October 2026
September Recap
The freelance artist life moves fast. We zip from project to project with an alacrity powered more by financial precarity than creative enthusiasm. In fact, I often wonder when I’ll have time to reflect on the workshops, events and milestones of my career (presumably on my death bed as the retirement age will be pushed into the 90s by that point). So today, I take a little moment to ruminate on the culmination of a specific piece of work - The Great Game of Existence™.
The project started in June of this year with the brilliance of a big bastard white page. I was asked to come back and work with the magnificent Creative Recovery Inverclyde group, who meet weekly at the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock, after a successful stint creating poetry with them earlier in the year. I came in with an ambitious plan - we’d devise, write, rehearse and perform a brand new play from scratch.
They say that a Camel is a Horse designed by committee. If that’s the case then I oversaw the human equivalent of one of those Arabian Derby machines that populate faded seaside resorts throughout the UK. Each participant with an idea, a plan, a contribution that needed to be understood, interpreted, created and added to the greater piece. Each participant with a perspective on each other’s work and the show as a whole. Each as important as the next, each as disparate as the last.
I am used to the quiet solitude of writing, of following branching pathways in my head until they trail off into nothingness, of following my instincts until I reach a place that feels right to me. But with this project, I was both the least important participant and the most important contributor. I had to put my ego on ice (an industrial freezer I’d imagine, to accommodate the size) before putting my talent to work incorporating a caravan of camels into a finished piece.
The idea, The Great Game of Existence™, came from exercises in which we attempted to create a unified manifesto for life combined with chat about childhood board games. Suddenly we were creating an unhinged live action board game about personal choice and universal indifference. The challenge came in this framing device being able to hold all the pieces written by participants - the monologues, poems, scenes and songs that sprouted from our weekly sessions.
Flash forward to last Saturday and our melange of ideas and contributions came into vivid focus with a sold-out audience at the Beacon’s studio theatre. As the host, or ‘Gamesmaster’, I was on stage directing traffic and connecting the dots between performers but even as it was happening in realtime I felt a swelling of pride for these participants who had devised this world we were all now inhabiting.
The ego is an artist’s biggest weapon and greatest impediment. We need to have that arrogance to dream big and take on huge challenges that seem - and often are - foolhardy from the outset. But we also need to know when to banish that sense of grandiosity in order to shepherd a project safely over the line. The Great Game of Existence™ taught me that what I want and what’s best for the participants might sometimes be at odds, but also that there is only ever one answer when it comes to facilitating art.
Where can you find me in October?
8th Oct
Kevin P. Gilday & The Glasgow Cross, Me or the Devil album launch show. Come and check us out as we play tracks from the new record and classics from the back catalogue.
Check out the new album here:
Work in Progress
Every month I aim to share a bit of work in progress. This could be a poem, a section of a play or just a snippet of writing I find interesting. Here, a first draft of a new poem about the quiet anxiety of childhood.
From the Archive
An original poem I created to celebrate the unheralded volunteers of Stirling as part of their awards ceremony.
Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter, please feel free to let me know if you enjoyed it and would like to see more/less of anything in particular. I’ll be back with another update next month but in the meantime you can follow me on social media @kevinpgilday - with instagram being where I’m most active nowadays.
‘Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.’ - Dale Carnegie
Cheers,
Kev x