ALASDAIR GRAY, SMALL BOY SLEEPING (STUART MACLEAN), 1970, INK DRAWING WITH WATERCOLOR AND ACRYLIC ON BOARD.
Drawing and Imagining
With every one of our Writers at Work interviews, we include a manuscript page, giving a glimpse into writers’ approaches to editing and revision. On the page that accompanies Alasdair Gray’s interview in our Winter 2016 issue, there are two drawings: a hooded man in profile, and a den of snakes rising happily out of a pyramid. The man’s face has been expertly hatched, and the snakes seem to have been doodled by a cheerful hand. They complement Gray’s dense, looping handwriting on, in this case, a draft of Lanark: A Life in Four Books—a monumental, six-hundred-page work published in 1981, and the first of Gray’s landmark novels of Scottish contemporary experience.