Jackie Macadam uncovers the influences of the poet and author Kenneth Steven.

PROFILE

We drove through grey silence;

The skies drifting with snow

In a winter that would not end.

At the church I made promises

In a language I did not know –

And a German bell rang out,

Strange in the muffled day.

And then you ran to me, Willow,

And you carried the sun in your running;

You poured into laughter and ran

As though all the war was over.

And inside a shell broke

That Easter Sunday morning;

A shell like a bird’s egg

Flooded over with warm light.

The long folly of words,

The gunneries of rage,

The anger of small conflicts –

Useless, forgotten, gone.

The land left open

For the love of sunlight –

The beginning of another spring.

– ‘Christening’ by Kenneth Steven

“I HAVE known great blessing in my life over the last few years, and great healing. For that I can never be thankful enough. I feel that my trust in God has strengthened, not waned. But I remember what a lecturer in divinity said in quoting St Paul, that he – Paul – would not have said that he was a Christian. He would have said that he was becoming a Christian, and I think it is a most powerful way of expressing it.”

Kenneth Steven is a weel-kent name to readers both of this magazine and also to people who love prose and poetry with a natural spirituality to it. Kenneth’s inspiration is drawn from nature – the nature he sees around him in his Argyll home, and the nature that is an integral part of him and the place his heart belongs to, Iona.

“I think my writing begins and ends with what I like to term wildscape. I was privileged in growing up first and foremost in Highland Perthshire: I had parents who knew the great outdoors, who took me to visit Hebridean islands and croft houses in the Highlands. I walked over Rannoch Moor and I was taken to see eagles and otters. And I had the freedom to explore: that was also an escape from the school world. In Highland Perthshire, and in the Hebrides when we stayed in a cottage on an island for however many days, I could be free range. It was an utterly safe world: the only dangers were barbed wire and angry farmers! I developed a passion for wild places, and for wild creatures. It was what doubtless spawned my love for conservation, and that tied in with the deepest roots of my faith. This was a God-created world; it was a wonderful and extraordinary beautiful world.

“I wanted to describe it with my pen: that was at the heart of what I yearned to do,” he says.

Kenneth was born into the Church of Scotland.

“In many ways it was a pretty traditional upbringing,” he tells us. “My parents were keen Christians and involved in running housegroups and were generally very involved in church activities. They were also representatives for Tearfund, so they tried to live the life as well.

“When I was four years old, my half-sister, Helen, went to Vietnam as a peace worker. It was during the Vietnam War, and her time there changed her forever.

“Her experiences challenged us all,” he says.

“When she returned, to Scotland, she was utterly committed to non-violence and the peace movement, and in time that led her to becoming Justice and Peace Worker for the Iona Community. It broadened our Christian view greatly from more narrow evangelical thinking. It challenged all our thinking, and certainly mine as I grew into adolescence.”

“Helen and her partner Ellen were Quakers, and they believed in non-violent direct action. That meant blockades at Faslane, and involvement in the Greenham Common protests at the time the Cruise missiles were being stationed there. It was particularly challenging to my father who had been a Commando in the war: what exactly did turning the other cheek mean? Where did we draw the boundaries as Christians? Did protesting ultimately mean going to prison if that was necessary? Because for both Helen and Ellen it was necessary: there was no easy escape from arrest through paying fines. Certainly we all changed; there’s no doubt about that.

Kenneth Steven and his daughter Willow

I think my writing begins and ends with what I like to term wildscape. I was privileged in growing up first and foremost in Highland Perthshire… It was what doubtless spawned my love for conservation, and that tied in with the deepest roots of my faith. This was a God-created world; it was a wonderful and extraordinary beautiful world.

Our horizons as Christians were greatly widened. But perhaps also we learned in the end that as Christians we are called to different causes: it’s too easy to condemn others for what we think they should be doing. We’re given different ploughs and different fields according to our particular gifts and strengths and life stories.”

Iona began to play a larger part in his life, driven by the involvement of his sister. More and more he found a sense of belonging there, of being at peace on the island’s white sands and windswept spaces, where he could access a real sense of solitude.

“Iona is my spiritual home: it has been since earliest childhood. It was where my mother had found faith, and once she married my father and I was born she wanted to share this place with the family.

“I learned to walk on one of the beautiful, sandy Iona beaches.

“From earliest childhood days I had a sense of the island’s significance. In adulthood it has become the place where I leave the baggage behind: I return to the deepest sense of myself. It’s the place where I find God most and always have done. Again and again when I return I find that poems happen, are born. I think that that deepest sense of God and that deepest sense of creativity become one there. I can’t explain it more usefully than that. But it’s of fundamental importance. And through the years I’ve come to learn more about Celtic Christianity, piece by slow piece. I’m still very much learning, but I find myself most fully there.

“I don’t want to over-emphasise my involvement with the Iona Community, but during the years that Helen was Justice and Peace worker for the Community I would visit the island from time to time.

“I was very much the wee young brother, and I was very happy for it to be that way. But I think that the core values of the Iona Community; what I would term their sense of global morality, began to become more and more important to me – began to really resonate with something deep within me.

“I was becoming increasingly frustrated with a church that didn’t seem to bother much about the environment, about global justice. I felt that, through my reading of the New Testament, these things had to form an integral part of our thinking and our response as Christians. They couldn’t just be after-thoughts, and certainly they were to be ignored at our peril.”

Kenneth’s love of writing has its roots in his childhood.

“I had writing parents, but they were working in a very different way. My father was a journalistic writer; my mother a social historian and a nutritionist. I was scribbling from the age of 12: it was mainly stories, certainly all from the imagination. I thought myself terribly superior: they were dealing with dry facts and history! I learned a little humility later. I think the world I found as a writer was a hiding place from school: I was very badly bullied and often unhappy. I think that being lumbered with glasses from the age of four didn’t help, and for better or worse I spent my days at schools where sport mattered a very great deal, but I think it was about more than that. I suspect I would have been bullied wherever I went to school: I was deeply sensitive and kids pick up on such things immediately. I was just too gentle.

“I suspect that’s why writing became important early on. It was nothing less than my world; somewhere the bullies couldn’t take from me – a hiding place. And I knew I could express myself: I knew I could write (though it was just practice writing for years). Once I finished university and went for a second year to Norway I was writing seriously: mainly still stories (and a first proper novel), as well as many poems. Through university days in Glasgow it had been all poems. And when I came back from Norway things started to be published in magazines: it was one step forward and often two back, but it was a beginning.

“In time I wrote other things: short stories, children’s books, articles. Since I’d lived in Norway for two years and learned the language fluently it was obvious that translating was also a wise path for someone desperately trying to survive from a literary income. But poetry was first and always at the heart of everything I wrote. Although I love the other elements very much, and turn to them often, I would say that poetry is the one constant.”

Kenneth has written many books of prose, short stories, children’s books and poems. It is perhaps as a poet that people know his name best.

His use of words and imagery is evocative and pulls the reader into a world of sacred light and sensitive touch.

One of his books, ‘Letting In The Light’ deals with his very personal reflections on bereavement, the breakdown of his marriage, and the estrangement from his treasured daughter. It is deeply touching, raw and visceral, full of pain and yet also, full of beauty and hope.

“I had grown up in a home where I knew marriage was for life. I felt an incredible sense of failure when I knew my own marriage had failed, and I really didn’t find great support from my church. During the year following the separation I lived in temporary accommodation: I literally lived out of bags and boxes. But the hardest thing of all was that I only saw my little girl Willow once a week. During the course of that year I almost feel I forgot I was a writer: it didn’t seem to matter any more. But I must have scribbled things on the backs of old pieces of paper, and I didn’t throw those words away. It was only much later I found them and wondered if I was trying to piece something together. I don’t think I had ever written in such a deeply personal way before: I think that in much of my previous work I’d kept my emotions at arm’s length. And so a long time later I pieced all those fragments together, partly because I wanted to write something for Willow, something that would always be hers. I wanted her to know in time to come that I had not forgotten her, that I had never abandoned her, that I had always loved her. And I wanted to give that message to others, to other parents who had faced the incredible pain of such loss. “

‘Bridge over the Atlantic’

Photo credit: Kristina Hayward

Inspiration comes to Kenneth from a multitude of places.

“There are rather too many places to mention!” he laughs. “There are the moments from nature: of the geese returning in autumn, of the first snow falling, of going to gather chestnuts. Often these moments, especially those remembered from childhood, have a deep spiritual resonance.

“And more recent memories like the birth of, Willow have been a whole new well of inspiration.

“I’m often asked how my faith influences my work and to be honest, I find this a very difficult question to answer. Sometimes more evangelical Christians will say: ‘It’s a shame you don’t write more about your faith!’

“At that point I could weep: I feel that my faith permeates everything I write.

“I can’t truly express what I mean by that; I can only believe it. Sometimes that expression is more obvious than at other times. One recent collection of poems is my poetry sequence ‘A Song among the Stones’.

“It tells the imagined (but almost certainly real) story of hermit monks who made the voyage from Iona to Iceland in the 6th century in open boats. It’s an extended meditation about faith in its purest form.”

Kenneth sees hope for the future though in the changes the church is going through at the moment.

“I think one of the most exciting developments within (and allied to) the Church has been the retreat movement. I love the ‘onshore Ionas’ that have been created: places of meditation and spiritual building that are free from any kind of labels about denomination or class or past. I only wish that we had more here in Scotland, but I hope and pray that as the mainstream church falters and often falls away, this may be replaced by new and special places of prayer and retreat which are not labelled in any traditional manner. I believe they can have huge significance as places of light and healing in an increasingly secular and sad world.”

There are rather too many places to mention!” he laughs. “There are the moments from nature: of the geese returning in autumn, of the first snow falling, of going to gather chestnuts. Often these moments, especially those remembered from childhood, have a deep spiritual resonance.