NORMAN BISSELL

Born in Kelvinhaugh in Glasgow and brought up in Partick, Norman Bissell went to the University of Glasgow where he was a student of Kenneth White’s and at meetings of the Jargon Group was introduced by him to radical thinking on culture and society which changed his life. He graduated MA (Hons) in philosophy and history in 1967 and was a principal teacher of history at Braidhurst High School in Motherwell for 17 years.

He was an active member of the Educational Institute of Scotland becoming Lanarkshire President, Strathclyde Regional Convener and a member of its National Executive and other national committees. He was also a leading member of the Lanarkshire Teachers Action Committee and Scottish Federation of Socialist Teachers. He was appointed Lanarkshire Association EIS Secretary in 1991 then worked as a full-time EIS Area Officer from 1996 until 2007 providing advice, representation, and training to EIS members working in nursery, primary, secondary and further education in much of west central Scotland. He gave lectures on Teachers and the Law to undergraduate and post-graduate student teachers at the former St Andrew’s College of Education and the University of Glasgow, and on geopoetics at the University of Edinburgh Office of Lifelong Learning. He is a full member of the Writers Guild of Great Britain and of its Scottish Committee.

He reconnected with Kenneth White in 1987 and set up the Open World Poetics group in Glasgow in 1989 to discuss a wide range of cultural ideas which were influenced by White and others and to enjoy weekends in the great outdoors mainly at Allershaw Lodge near Elvanfoot. With Joe Murray, Gerry Loose and others he edited and published 3 issues of Open World magazine. He attended the founding meeting of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics in Edinburgh on Burns Night 1995 which Tony McManus initiated and led with distinction until his death in April 2002. He became its unpaid director in August 2002 until the present and has organised many geopoetics events such as the Atlantic Islands Festival in 2009, the Brantwood Geopoetics Weekend in 2011, and the Expressing the Earth Conference in June 2017 in collaboration with the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Most of his early writing was related to history teaching and socialist politics but in the 1980s he began writing poems and essays on cultural themes. In 1991 he wrote, developed, produced and directed a play Closure? Story of the 'Craig with his S3 history class at Braidhurst High School which the students performed for a week at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. About the closure of the Ravenscraig steelworks, it received favourable reviews and national publicity on BBC Reporting Scotland and other media.

His poetry, essays and reviews have been widely published in literary journals, books and newspapers. His poems have appeared in The Scotsman, Cencrastus, Classwork, island, Luing Newsletter, Open World and Scottish Book Collector, the booklet Circles and Lines and the books The Reckoning, Making Soup in a Storm (New Writing Scotland 24), The Dynamics of Balsa (New Writing Scotland 25) and the Scottish island poetry anthology These Islands, We Sing.

He was an active member of the Workers City group from 1990 to 1993 which campaigned against the privatisation of parts of Glasgow's parks, the removal of Elspeth King as Curator of the People's Palace and overspending by Glasgow District Council during the Year of Culture. His articles on cultural issues and book and music reviews have been published in The Herald, The Scotsman, the Scottish Educational Journal, The Keelie, Cencrastus, Chapman, Edinburgh Review, island, Northwords, West Coast, Classwork, the Luing Newsletter, Northings, in the books The Reckoning, Ainmeil Thar Cheudan on Sorley MacLean and Grounding a World: Essays on the work of Kenneth White, and in the papers of the Scottish Trade Union Research Network.

He has read and spoken at many festivals and cultural events including Celtic Connections, Changin’ Scotland, the Nairn Book and Arts Festival, Glasgow’s Aye Write Book Festival, Edinburgh’s Ceilidh Culture, the Belladrum Festival, Bookends Festival, Benderloch, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Taproot Lismore Music and Literature Festival, StAnza International Poetry Festival 2017, Asheville Wordfest 2018, Islay Book Festival and Wigtown Book Festival 2019.

Poetry reading at Taproot Music and Literature Festival on Lismore, September 2017

In 2010 he was awarded the Fellowship of the Educational Institute of Scotland in the special category ‘for signal service to education.’ In 2012 he won a Creative Scotland funded Incubator commission to write a feature film screenplay about the last years in the life of George Orwell. In 2014 he was awarded a Creative Scotland artist's bursary to undertake research and professional development to write his first novel about Orwell's last years. In 2022 he was awarded Creative Scotland Open Funding for Individuals to research and write a creative non-fiction book Living on an Island, Expressing the Earth.

He now concentrates on writing from his home on the Isle of Luing in Argyll where he was Vice-Chairman and Events Convener of the Isle of Luing Community Trust until February 2017. His other interests include ecology, natural history, gardening, walking, reading and chess, having once played for the Scotland boys' team in the Glorney Cup.