Unsorted Donations is not your usual art exhibition open to all; it is a unique listening experience. The GWL Archives provide a curious setting as visitors tiptoe through the maze of cardboard boxes and wooden pallets, inhaling the dust of historic artefacts, eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the shadowy light. With the use of hidden speakers scattered throughout the space, Nicky Bird violates the standard codes of Archive etiquette by embedding sound into the setting.

Suggesting the importance and poignancy of the GWL’s yet-to-be-catalogued Archives, Unsorted Donations is not only a surprising and haunting experience – it is a truly significant documentation of the lives and histories of diverse women in Glasgow.

Unsorted Donations is part of GWL’s Making Space project, funded by the Scottish Arts Council. If you would like more information about the project, please contact Glasgow Women’s Library at info@womenslibrary.org.uk or by phoning 0141 552 8345. Thanks.

Unsorted Donations invitation

Jackie Kay is known and loved for her fiction – a novel, and short stories -, for her poetry and her plays. In this revelatory and redemptive book, with characteristic generosity and humour, she tells the most inspirational of stories: her own.

Red Dust Road Exclusive Launch
Wednesday 23 June 2010, 7pm

‘I was adopted by warm-spirited Scottish communists. When people ask me if I’ve ever found my “real” Mum and Dad, it is them I think of. A while ago I tracked down my Nigerian birth father and discovered him to be a born-again Christian, who didn’t want his current family to know anything about me. “If people were to know about You,” he said, “they would lose their faith in God.” Heavens, I said. I hadn’t realized I was that powerful. He had my hands, my father, my gestures. Years before, I traced my birth mother and discovered her to be a Mormon. She had my voice, my mother, my patterns. Red Dust Road is a book about belonging and beliefs, strangers and family, biology and destiny. What makes us who we are? My adoption is a story that has happened to me. I couldn’t make it up.’

From Glasgow to Lagos and beyond, the much-anticipated Red Dust Road takes the reader on an intimate and unforgettable journey across continents and time.

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh. She is a poet, playwright, novelist and writer of short stories and has enjoyed great acclaim for her work for both adults and children. Her novel Trumpet won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and she has published two collections of stories with Picador, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? and Wish I Was Here. She lives in Manchester.

photo taken by Robert Burns

The evening will also see the return of Suzanne Bonnar to the library, who will fill the library with her smooth bluesy and seductive vocals supported by Alan Brown on the guitar.

This event is now fully booked. If you are interested in your name being added to the waiting list please click here to send us an email or you can call us on 0141 552 8345.

There is limited seating at this event, please arrive early to guarantee your seat at it is likely to end up standing room only. Entry will be on presentation of ticket unless you are on the guestlist. If you have any questions please call us on 0141 552 8345.

Red Dust Road is a Picador non-fiction hardback, released in June 2010. Many thanks to Picador for supporting this launch event.

photo taken by Robert Burns

Suzanne Bonnar is a Scottish based singer and actress who has worked on a variety of media in- fact based and drama productions on both TV, Radio and Theatre. Suzanne first hit the headlines in 1991 with the BBC Forty Minutes programme, Fly me to Dunoon. Her second documentary, The Blacksburg Connection was a winner at the Celtic TV Awards, won a bronze medal at The New York Film and TV Festival and was a finalist in the CRE Race in the Media Awards. It shows her meeting her father, a former American serviceman, for the first time, and traces the emotional discovery of her previously unknown heritage in South Carolina.

Already behind her are two acclaimed theatre shows, I Cover the Waterfront (the life story of Billie holiday), Every Bit of It (based on aspects of the blues and Bessie Smith) by first rate poet and novelist Jackie Kay and a hugely successful run at the Edinburgh Festival with her own production Wild Women Don’t Sing the Blues. Every Bit of It was also adapted for Radio 3.

As a vocalist she comes into her own, a complete natural. Her background has given her an innate sense of Black American music – jazz, gospel and blues – and she has developed a voice which is smooth bluesy and seductive.

Recent projects include devising and performing “Ancestral Voices” during the year of Diversity which played at The Young Vic and Arches Theatre, Journey at the Tramway, directed by John Binnie, Lola Fraser in River City BBC Scotland, The Maw Broon Monologues written by Jackie Kay and directed by Maggie Kinloch and Single Father written by Mick Ford and directed by Sam Miller.

Ninian Dunnet, writing in The Scotsman put his finger on why Suzanne is so popular. “…she bursts with edge and attack, and expression. But her real gift is that precious thing, the intimacy which crosses divides…Bonnar’s range of dynamics and nuances is considerable: this is a rich personality which travels straight to the audience…”

This walk is running twice as part of the West End Festival 2010 on:

Sunday 20 June, 2pm or
Sunday 27 June, 2pm
Tickets: £6.50

To purchase your ticket(s) please visit Barretts News Agents on Byres Road (opposite Hillhead Underground Station). We cannot take bookings through the library. The start point of the walk is printed on the ticket.

Blue Spine is a collective project, involving contributions from hundreds of women across Scotland. If you would like more information, please follow this link: http://makingspace.womenslibrary.org.uk/2010/03/31/blue-spine-invite/

This is a free event and booking is not necessary, but we would appreciate if you could let us know if you are coming, either by phone (0141 552 8345) or email (info@womenslibrary.org.uk). Thank you.

Thursday 17 June 2010, 4pm to 5pm at The Mitchell Library

There will also be a chance to buy copies of the readers work and have them signed.

Louise Welsh
After a sell out event at Aye Write in March this is a great opportunity to hear Louise reading some of her short story work about Polish migrants coming to Scotland, included in the anothology Shattered (polygon) which was published in support of Victim Support Glasgow, written and published in 2009. Louise Welsh is a writer living and working in Glasgow. She is the author of three novels: The Cutting Room (2002), The Bullet Trick (2006) and Naming the Bones (March 2010), and one novella Tamburlaine Must Die (2004) all published by Canongate Books. She’s also produced many short stories and articles and written for radio and the stage including a libretto for opera.

Leela Soma
Have you read a book about Glasgow seen through the eyes of first generation Indians? Leela Soma’s novel `Twice Born’ does just that. The novel peels away the layers and presents the simmering progress of a young couple from India’s life in Glasgow. Straddling the two cultures, putting down their roots while not forgetting their liberal family values steeped in an ancient culture is a delicate balance for them.

Joyce Ito and Sarah Ward
Joyce and Sarah worked on a community anthology called “Words About Whiteinch” which included stories from female asylum seekers and is the culmination of a year of hard work gathering and editing stories in partnership with The Whiteinch Centre. The book is beautifully illustrated by artist Annabel Wright.

Booking is essential. For more information or to book your place click here to send us an email or you can call us on 0141 552 8345

Visions of new a home for women, art, feminism and reading in Glasgow.

Saturday 29 May, 2.30pm – 4pm, pop-in to the CCA club room

This event is inspired by the question How Do We Go On From Here? and by the Read Out Read In reading lists and reading groups. Reading into the Future will be an opportunity to expand this list of books, articles and films to include your own favourite and inspiring reading and writing and to advise the Library’s staff about what materials the future women’s library should contain.

Glasgow Women’s Library staff will also be facilitating workshops throughout the afternoon that take this visioning of a women’s library of the future further… What will the new space look like? What facilities should it contain? And, what reading, making, performing, learning and researching could take place there?

Swap a Book and Make a Kite
We are also looking for women to share books in a special book swap to mark the end of the Long Loch exhibition. Please wrap up a book and bring it to swap on the day. The suggestions and visions generated on the day and those gathered at CCA and GWL during the exhibition will be used in the construction of an end of the Long Loch kite. Come and make sure your visions for women and feminism and reading take flight.

For more information on any of this, visit the Read Out! Read In! website or contact us.