Aye Write Festival, Mitchell Library, Glasgow

Dylan Jones on Jim Morrison (Saturday)

Harry Giles, Marion McCready and JL Williams: Vagabond Poets (Saturday)

David Ross: Glasgow's Railways and the Men behind Them (Sunday)

Fred MacAulay, Melanie Reid, William McIlvanney and Helen Fitzgerald: My Dog, My Friend (Sunday)

Patricia R Andrew: A Chasm in Time: Scottish War Art and Artists of the 20th Century (Sunday)

The first weekend of this year's Aye Write was an eclectic mix of dogs, poetry, war, art, popular music and railways, which always presents something of a challenge when you're trying to discern a common theme. What connects Jim Morrison with new poets, with a history of the railways, with war and death and the comfort our pets give us?

Perhaps it's only a shoring up of the self: certainly, the 'reverence and hero worship' still shown to Morrison, as evinced by the attention his grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery attracts, ought to be enough to ensure an immortal 'self' at least. Jones was revisiting a biography he'd written many years ago, but some fans might have bridled at the more up-to-date comparisons ("he was the Harry Styles of his day", Jones quipped at one point).

Stars are one thing, new talent another and the most striking aspect of the Vagabond Poets session, where they announced the next volume in their Tryptich series, Our Real Red Selves, was the dissonance between subject matter and voice. All three poets gave startlingly strong readings, but with different effects: Jennifer Williams' poems on war are as violent and as visceral as you might expect. Yet her quiet and gentle American accent, deliberately softened to caress words of hate and death, gives them more impact and force than if she had screamed them in our faces.

The shadow of slavery hangs over the early days of Glasgow's railways, with investment often coming from those plantation owners compensated when slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. Merchants like James McCall put their money in the new technology, but David Ross's excellent talk showed how haphazard and piecemeal the development of the railway system was, with competitors carving up the landscape between them, mainly focused on serving themselves and their chemical works. We saw paintings of owner after owner; none, alas, of the men on the ground surrounded by the soot and the stour.

If dogs can restore a sense of the self to a damaged mind, perhaps they should be available on the NHS. Melanie Reid read a moving extract of her dog's joy when she returned from hospital, after breaking her neck and back in a horse-riding accident. An adolescent Helen Fitzgerald found a companion and some space in an overcrowded family home in Australia. Mostly, though, this sold-out session reflected the laughter dogs bring to us that keeps us from tipping over the edge, perhaps, when it all gets too much.

Patricia Andrew's book, A Chasm in Time, contrasts some well-known war paintings with those we rarely see because they're not on exhibition in galleries, but adorn council offices or private buildings. She wanted to get away from what we think of as military art, though, and her history shows the work of war, the transport, the cooking, the factory making, and so on, which changed artists' outlook during the last century. This was a revealing and fascinating event that reminded us of the task facing artists during both world wars. Because the Imperial war Museum houses so much, she said, few feel the need to explore beyond it and discover the Scottish artists of the era, some of whom weren't officially chosen to record the war, but were coal miners, for instance, in the trenches, sneaking out pictures that the censors would never have allowed. From Ian Eadie painting air raid shelters in Dundee to Keith Henderson, working at Leuchars, we have striking images of war at home and in the air. Many artists, however, couldn't face drawing the horrors they'd witnessed, she said. Sometimes, there is only so much the self can take.