Residencies

New Work in Southlight Magazine

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

Happy to have work back in Southlight magazine having contributed to two previous issues. There will be a live reading event at The Yellow Door Gallery in Dumfries on June 11th at 6.00pm with actual people! Sadly I won’t be able to make it, but I hope anyone in the Dumfries area will call in and listen to the work of the other contributors present; and please do pick up a copy, either on the day or through Southlight’s own website. The issue is full of great writing by some well-known Scottish writers including the prolific Margaret Elphinstone and writer and poet Hugh McMillan along with many others, not to mention a forward by editor Vivien Jones. My own contribution is an essay with accompanying images which continues an exploration of Lewis stemming from my residency with Island Darkroom in February and first appeared in abridged form in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place.

Reflections

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

“No place remains static and unchanged, frozen in its past, but the past gives us a sense of place and belonging that helps shape our future, and this is what Lewis has shown me.”

Some thoughts on my recent residency on Lewis with Island Darkroom have been posted up on their site. I was very grateful for the opportunity to spend time there in February, and you can read the full account of what I have taken away from it, here:

Island Darkroom Residency

New Piece on Lewis Published.

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

‘No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat…’

Very pleased to have a new piece of writing feature on Paul Scraton’s online blog Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. It has come out of wider work stemming from my recent residency on Lewis with Island Darkroom, and explores the legacy of the island through its impact on the work of poet Iain Crichton Smith. Click on the image above to read.

A Dream of Stones

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

I drove to Calanais in the rain, looking for the stones. I found them there, standing tall in the mist, like a distant dream I had once dreamt but long forgotten, a silent memory. Did they walk this way those thousands of years ago? What gods and spirits did they dream of; what lost stories did they tell? Where do they dream now, long buried in the ground? Across Loch Ròg to Kirkibost the sleeping woman lies, and the Shining One waits in the west. Too many stories wait here, commodified even now: unreal place, resting in its unknown truth.

Wind and Tide

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

I looped round Harris before another storm blew through, chasing echoes from the past: old saints and their stories; old places filled with memory, fleeting shadows from another time. Losgaintir shone with a cold brilliance against its ancient hills. Time slept, dreaming the ocean, its voice lost to the wind without echo or meaning. I drove back through a landscape of splintered rock as old as the earth, leaving the beach and its impossible confluence behind.