literature

Cover Reveal!

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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.

New Work in Southlight Magazine

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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.

Deep Wheel Aberdonia

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I’m looking forward to taking part in this symposium on the 04th May at the University of Aberdeen:

Deep Wheel Aberdonia is an event celebrating writing from and about Scottish islands with special guest Harry Josephine Giles, author of recently published verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia, in which Orkney and its language are taken on a strange science-fiction journey, carving out a radical new space for Scottish writing.

The event will be chaired by Centre co-director Professor David Wheatley and also feature Orcadian poet Ingrid Leonard, who will read from her recently-published pamphlet Rammo in Stenness (Abersee Press). I will be sharing work stemming from my residency at Island Darkroom which explores how Lewis has helped to shape the work of poets Donald MacAulay, Iain Crichton Smith and Derick Thomson.

More details can be found here.

Poetry Scotland

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I would never consider myself a serious poet, but I do like to dabble now and then, and I am very happy to have my short poem ‘Planets’ included in Poetry Scotland Issue 103.

The magazine has a long and distinguished history, summed up here from the Poetry Scotland website:

“Poetry Scotland began in the 1940s when Maurice Lindsay started publishing books and anthologies of new poetry under this title. There were three issues of Poetry Scotland and a series of slim hardback books by poets of the day, including Hugh MacDiarmid. Then there followed a hiatus until 1997 when, with Maurice Lindsay’s support, Sally Evans and Ian King of Diehard Press began to publish Poetry Scotland as a broadsheet, aiming from the first to be inclusive, encouraging women, minority languages and people from country airts.”

Now under the editorship of Andy Jackson and Judy Taylor, it publishes poems from across the UK, twice-yearly in the A4 broadsheet format of its previous incarnation. You can subscribe and purchase individual issues on the Poetry Scotland website.