creative writing

The Moor, the Sea, the Sky

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I’m delighted to have an essay included in the latest issue of Stravaig: an online journal for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics.

Based on the thinking and writings of Kenneth White, the centre describes Geopoetics as being ‘deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the centre of experience.

It seeks a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy [and] also seeks to express that sensitive and intelligent contact with the world by means of a poetics i.e. a language drawn from a way of being which attempts to express reality in different ways e.g. oral expression, writing, visual arts, music, and in combinations of different art forms, sciences and thinking.’

Geopoetics is by nature, interdisciplinary, and engages with a broad range of practitioners in the arts and sciences, bringing ways of expressing the world together through both the journal and regular symposiums, seminars, workshops and retreats.

My essay ‘The Moor, the Sea, the Sky’ is a development of earlier work first featuring on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place in 2022, and comes out of my residency with Island Dark Room in the February of that year as part of my wider PhD research. It explores the moorland of Lewis both symbolically through the work of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith, and viscerally through my own experience in context with the thinking of anthropologist Tim Ingold.

You can read the essay by downloading Stravaig 13 here.

Four Rivers, Deep Maps UK Launch

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After being published through UWAP in September 2022 and launched initially in Perth, WA, Four Rivers, Deep Maps comes to the UK with a launch event at the University of Aberdeen on Thursday 15th June in the Sir Duncan Rice Library. Click on the image above for details.

The cities – Perth, Australia, and Aberdeen, Scotland – have received relatively little attention as specific geographical–cultural locales. Often perceived as industrial, isolated and lacking romantic association, they nevertheless have rich historical, narrative and creative traditions that characterise interactions between humans and place, particularly along the length of the four rivers.

My own contribution charts the River Don from source to sea, uncovering its ancient sacred associations and exploring how they have shaped the geography and identity of the region through time.

All the contributions of this book are woven together through strands of deep mapping and ideas of place, history and inhabitation. Countercultures seem to return to specific place knowledge that predates industrialisation, whether in the traditional shapes of the Nyoongar knowledge of the Derbarl Yarrigan (Swan River) and Beeliar (Canning River) or the traditions and ancient patterns of Aberdeenshire: we come back to these profound knowledge systems that, in fact, never went away.

Copies of Four Rivers, Deep Maps are in stock at Blackwells and will be available to purchase on the night.

Fields of Meaning

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The latest podcast from the postgraduate community at Aberdeen University’s School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture where I interview author Eden Unger Bowditch with fellow creative writer Jane Hughes.

Eden talks about her novel in progress Two-Hundred-and-Fifty Years at Home and her thesis Fields of Meaning which examines the role of ambiguity in the literary text. You can listen to it through clicking on the image above or find it on your preferred podcast platform.

An Open Book

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Really excited to be setting up a new Open Book writing group in Aberdeenshire in the coming weeks.

Open Book are a fantastic organisation, set up in 2013 to help build communities through shared reading. Their groups now encompass creative writing and have been set up across Scotland. They are expanding their current provision with a Growth Pilot of 5 further groups in areas not currently served and which I’m very happy to be a part of.

Details will follow!

What I’m Reading

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I’m a day late for International Women’s Day, but this collection of great books by wonderful women authors all offer thoughtful and enlightening perspectives on landscapes, belonging, and the nature of home and homelands. I was lucky enough to hear Chitra Ramaswamy, Kerri Andrews and Amanda Thomson read and discuss their work at Pitlochry Theatre’s Winter Words Festival last month, and I’ve been following the trajectory of Pamela Petro’s The Long Field since being published, with a new paperback edition just out.

Kerri’s entertaining, funny and at times, moving book, re-writes the canon on mountain literature, and the place of women writers within it, while Pamela Petro’s Long Field is a deep exploration of longing, language and identity. Amanda Thomson’s book weaves personal narratives of place and self through the forests of Abernethy, and Chitra Ramaswamy’s book is an exploration of borders and identities through a poignant and very moving account of her long standing friendship with two Holocaust survivors.

Each of these books explore place and identity in different ways, and speak to us at a time when both of these things are at the fore in the national and global narratives that are reshaping our world.

Great books by great women writers.