Scotland's new literary superstar wants to fix the broken Scots male

Stephen Fry and Alan Cumming rave about Pedersen. Musicians love him: Shirley Manson from the band Garbage, the KLF’s Bill Drummond, and Charlotte Church all pile on praise. Novelists Val McDermid, Andrew O’Hagan, Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin laud him, as do poets Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead and Kae Tempest.

Artists like David Shrigley are his fans. Comedians like Sara Pascoe can’t get enough of Pedersen. He’s taking the cultural world by storm.

Pedersen’s rise hasn’t been meteoric, though. He’s been slaving determinedly away in the salt mines of literature for over a decade, producing critically acclaimed but little noticed works of poetry. Then last year everything changed when he brought out a memoir of his friendship with Scott Hutchison, the singer-songwriter from the acclaimed Scottish band Frightened Rabbit, who took his own life in 2018 aged 36. Hutchison’s death caused an outpouring of love and grief across Scotland for a talent lost so tragically young.

Pedersen’s book Boy Friends was an hymn to friendship: laugh-out-loud, scatalogically funny, heartbreakingly sad, and a wryly observed indictment of modern masculinity. The subtext to Boy Friends was this: why can’t men be open with their emotions and show each other that they genuinely care for one another the way women do?

It’s the same theme he has returned to in his just-published collection of poems The Cat Prince. Why do men hide from their feelings: that’s the message reverberating from its pages. Rest assured, Pedersen doesn’t pursue his theme po-faced. There are poems here to leave you crying with laughter. Others might have you just crying. He uses language like a Jedi with a light sabre: his lines flash and dazzle, blindside and delight; his writing is a high-wire act, daring, provocative and endlessly demanding your attention.

One matter is sure: this is a writer, approaching the summit of his powers, who wants to take on the tired old tropes of Scottish masculinity.

His platform is about to get much bigger: shortly he’ll become writer-in-residence at Edinburgh University, a role previously held by the likes of Norman MacCaig and Sorley MacLean, giants of Scottish literature. And he’s got a novel coming out, but is under strict instructions not to say anything about it.

Michael's collection of poems, The Cat Prince has just been published. The title poem from the his new collection of poems, The Cat Prince is about metamorphosing into a cat.

Family

When you meet him, Pedersen, who is in his late 30s, appears deceptively young. “I look like a fluffy-haired man-child,” he laughs. “It’s not entirely uncommon that I get ID’d for alcohol.” He didn’t grow up in a literary family, but rather an average home with a book-loving nursery nurse mum and an “emotionally closed-door” of a dad who worked in a bank. Home was Edinburgh’s Leith. He went to Portobello High, “a 10-storey tower block that looked like a Soviet prison”.

He had a tough time there as an arty kid not much into macho pursuits, but still retains affection for his old school. Pedersen’s English teacher comes to his public readings. By his final year, Pedersen wanted out of Scotland. “I studied my balls off,” he says. That won him a place at Durham University. It was a culture shock, to say the least.

The lad from Leith – first in his family of “plumbers, hairdressers and mechanics” to go to university – was now attending “formal dinners in gowns and robes” at Durham’s Great Hall, hanging out with “more Old Etonians and Cheltenham ladies than I ever realised existed”. It’s a college where second-tier European royals come to get an education. “It was ridiculous but brilliant,” Pedersen recalls.

“I didn’t treat it with any degree of prestige or seriousness. It felt like role play most of the time.”

On the advice of an older poet friend, he opted not to study English literature, but pursue law. That certainly paid off

– quite literally – once he graduated.

He took a job with a London law firm, filled with people from “public schools and Oxbridge”, worked for two years and two days as a solicitor, then jacked it in once his student debts were cleared.

Then it was off to Cambodia – to go fully “off grid”, no mobile, no internet

– and write his first book of poetry, Play With Me.

Writing was a “labour of love, a compulsion, a sickness”. Pedersen accepted a poet’s life wouldn’t bring wealth and fame. However, he’s now proving his younger self wrong on that score.

 

Masculinity

RIGHT from the beginning, his work was about “battling against the bulwark of masculinity. The curses, burdens and blessings of masculinity have been super-prevalent in my writing at every stage”, he says.

Pedersen wants to celebrate the “soft, gentle, vulnerable, emotional” side of men, to “take back that which is deemed effeminate, or a failure of masculinity, that which is mockable”.

His critique of modern masculinity started as a child when he saw his older sister and her friends enjoying much stronger emotional bonds than those between boys. “One of the curses of modern English vocabulary is the phrase ‘man up’,” he says. “What does that say? It says we’re not supposed to speak about our fears and vulnerabilities, we’re supposed to swallow them into our stomaches like pieces of fat, gristly meat and let them dissolve away.

“We’re supposed to let our concerns, fears, our trepidations dissolve into silence: pick yourself up, don’t lament them, don’t focus on them, don’t discuss them, move past them. But if we move past these things, time and again we just learn to anaesthetise ourselves against the emotions they carry. It locks all these things inside us, keeps us caged. It promotes a stoic, silent masculinity.

“It keeps us away from our most tender and vulnerable selves.

“It suggests masculinity only happens in moments of strength. But if you carry all these burdens, all of a sudden they spill out, in rage, in upset that’s violent and physical, booze-associated. It’s numbing yourself against the world. You become this thrashing ogre of a warrior – that’s how men deal with grief. I want to offer an antidote to that, an invitation to welcome softness into your life.”

Sexuality

HIS book Boy Friends certainly flew in the face of how friendships between men are conventionally seen. Even the title was a challenge to some. Pedersen deliberately played with the language of romantic love in his memoir. He recounted drinking some whisky he and Hutchison loved and wrote: “I think of your mouth with these flavours lathered all over.”

Pedersen is clearly more than savvy enough to know that the book would raise questions in some minds about his own sexuality. At book festivals “I fortified myself for people having deeply personal questions. I worried that they were reading between the lines and mining for things I’d chosen not to tell”.

He’s been reluctant to talk about his sexuality until today. Boy Friends was “put into the LGBTQ+ section” in some bookstores, Pedersen notes. He didn’t want to “do or say anything which prevented somebody being able to project their own life into it”.

It’s a book about loss and grief, and Pedersen feared that by pigeon-holing himself sexually he might deter some readers from picking up a work which he hopes will help them face their own pain. “I just want to offer everybody a way in without labelling the book as a specific thing because as soon as I label it, or as soon as somebody says ‘this is what you are’, by confirming or denying that, it denies them the ability to put themselves inside the heart of these stories. I don’t want to put up any guards or barriers.”

Love

TODAY, though, he’s finally comfortable talking about his private life. Pedersen is “in a very lovely, life-altering, beautiful relationship” with the well-known poet Hollie McNish.

They often perform readings together, and although she lives in Cambridge, and Pedersen in Glasgow, the pair regularly accompany one another on the road and “ping-pong between each other’s lives and households. It’s a really healthy existence, conducive to both writing and loving”.

When it comes to men, Pedersen has, he says, “had physical, kissing experiences. I’ve been in love with men from that perspective, but all of my seminal, romantic, long-term relationship have been with females”.

He adds: “The whole notion of pansexuality is definitely an interesting concept. I’d never like to think I’m in the position that if I was in love with someone, I’d want it to stop at a certain place, regardless of what gender they are.”

Bullying

EVIDENTLY school, for Pedersen, “had its moments of difficulty and heartbreak”. Mostly, however, he found himself “in the position where I wasn’t necessarily bullied but was affiliated with the bullied, yet lacked strength to prevent those circumstances. So it was almost like the craven onlooker in the middle. Any attempts to intervene ended in failure a lot of the time”.

But he had a tight group of friends. “We fortified each other for the battles ahead. Physically, we weren’t scared to stand up for ourselves, but we weren’t very effective at it,”, he says. They took a “tactical approach to survival”. He was, he adds with admirable candour, “subject to tears and bed-wetting when I was young”. One bully would “try to prove to people he could make me cry without touching me. But I developed courage. I definitely wasn’t terrified. I buttressed myself with good friends, people made of the same mirth and mettle”. Inevitably, his group was sometimes subjected to “homophobic terms and teasing”.

The lesson from his latest work The Cat Prince is that men can open up, change, and become more emotionally intelligent. “Things that were deemed failures or flaws, some of the most difficult periods of your life, can now be reclaimed and sculpted into something which has strength and prowess,” he says. “You can become the bigger, bolder, more sentient version of the human you were looking to be.”

Sport

PEDERSEN uses the metaphor of “the fishing trip” to explain how men bottle up emotions and often only express their feelings when in a traditionally male environment like a football ground or pub. He had pals at school who were mad about fishing. They would invite him to Mike’s Tackle Shop in Portobello and gear up before heading off to the riverbank. “It felt like an audition for masculinity,” he recalls. “There were these ceremonies, like soldiers collecting their arsenals as they go off to battle.”

Once the “showboating” was over, and they’d “thrown a hook in the water, talking became more unguarded about what was going on inside them – those tender, emotive parts that they kept covered over and masked”, he says, adding: “On fishing trips, we had these beautiful, sentient conversations. I found it very difficult to understand that they had to be left there, they couldn’t be taken back to school. It was just the fear or shame of the things they talked about becoming public knowledge, when there were coyotes who’d spring upon it as a weakness and use it as mockery.”

Loneliness

AT the kernel of Pedersen’s worries about modern masculinity lies “the loneliness epidemic within males. One in three men say they don’t have a close friend”. Men can “go to the pub or football together”, he says, yet still not have a friend who’s really meaningful, someone “they can call and talk to about emotional matters, problems, worries, fears”.

Friendship, he says, “shouldn’t require you to touch on your favourite football team or have six pints” before men find themselves able to talk about how they feel. There’s heartbreak to the notion that so many men “don’t have someone on the end of the line they can call”.

Why can’t men say they “love” each other as friends without it being sexualised, he wonders. “It’s dangerous that friendship can’t be celebrated for fear of abuse or mockery.”

Pedersen feels that incrementally matters are improving as more men start to embrace their emotional side. He gushes over Harry Styles, for example, and how the singer “shows we can push our emotional boundaries into what would be traditionally termed ‘feminine zones’ and still be masculine. There are new forms of masculinity out there. So I do feel hopeful. But then I walk down the street and see a group of boys on the corner and overhear all the same homophobic and racial slurs I heard as a kid.”

Teacher friends tell him “there are signs of progress” among young men in schools, though “we’re still far from where we need to be”. There’s a “stoic algebra of masculinity that’s been passed down to us by fathers, older peers and siblings that we’ve grown up with”, he says. It’s stopped men being “shame-free” about their emotions. “I want to offer an alternative.”

At the very heart of Pedersen’s concerns is the sense that men should celebrate their friendships before it’s too late, before “darkness visits”. That’s why he wrote Boy Friends. The public responded to the book with praise and delight. People queued at signings to tell him of friends they’d loved and lost.

Drugs

WHAt made Boy Friends unique was that it’s the antithesis of the “misery memoir”. This was a book which sang of friendship, revelled in the joy of a “best mate”, was full of comic memories and tales of men behaving badly. There’s lots of drink, drugs and sex within its covers, as well as its central message that men can show their true feelings without somehow “losing” their masculinity. For a book about death, it’s determinedly upbeat. “What more rebellious streak can you have,than to mine joy at a time when we’re all having s*** chucked at us?” Pedersen says. “Don’t hide from pain, show grief with all its fangs and barbs, but show joy at the end of it, show us overcoming pain.”

Pedersen’s friendship with Hutchison was “immaculate”, he says, adding: “I wanted to celebrate that. Grief is just the final manifestation of love.” Writing Boy Friends helped him “take grief by the horns”. Today, five years on from Hutchison’s death, Pedersen says “the urgency of grief is gone, its rawness, the discombobulation I felt, the lack of permanency in realising he wasn’t coming back”.

Scott Hutchisonof the band Frightened Rabbit

He adds: “I’ll never stop missing him, never stop talking to him. I’ll never stop finding it entirely unacceptable that he’s not walking around. I go through periods of still not being able to listen to his music, and then periods of his being the only voice I want to hear. But more than anything I just constantly feel a burning ambition to keep doing him proud.

“It was a very unusual moment when I became older than him. He was a couple of years older than me, so was always like this big brother, and much further ahead in his career. He was an artistic inspiration to me, pushing me to go further, be better than I otherwise would’ve been. Emotionally, he unfurled or completed something in me.”

Death

HUTCHISON’S death left Pedersen “with deep lamentation, a deep ‘missing’ inside of me”. Some asked if he was angry with his friend for taking his life. “I was never angry. I didn’t have that entitlement. I was upset and remorseful. Grief will always be there but most of the time it’s just gratefulness that I got close to him. He’s left me with cherished memories. There are no limits I wouldn’t go to alter the past, but I can’t do that.”

Pedersen never learned why Hutchison took his life. There were clear signs of “depression” in songs like Floating On The Forth’, Pedersen explains. “He struggled to suppress the darkness, insecurities and pain that inhabited his life. All I can do is accept that I’ll never have an answer. But all the questions I do have an answer to are about how well he lived, as opposed to the way he died.”

When it came to “being a man”, Pedersen says, Hutchison was “constantly trying to get it right. He wrote songs which offered people compassion, made them feel understood when they were in moments of emotional turmoil”.

His friend was in the vanguard of a “beautiful masculinity that’s pushing through now”. As a sign of that change, Pedersen notes that Mike’s Tackle Shop, the site of so much repressed emotion among men in his youth, has morphed into an independent bookstore.

“It’s become the very thing I was willing into existence.”