Kirsten MacQuarrie – Remember the Rowan
By Tracey McCallum

Scottish writer and Librarian Kirsten MacQuarrie is a twice winner of the Glasgow Women’s Library Poetry prize. As well as being shortlisted for the Vogue Young Talent Award, Kirsten has also been selected as Editor’s Choice for the John Byrne Award. Here we talk about her new novel Remember the Rowan.
Remember the Rowan has been longlisted for The People’s Book Prize -That’s a great achievement for a first novel.
It’s surreal, in the most thrilling way, to see a story that lived in my head and heart for years now appearing on a prize longlist – and the fact that The People’s Book Prize is chosen by readers makes the experience even more exciting! Most importantly, everyone who votes for Remember the Rowan is also someone who will remember the name Kathleen Raine, making my mission in writing the novel more of a reality with each click.
How would you sum up Remember the Rowan for Westender readers?
Remember the Rowan is inspired by the true story of what I call the ‘some-requited’ love between poet Dr Kathleen Raine and author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell. Many Westender readers will already be familiar with Gavin Maxwell through his bestselling book Ring of Bright Water and the world-famous film that followed, but how many of us know that Ring took its title from one of Kathleen Raine’s poems?
The pair shared an intense emotional and even spiritual bond that lasted over twenty years, but the way in which their tale has thus far been told is reductive and misogynistic: either ignoring Raine entirely (indeed, a 1970s documentary about Maxwell refused to even state her name, crediting the actress who played her only as ‘the rowan tree woman’) or, when she is mentioned, shaming her as some sort of lovesick witch. It’s a travesty that so few Scots have heard of Raine – to my mind, one of the greatest, most underrated writers of the twentieth century – and Remember the Rowan seeks to play its part in tackling that injustice, sharing the story of this unique relationship from Raine’s perspective and bringing her passion and poetry to a new generation of readers.
Tell us about your inspiration for the book?
I first encountered Kathleen Raine through Ring of Bright Water and specifically the audiobook version within my local library BorrowBox app. The story starts with “The Ring”, the second part of Raine’s poem “The Marriage of Psyche”, but without her name printed beneath it on the opening page, it sounds very much like Gavin Maxwell wrote the poem himself! Raine is referenced obliquely and quite enigmatically on a couple of occasions in Ring, and when I began to research her life and work, I was shocked that I had never heard of her before.
I was also incensed by how a woman of such obvious intelligence and integrity could be castigated as a ‘witch’, which regrettably became the case after Maxwell’s final book Raven Seek Thy Brother blamed the ‘curse of a poetess’ for everything that had gone wrong in his life throughout the past decade. If one fewer person thinks of Kathleen Raine as a witch and instead recognises her as the wonderful woman writer she was, I feel the novel will have done its job.
On reading the back cover of the book, I immediately wanted to know more about the real life characters and ended up purchasing Ring of Bright Water too. What do you think of Gavin Maxwell’s book?
Ring of Bright Water will forever be close to my heart – after all, it’s transformed my life personally and professionally – and decades later, Gavin Maxwell’s charm simply shines off the page. I think Ring is stylishly written, perhaps even seductively so – as I imagine Kathleen observing within the novel, ‘how astonishingly skillful he is at crafting a gripping tale, to make the literary version more compelling than the truth.’
It’s a more commercially-conscious style than Kathleen’s own writing, but the power of plurality in literature is that there’s a place for every approach, and I’d argue in favour of making room for everyone’s recollections. I like the phrasing of this question because it’s common for me to be asked about writing Kathleen’s ‘side’, but do we adequately recognise that a book written by a man is also – and can only ever be – his ‘side’? If, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, ‘Anon… was often a woman’ then ‘Neutral’ is too often a man!
Kathleen Raine is a very interesting character. Being a divorcee in the 1940s would have carried a lot of stigma & leaving her children behind to pursue a career as a poet can’t have been easy. What kind of woman would you say she was?

Oh, another great question and it immediately leads me to the crux of a key conflict for Kathleen during the chapters of her life that Remember the Rowan explores. In many ways, womanhood itself was a challenge for her, as it is for many of us within the enduringly oppressive ‘can’t win’ social conditions you’ve outlined. Part of my author’s note at the end of the novel examines Kathleen’s ambivalence and at times direct antipathy towards second wave feminism – indeed, it felt like one of the main things I could offer her as modern day ‘translator’, bringing a feminist-infused compassion to her story that she couldn’t give herself!
Kathleen blamed herself mercilessly for all that went wrong in her relationship with Gavin, and tracking her writing throughout this period I sense a real hardening against her own ‘femaleness’ and perhaps even more painfully against her own heart. Nonetheless, I find great impetus in her uncompromising understanding (which can sadly still feel radical) of woman as human; that a woman’s story and particularly a woman’s poetry are not niche subsets of the male-made canon. As I give voice to within the novel when Kathleen invites her close friend, the immensely talented artist Winifred Nicholson, to Sandaig: ‘Like me, Winifred will always be an artist before a woman. Like me, I think she wishes life did not so often force her to choose between the two.’
What do you admire most about her?
Kathleen will forever be one of the most important people in my life and there’s so much to admire in not just what she did but why. From the sheer force of her intellect to the spiritual hopefulness of her poetic vision -for me though, what will eternally linger in me is her raw, radical honesty as a writer.
Why do you think Kathleen was so quick to put her own romantic feelings aside in order to nurture this all-consuming friendship?
In addition to being a great poet in her own right, Kathleen’s paradigm-shifting academic research into William Blake illuminated the Neoplatonic threads within his work, and she truly had faith in the power of a genuine Platonic love.
Your wonderful turn of phrase creates beautiful imagery. I often felt like I was right there with the characters. How do you create this magic?
Thank you – a lot of effort and repeated prose-polishing! As Kathleen herself wrote, ‘to make the imperfect perfect, it is enough to love it,’ and refining each line is the part of the process I love most. I began my career as a writer with poetry and my first poetry collection, including a Sandaig series inspired by my novel research, will be published in early 2025, so the poetic side of prose writing really is my happy place. Above all, I chose to make Remember the Rowan a creative rather than academic text because I wanted readers to not just intellectually know but viscerally sense and almost re-embody what Kathleen went through.
Two of my favourite characters in the story are Jondog the faithful spaniel and Mijbil the mischievous otter. Our relationships with animals can be life changing, would you agree?
I couldn’t agree more and in fact I have a novella coming out soon with Ringwood, Ellen and Arbor, that is my most autobiographical work to date and inspired by my beloved late dog Gypsy, who rescued me every bit as much as I did her.
Nature is almost a character itself within the story. In this increasingly busy & technological world, being in the outdoors is totally underrated don’t you think?
Absolutely, and as so often, I can’t put it better than Kathleen herself when she wrote that ‘old joy and pain mean less / Than these green garden buds / The wind stirs gently.’ She intuitively understood from girlhood, running wild over Great Bavington’s remarkably unchanged landscape, that it is in nature we find both belonging and freedom: a truer sense of who we are and what we owe fellow living creatures, as well as all the free riches they in turn can bestow upon us.
When you’re not writing, what do you do for fun?
This question made me laugh because it took me a moment to remember what it was like to have free time – fortunately both sides of my work, literary and library, are a lot of fun! When not doing either, my day is all about those life-changing animals – I volunteer for Scottish SPCA as a fundraiser and spend every spare moment with my beloved rescue dogs, Winnie and Shep. Their wild and precious lives are a constant source of sustenance, strength and joy to me.
Libraries are a wonderfully valuable community resource – tell us about your career as a Librarian?
Like countless writers across Scotland and beyond, libraries are the lifeblood of my career. The first literary prize I ever won was at the wonderful Glasgow Women’s Library – where Kathleen Raine is now a ‘Woman on the Wall’,
I’m a chartered librarian advocating for and advancing the sector via our professional association CILIPS. The readers of today become the writers of tomorrow thanks to the unique equity of opportunity that libraries offer, which is why library access is a legal and moral right we must all fight for.
What’s next for you?
I said throughout writing Remember the Rowan that I would never find another woman to replace Kathleen and that’s true – this time, I’m focused on two! One of my most popular short stories in recent years was inspired by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, best known as the wife of Charles Rennie Mackintosh but also an astonishingly gifted avant-garde artist and designer in her own right. As Mackintosh himself said, ‘I have only talent; Margaret has genius’.
Margaret and her sister Frances were the subject of my History of Art Masters dissertation and I’m eager to explore their story further in fiction now: as one century cedes to another, what thrilling new possibilities could two imaginative sisters harness, and (perhaps paralleling Remember the Rowan) what different types of love – sororal, romantic, artistic and more – shaped their creations? At the time of writing, it’s taking the form of a screenplay, but all being well that research will soon go in a novel direction in more ways than one!
Remembering The Rowan by Kirsten MacQuarrie is available from all good book shops including Waterstones Byres Road
Return to Culture and Arts Articles