Back in in the 90s, a junior Michael Pedersen suspected something was rotten with masculinity. He was labelled a ‘poof’ in high school after unashamedly adoring row-boat trips on the Union Canal with his friend Daniel, someone he now recognises was his ‘first love in many respects’. He looked on enviously as his big sister linked arms with female pals and invited them over for sleepovers. ‘Boys didn’t get to do that. There wasn’t that same physical vocabulary. It felt somehow bereft. I was often called a soppy git; there was pressure to be stoic instead.’

Poet and author Pedersen is all too aware of the dangerous consequences that this forced masking of real emotions can have for men. After Daniel’s father ended his life when Pedersen was a teenager, tragically, one of Pedersen’s dearest friends, the singer-songwriter and artist Scott Hutchison also died by suicide in May 2018. Pedersen and Hutchison were midway through a book tour at the time; Hutchison had illustrated a book of Pedersen’s poetry, Oyster.

Pedersen’s newly published memoir Boy Friends is a deeply tender love letter to his cherished buddy. It also serves as a manual for not just navigating grief but celebrating all friendships, including ones that have ended, sometimes abruptly, other times more gradually. ‘I still talk to Scott, out loud,’ says Pedersen, speaking over Skype from a bedroom in Paris where Serge Gainsbourg once romanced Jane Birkin. During a six-week tour, the ebullient 37-year-old vocabularian is shoehorning in a residency at Shakespeare And Company bookshop before a string of UK literary festivals. 

‘After an interview, I’ll maybe check in that he was OK with what I said. If I said anything he didn’t like, I’ll tell him I owe him a pint. You can roleplay with grief; it helps,’ says Pedersen, who runs a literary salon called Good Grief! which returns to the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August. This year’s guest performers, chosen by Pedersen, are queer Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong and Malaysian-Australian poet Omar Musa. The remit is to find joyous ways of exploring those normally hidden depths of sorrow. 

Pedersen’s book, while at times casually crushing in its depiction of heartache, is also dogged in a desire to find life’s visceral thrills and bask as often as possible in zesty moments of pleasure. Like his poetry, Pedersen’s prose is energetic and dazzling, but the whimsy and giddiness of some of his earlier writing is replaced with sage candour; a by-product of the sudden sucker punch dealt by his friend’s death. ‘I wanted to avoid any kind of pomposity,’ says Pedersen, who approached the genre of memoir with due caution. Any danger of seeming up himself is quashed early on with stories of his mawkish reaction to a pet hamster dying or his boyhood problem of piddling himself.

Writing about Hutchison’s death provided a welcome conduit for Pedersen to explore male friendship in general, and by extension the fluid parameters of platonic, romantic and sexual love. It’s also a warmly spun yarn, catching the reader up on Pedersen’s story so far, where he has trained as a solicitor, dabbled in heroin and set up the hugely successful Neu! Reekie literary collective and performance series, among other things.

‘Going through this enormous jumble sale of memories, I needed to write things down to preserve these sacred moments. There was a cathartic compulsion to create this archived friendship history. Using my cerebral apparatus and sensuality and sentimentality, I wanted to move past the histrionics of tumultuous times in the past and enjoy the glorious splendour and fun that my friendships have brought me.’ 

Michael Pedersen, 24 August, 7pm; Good Grief!, 26 August, 7pm; both events at Edinburgh College Of Art.