Goodbye, Dear John

John Burnside was brilliant. In the sad days since his passing, his peers in Scotland and around the world have mourned him as one of his generation’s most gifted writers. John was prolific, wise, and shockingly talented, as a poet, a memoirist, and a novelist. He overcame a difficult childhood. He wrote every day. He was a keen gardener and devoted to Fife and the natural world, to the beauties of language, and to simple, powerful ideas like preservation, redemption, and grace.  But John Burnside the man was even more impressive than the poet whose portrait hangs in our national gallery, who won awards and moved thousands of readers, and whose words will live forever in our canon.

He had such bottomless stores of kindness and warmth. For almost three decades, he has been the backbone of creative writing at the University of St Andrews. In his time here, John helped to develop it into a modern, rigorous programme dedicated to the pure artistic practice of poetry and prose. From this corner of Scotland, he launched many talented UK novelists, memoirists and poets, and guided many others (myself included) who will remember him as a most generous and caring mentor.

This morning I asked our prose students if anyone wanted to say a few words in this tribute. Within hours, my inbox filled with grieving voices of the young writers he nurtured—and nurture is precisely what he did. He made space for the lonely and the grieving and the searching. He really listened. He reminded his students that life was far more interesting than writing or art, that they should pay attention to it more than their careers.

In his last months, John spoke often about his new grandson, marvelling at his small, clumsy movements, his attempts to figure out the world and its objects. Though he struggled with his eyesight, John was so good at seeing—especially the vulnerable and the fragile: children, birds, wounded people, trees. He taught me to be patient, to listen better to our students, to stretch my arms wider than felt possible. For so long, his warm, sprawling wings protected everyone who studied writing here.

I do believe that this week, everyone at Castle House is hurting. He left such an emptiness behind him. I'll miss the way he laughed with his whole body. I'll miss that he couldn't stop laughing sometimes, like when I told a student that writers are like Geishas. "Oh dear," he sighed when he was done. He wiped his eyes and he said, "Or maybe we're like butterflies."

In our creative writing programme, John's two-hour chat sessions were legendary. Everyone wanted their turn, in his office or in the pub or a café. "I felt very seen by him and that he respected even our worst productions," said Caspian Flint.  "He'd find very specific musical or visual art references, or personal stories [that] made it seem like he'd lived a thousand lifetimes."

Josie Lockwood described looking him up before she arrived at St Andrews. He was a formidable writer, and yet, in real life, he exceeded her expectations. "Every word he spoke was equally as beautiful and complicated as his prose. John had a way of making any topic engaging, whether it be Italian poetry, the history of the kilt, or the problematic nature of fountain pens."

"John was a repository of knowledge and wisdom," said Emma Love. "We talked about his grandson's music taste, paganism, Scottish history, and debated if a cooked heart bleeds or not. The hour wasn't enough, it flew by. I will always be grateful to him, and I will think of him when I see monarchs."

"John would show up, little mug of water in hand, loosely tied trainers on his feet, sit behind a little desk, just like us, and begin to teach," said Megan Lederman. "It felt like I was somewhere saturated in importance. Trying to take it all in, but knowing some of John's lessons are meant to unfold over time."

One MFA candidate described a painful workshop when the class sat silently, unable to react to a difficult story he'd written. John let the silence linger, allowed the writer to draw information from that. Then afterward, John said, "well, it got me. I cried."  "That was enough for two years to sustain me," said the student. "I have to imagine how easy it is to become jaded after that many pages from that many students, but he was always able to spare a tear for honesty."

As for me, John is the reason I came to St Andrews. My family and I arrived in a village in Fife on a dark December afternoon in 2021. It was around 3:30 and the sun was already retreating. I called John with all my worries and fears about this new life. My head was filled with so much doubt, so much noise. He said, "Don't listen to that nonsense." He told me to breathe, to step outside and smell the coming storm. He told me to watch the light change on the horizon. To take long walks and watch out for areas that are in danger of over-development, to get involved in their protection. He campaigned passionately to stop wind farms from decimating the birds, to lessen the impact of the golf courses (with their chemicals) on wildlife, and so much else.

He loved Fife.

My colleague, the poet Anne Boyer reminded me of a line in John's Poem Going Back, "Nothing," he wrote, "is as true as the darkness of home."  That darkness that I had complained about.  His work, Anne told me, is so patient with life's contradictions. And that has much to do with his commitment to Fife, "and his living with the nature here and its seasons."

I wish I'd had ten more long conversations with him, or just five, or one.  I wish I'd sat in those pubs for longer, instead of rushing off to catch a train.  I wish I'd ask him all the questions I was too afraid to ask. He would have answered them. Now I find myself thinking about where he might be, and the person I want to ask—all those grand afterlife questions—well, that person is John. But all we have left now is what he's already told us.  His long-time friend and colleague, the writer Susan Sellers showed me a passage from his memoir, A Lie About My Father;

"If there is an afterlife, for me it will be limbo, the one truly great Catholic invention: a no man's land of mystery and haunting music, with nobody good or holy around to be compared to – they will be in heaven – just the interesting outsiders, the unbaptised and the pagan, and the faultless sceptics God cannot quite find it in Himself to send to hell."

I imagine him now, talking about something wildly interesting, with some unholy outsider. I imagine him making those pagans laugh with his glorious wit. John was like a father to many of us. Now that he's gone, I keep returning to lines from his poem "At My Father's Funeral," where he imagines his father standing at the window, peering in.

"the look on his face

like that flaw in the sway of the world

where mastery fails

and a hinge in the mind

swings open – grief."

Goodbye, dear John. Because I knew you, I will look and hear better, and I'll watch the butterflies, and write letters about the golf-course chemicals. I'll stay in Fife and smell every storm, and I'll breathe until everything is quiet and still, and I won't listen to any more of that nonsense.