There will be an official in-person launch event for Four Rivers: Deep Maps, held in Perth, Western Australia on Nov. 4th at 6-8pm AWST. And if you can’t manage to be in Australia by then, there will be a second event, planned for the UK in the first half of 2023. Dates to be confirmed.
For more information on the book project, click here. And to register FREE for the in-person Perth event, click on the image above.
I really enjoyed being a small part of WayWORD 2022 this last week: a cross-arts literary festival hosted by the WORD Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. I ran a workshop on writing Landscape and Place which was attended by a lovely group of folk who shared some wonderful writing coming out of the exercises we did. For me, it was a really special opportunity to share my passion and spend time talking about the relationship between landscape and memory, place and story, and to see the different ways in which others tapped into the landscape as a ready resource for their imaginations. I hope to run the workshop again in the future. Thanks go to Helen Lynch and her amazing team, and to the attendees who braved the wet weather to come along.
‘I can hear the distant sound of the ocean, smell the ozone in the air and feel the fine mist of salt-spray against my skin.’
A new short essay on The Clearing: A Journal of Nature, Landscape and Place published by Little Toller Books. The essay takes the reader to Luskentyre in southwest Harris in the Outer Hebrides, exploring its origins and the forces still at play there, set against the ever burgeoning problems of climate change. I visited Luskentyre during my winter residency with Island Darkroom back in February. The essay is a much abridged extract from a chapter in my longer work-in-progress that forms part of my PhD. Thanks go to Jon Woolcott for his expert editorial input, and to Little Toller for hosting such a great online journal. I hope you enjoy the essay’s evocation of Luskentyre’s sense of place and time, which you can read here.
For the latest episode of From the Old Brewery, I had a great chat with Dr. Helen Lynch of Aberdeen University. Helen is a short-story author and Director of the WORD Centre for Creative Writing. Along with a host of paid student committee members and intern staff, Helen manages the annual WayWORD cross-arts literary festival. I talk with her about the work of the centre, the festival, and the opportunities she has been able to create for students to get involved. Joining her is Bea Livesey-Stephens, the current WORD Centre intern and EDI officer for this year’s festival.
You can listen here or search your preferred podcast platform.
Coming September 2022 from UWA Publishing: a creative and critical engagement with place that crosses hemispheres and challenges typical perceptions of two often overlooked regions.
It’s been a long time in the making, a journey that began back in the summer of 2019. We all know what happened shortly afterwards but really happy to see the project come to fruition: a collaboration between writers, poets, artists and academic researchers to create a deep map of four rivers: the Derbari Yerrigan (Swan) and Dyarlgarro Beeliar (Canning) rivers in southwest Australia, and the Don and Dee rivers in northeast Scotland, weaving narratives of place across seemingly disparate regions of the world into a thoughtful, provoking and surprising engagement with landscape.
My own contribution charts the river Don through time, revealing how its once sacred associations during the Neolithic, Pictish and early medieval periods still shape the region today.
Looking forward to its release this September.
Edited by Dr. Jo Jones with Neil Curtis.
Follow @uwapublishing for details of this and their other titles.
Groundings 