly
disapprove of!" "I think of Willy as the reader par excellence. He's read all my books in their various draft stages, and his observations have always been trenchant, but it's more than that; I don't know anyone else so well and widely read. Willy has a kind of Rolodex brain: pick a subject and he'll flick through his internal card index and name the key works to consult. Five minutes with Willy, and your research horizons have already expanded. My prediction: come the middle of the century, he'll be the linking element in any number of literary biographies." Rachel Seiffert - Author of The Dark Room "When
I first met Willy Maley, I suspected there were a few screws missing.
Now I KNOW the missing screw toll to be very high indeed. But what a charming man, despite his many quirks. I will never forget the first day of the MPhil in Creative Writing - meeting the tutors and students. That was when I had my first encounter with Greatness. Then I met Willy Maley! boom boom! and was lucky enough to secure his services as my tutor. When I first went to University, decades ago- I was in a bit of a state, drunk morning noon and night. When I sat my final English exam, my tutor hissed: "I didn't know you were doing English."Thirty years later, I, literally, could not wait to get to my tutorials with Prof Maley. I always arrived exactly one hour before, sat in the café beneath his old room and prepared myself. OK, I admit, I have always liked the younger man, as Willy was back then, in 2005, nothing but a black-bearded manboy with a gold-hoop earring. So much can change in the space of three short years. No matter. He helped me begin to believe in myself; in the writing I was so desperate to do. He listened, he encouraged, he never talked down to me. Here was an academic who spoke my language. No matter how unpleasant the ramblings of my painful past, Willy forced me to jot them all down in book form. I never expected to have (my book) Mother's Ruin published. Nor did I expect my life to turn out as happily as it seems to be doing at the moment. Professor Maley had more to do with all of this than he will ever really know. Nicola Barry, author of Mothers Ruin |
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