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.
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.
From July 22nd 2022, there will be an exhibition of work created by the Winter Artists in Residence hosted by Island Darkroom over early 2022.
Photographs taken during my research time on the island as part of my own residency will feature in the exhibition along with my thoughts and reflections following my stay. The research was for my PhD and the book that will hopefully come out of it, charting a journey back through the places that have featured in my life to better understand how the landscape can shape a sense of who we are. I was honoured that Island Darkroom drew on some of my writing for the title of the exhibition, and the work featured as a whole seems to chime with this theme.
If you’re in the Western Isles between 22nd July and 20th September, be sure to call in and check it out, with four international artists sharing exhibition space besides my own contribution.
You can find out more about the exhibition and the other events taking place at Island Darkroom by visiting their website and signing up to their newsletter, here.
Groundings 