Place

The Don: A Sacred River

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“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.

Practicing Place

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One of the great things about researching something academically as well as creatively, is that you get to geek out over your topic at the occasional conference, and I’m really looking forward to attending a conference next week at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt’s Practicing Place Centre in Bavaria.

The conference is multi-disciplinary in nature and focuses on the different ways we practice and make place: ways of ‘doing’ and being. The key note speaker is the renowned geographer Tim Creswell, who is also a published poet with a PhD in creative writing. My creative exploration of landscape and place is underpinned by some of the thinking in cultural geography as well as anthropology, so I’m very interested to hear and to learn from Tim’s opening presentation covering the theme of Routes.

My own presentation comes as part of the ‘Sensing and Storying’ panel following Tim’s opening address, and draws on some of the thinking in anthropology and cultural geography to explore the idea of the presence of absence in the landscape as one way of approaching an understanding of place.

There are six panels of speakers in total, covering the themes of ‘Sensing and Storying’, ‘Contestations’, ‘Imagining and Creating’, ‘Productions and Reproductions’, and ‘Constructing the City.’ I’ve never been to Germany, and with such a packed couple of days exploring how we make and experience Place, it’s a trip I’m really looking forward to.

You can read more about the conference here. Its output will be subsequently published by the centre.

Four Rivers: Deep Maps Launch Event

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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.

WayWORD 2022

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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.

New Essay on The Clearing

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‘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.