Award winning Scottish poet, novelist and playwright Jackie Kay opened up Women’s History Month this past week lecturing at several classes and speaking about Bessie Smith, a favorite blues singer, in her keynote address for Women’s History Month.
Kay, born to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, was adopted and raised by a white couple in Glasgow Scotland. Her adoption has raised many identity issues and she addresses them in her writing. Identity is perhaps at the heart of Kay’s writing. It certainly is at the heart of her first novel “Trumpet,” which won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998.
“Trumpet,” a novel inspired by jazz musician Billy Tipton, explores the construction of gender. Tipton, born Dorothy, began cross-dressing to advance his career as a musician. Eventually he cast away his female identity completely and lived as Billy, marrying five times and adopting three sons. None but the first of his wives knew of his female origins.
“Trumpet,” said Kay, is “a book about losses as much as a book about identity.” Written and told in many different voices “Trumpet” tells the story of musician Joss Moody primarily through his wife Millie and his son Coleman’s voices. Joss like Tipton concealed his female identity, wrapping his breasts in bandages. Only through death is Joss’s identity revealed and the novel addresses his family’s loss and motions of coping with the truth.
Kay who began her writing career as a poet, publishing her first poetry collection “The Adoption Papers” in 1991, said that novel writing is perhaps her most challenging feat yet. “There’s a long time that you’re writing a novel that it’s just a horrible thing to do.” She enjoys writing short stories and told the Portland Press Herald last week that they are the most fun.
Kay didn’t completely plan “Trumpet” out before beginning. “I need a certain amount of form and a certain amount left free to explore,” she said. In this way she leaves her writing open to the unexpected. Though she said those that plan out every aspect of a novel often wind up creating a novel without surprises she realizes her way won’t necessarily work for everybody. “You have to find your own way,” she said.
Currently Kay lives in Manchester England with her son and partner Carol Ann Duffy.