After the successful completion of the growth pilot earlier this year, and following a successful funding bid through Creative Scotland, Open Book Reading have announced that they can support all the groups that took part in the pilot, and so I’m delighted to be able to continue the work of the charity through leading a group in partnership with Live Life Aberdeenshire.
The wider community project runs from October this year to September next, and will consist of eight supported sessions exploring stories and poems and nurturing a supportive environment to try creative writing. We’ll also be visiting a literary festival together and fostering a sense of community through the shared enjoyment of literature and poetry.
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.
Looking back over a busy year that started on the Isle of Lewis. My trip was delayed because of the storms in January, but the beginning of the year saw me spending ten days with Island Darkroom: a great opportunity that really helped my project find its feet.
In February the world changed of course, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which continues to mar the world with violence, loss and sadness, and it’s difficult to believe that this terrible war has dragged on now for almost a year. All we can do is hope for a resolution in 2023 that will end the needless suffering as the people of Ukraine continue to be an inspiration.
In May I read work at a symposium with The Sir Herbert Grierson Centre, and in September I gave a workshop on writing Landscape and Place as part of the 2022 Wayword Lit. Arts festival. In November I gave a paper at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt for the Practicing Place conference.
Finally, my work featured in the long awaited book Four Rivers:Deep Mapswith a chapter on the River Don, tracing its sacred associations from source to sea and exploring how they have shaped the area’s geography and identity over time. The book was published by UWAP in late September.
I’m nearing the end of my major work-in-progress now and hope to get it out there next year which looks set to be as busy as the last, with some teaching work lined up, and hopefully an academic publication on my research and a further conference in the summer. Beyond that I hope to do some more workshops and get my thesis in on time!
Wishing you all the very best for the year ahead and hoping the world finds itself a little kinder in 2023.
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.
Groundings 