Jem Rolls

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498 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 21 Dec

Jem Rolls’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Scottish Poetry Library Podcast · From the Archive: Jem Rolls. January 2015 · 21 Dec 2025 podcast

And to stand there with the book kind of rejects

all the fantastic liberations and possibilities and techniques that you can use to get your ideas over.

You're basically going to say, oh, I don't need any of them.

So I'm not sure if there's not an arrogance there or it's not sort of a feebleness and a cowardice and unwillingness to learn.

And you have to ask, in what other mediums would you get on stage and read?

It's not what people do.

So I think there's something cowardly, regressive, and feeble about people getting on stage and reading.

There's more of it in this town than there was.

There's more than there was in this town 10 years ago.

And I'm kind of trying to work out why there has been these, what I would consider to be these steps, steps back, and why it's considered adequate.

Because again,

There are so many more possibilities to be gone for, and if you're standing there with a book, you're effectively rejecting all of them.

And that's not diverse, that's small.

And I think it's a product of a small-mindedness and a kind of arrogance of one medium over another, where I can't see what there is to be arrogant about, because let's face it, nobody sells anything.

So, you know, nobody sells, nobody shifts, you know, a lot of those books.

in the bookshop, they don't really look like they're going anywhere terribly quickly, and you know, I'll sell a thousand tickets in 10 days in Winnipeg.

Who in Scotland sells a thousand books in a year?

let alone in 10 days.

Does anyone?

I don't know.

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