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!
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.
“Ian Grosz takes the reader on a journey, often on foot, to the half-hidden spiritual locales of the Don. Replete with historical and archaeological resonance, his journey through road, trail, stream and field is an elemental dance of often elusive elements. Spiritual faith as a palimpsest of earth, rock, water and culture remains a central theme as he leads us through histories of Gaelic saints, Pictish stones, cairns and Aberdeenshire stone circles with their distinctive recumbent stone. Places of transformation and spirituality are never far away from the divine river. The ancient goddess endures in a looping and recursive movement that exists differently from linear formulations of time and space.”
Neil Curtis and Jo Jones, Introduction, Four Rivers, Deep Maps, pp. 21-22.
The book Four Rivers: Deep Maps was published by UWAP and had an official launch early in Nov. There will be a second launch in the UK in the first quarter of 2023. The book has a diverse range of creative and scholarly responses to the two regions of Perth, WA, and Aberdeenshire. My own contribution is reviewed here by Neil Curtis in the book’s introduction:
UK stockists may be available next year, but if that’s piqued your interest, you can order the book directly from the publishers. Click on the image to go direct to UWAP for this and their other titles.
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.
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.
Groundings 