Rodge Glass has been writing in Glasgow for decades. He came to the city as an ambitious young student at Strathclyde University, romanticizing life as a writer. ‘I had hair then,’ he remembers fondly. He moved into the West End and was excited that he might see James Kelman or Liz Lochhead pass him on the street. He started working at the Curler’s Rest, a local pub and West End institution. When Alasdair Gray walked in, looking for a little peace, a young, starry-eyed Rodge couldn’t help but gush about Lanark. Gray promptly left the bar.
This weekend, Rodge told that story from the stage at the Byres Road Book Festival. Now a successful author, he was there to talk about his latest work, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir, but he still remembers the days when working as a writer seemed so far away. Over his career, Rodge has published eight books, spent years under the tutelage of Gray himself, and become the reading Professor of Creative Writing at the University where he used to study.
Although Rodge has accomplished much during his time in Glasgow he has not forgotten his roots. While fielding questions from the audience during the Book Festival, a woman raised her hand. She had interviewed Rodge for a piece on writing communities 20 years ago. ‘You probably don’t remember me,’ she started. But Rodge recalled her name and the experience he shared with the other writers who were part of the article.
After the festival, Rodge treated me to coffee in a café down Byres Road. ‘I wrote my first short stories here,’ he noted. We talked about his latest work, what it takes to be a writer in Glasgow, and how he approaches writing biography. Joshua in the Sky straddles the line between biography and memoir. It is fundamentally a story about Rodge’s nephew, Joshua, who died three hours after they were born. But it is told through personal essays about Rodge’s life and his experience with HHT, the rare genetic blood condition that caused Joshua’s death.
As Rodge explained how he can’t help feeling partially responsible for what happened, a tiny drop of blood began to form on his chin. HHT often manifests in frequent nosebleeds, but can sometimes cause small wounds, like a cut left over from shaving, to bleed for extended periods of time. The drop of blood grew until I was forced to interrupt Rodge by handing him a napkin. He excused himself and took a minute to manage his bleeding. Even so long after it happened, there is still something raw and lingering about the tragedy of Joshua.
One chapter of Joshua in the Sky, ‘On the Covenant’, won the Anne Brown Essay Prize for Scotland. Here, Rodge’s personal beliefs intersect with his family’s religion as he attends a bris for Joshua’s younger brother nearly five years after Joshua’s death. While Rodge has big issues with parts of his faith, he was raised in a Jewish household. ‘When you have a Jewish family,’ Rodge said, ‘some things are non-negotiable.’ Like attending a bris. Rodge explained how there was a concern with Joshua’s family about the ceremony. Joshua never reached the requisite age of 8 days old. As such, Joshua would never be named or officially inducted into his family’s faith.
Rodge saw Joshua’s rabbi and assumed his more traditional practices would have Joshua buried beneath an unmarked headstone. A history in a private Jewish school had led Rodge to become resentful against people who let their faith obscure their perspective on the world. ‘I had my own prejudices, because I assumed Joshua’s rabbi would be bigoted.’ But he was wrong.
Rodge discovered that Joshua’s rabbi was kind and inclusive. He performed rites that stricter rabbis may have not, and allowed Joshua to be named. This kindness defeated his expectations. After the Manchester Synagogue Attacks, Rodge appeared on BBC Radio Scotland and said this: ‘Antisemitism has much in common with prejudices of other kinds; Islamophobia has also seen a disturbing rise, and we might do well not to turn inwards in pain, but outward, to see our common humanity afresh. Let us not carry our prejudices, our assumptions, with us, as we move about the world!’
In his acceptance article for the Anne Brown Prize, Rodge name-dropped nearly a dozen of his fellow authors who were shortlisted for the award. Rodge admits it takes a certain type of personality to be active in the Glasgow literary scene. Success here requires a willingness to cooperate, instead of a desire for competition. Almost immediately, he began talking about Kirstin Innes and her work with the Agnes Owens Archive. Rodge jumps at chances to promote other writers. His connection to the writing community in Glasgow is a responsibility that success rewards him.
Connection reaches into Rodge’s work not just as a responsibility, but through his writing method as well. As a biographer, Rodge does not take the objective approach. His attempt to understand a subject requires a close relationship, built on trust. As such, he finds himself as a supporting character in all his work. Building those relationships takes effort, and the approach results in portraiture over a long period of time. Perhaps this is why the close relationships he already had – with Joshua’s family and Alasdair Gray – have yielded some of Rodge’s best work.
Rodge is using this same approach for his next book. He’s unable to talk about it, but said it was a biography of ‘a major British rock band.’ It’s due out next year. Rodge says it’s less about being too fast to live and too young to die, and more about, ‘what you have to do when you face the cartoon of your own past.’
You can find Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir at Waterstones and online. All proceeds from the book go to the Cure HHT charity and the UCLH Fetal Unit that cared for Joshua.
You can follow Rodge on Instagram at @rodge.glass and you can find more of his work at rodgeglassauthor.com
Byres Road Book Festival ran 25th-28th September 2025
Photo credit: Alan Dimmick
