And now it can be told ...

Way back in July 2014 I blogged about going to the First World Congress of Scottish Literatures in Glasgow. This was always intended to become a triennial event, so no surprise that the next one is next year. It was rumoured in Glasgow that the next one would be in Canada and I had rather hoped this would give me an opportunity to visit Canada's Maritime Provinces, because obviously if you're going to have a World Congress of Scottish Literatures in Canada then it's going to be in Nova Scotia, right?

Wrong.  It's going to be in Vancouver.

Now I'm sure Vancouver is a lovely place, it just wasn't what I was expecting and it made me rather less keen to go than I had been. In the interval since attending the first one and now, I had memory majored more on the negatives than the positives so whenever anyone asked me if I was intending to go  I havered. Long way to go, especially if it turned out to be all about Walter Scott and Robert Burns again I thought. Our one long haul holiday next year and do I really want it to be to Canada I thought. (The OH maintains that Canada is not long, but medium, haul. While I am willing to give him the benefit of that one if you're talking Toronto, as far as I'm concerned Vancouver, which is roughly 10 hours in flight time from London, is long haul).

 

Well to cut a long story short I was getting a bit bored one day last spring while toiling my way through the first draft of my thesis' middle chapter so as a piece of displacement activity, since the Call for Papers for Vancouver had just gone out, I cobbled together a proposal for a paper on a Canadian writer called Alastair MacLeod and sent it off. Told myself that if it was accepted then I would go, and if it wasn't, I wouldn't.

 

I was lying to myself because I knew it didn't have a snowflake's chance of being accepted and all I was doing was putting off making my own decision. But then back in November I got The E-Mail. They had accepted the paper.

 

To say I was astonished would be to put it politely as I was absolutely gobsmacked. Pleased obviously. But gobsmacked none the less. I told no-one for a few days. Then I told my husband and sons and then a while after that I mentioned it in a small and secret group of friends on Facebook. And then I shut up. Because I needed to tell my supervisors but I didn't want another accusation of 'showing off' being flung my way.

 

However, having talked myself into the position that the paper had probably only been accepted because they hadn't had sufficient submissions and were desperately taking anything they could get their hands on to fill up conference time  I did manage to tell both my Director of Studies and the Supervisor in Glasgow in the run up to Christmas. And since I've told them, which I felt I should do before I told anyone else, I can now report it here.

 

I should also say that when I got The E-Mail I dug up the proposal I'd sent off and was rather dismayed to find it so jargon ridden it was incomprehensible to me. However I'm sure what I was planning to say will come back to me sometime between now and June!