publications

The Moor, the Sea, the Sky

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I’m delighted to have an essay included in the latest issue of Stravaig: an online journal for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics.

Based on the thinking and writings of Kenneth White, the centre describes Geopoetics as being ‘deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the centre of experience.

It seeks a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy [and] also seeks to express that sensitive and intelligent contact with the world by means of a poetics i.e. a language drawn from a way of being which attempts to express reality in different ways e.g. oral expression, writing, visual arts, music, and in combinations of different art forms, sciences and thinking.’

Geopoetics is by nature, interdisciplinary, and engages with a broad range of practitioners in the arts and sciences, bringing ways of expressing the world together through both the journal and regular symposiums, seminars, workshops and retreats.

My essay ‘The Moor, the Sea, the Sky’ is a development of earlier work first featuring on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place in 2022, and comes out of my residency with Island Dark Room in the February of that year as part of my wider PhD research. It explores the moorland of Lewis both symbolically through the work of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith, and viscerally through my own experience in context with the thinking of anthropologist Tim Ingold.

You can read the essay by downloading Stravaig 13 here.

Four Rivers, Deep Maps UK Launch

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After being published through UWAP in September 2022 and launched initially in Perth, WA, Four Rivers, Deep Maps comes to the UK with a launch event at the University of Aberdeen on Thursday 15th June in the Sir Duncan Rice Library. Click on the image above for details.

The cities – Perth, Australia, and Aberdeen, Scotland – have received relatively little attention as specific geographical–cultural locales. Often perceived as industrial, isolated and lacking romantic association, they nevertheless have rich historical, narrative and creative traditions that characterise interactions between humans and place, particularly along the length of the four rivers.

My own contribution charts the River Don from source to sea, uncovering its ancient sacred associations and exploring how they have shaped the geography and identity of the region through time.

All the contributions of this book are woven together through strands of deep mapping and ideas of place, history and inhabitation. Countercultures seem to return to specific place knowledge that predates industrialisation, whether in the traditional shapes of the Nyoongar knowledge of the Derbarl Yarrigan (Swan River) and Beeliar (Canning River) or the traditions and ancient patterns of Aberdeenshire: we come back to these profound knowledge systems that, in fact, never went away.

Copies of Four Rivers, Deep Maps are in stock at Blackwells and will be available to purchase on the night.

What I’m Reading

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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.

2022 Round Up

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Looking back over a busy year that started on the Isle of Lewis. My trip was delayed because of the storms in January, but the beginning of the year saw me spending ten days with Island Darkroom: a great opportunity that really helped my project find its feet. 

In February the world changed of course, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which continues to mar the world with violence, loss and sadness, and it’s difficult to believe that this terrible war has dragged on now for almost a year. All we can do is hope for a resolution in 2023 that will end the needless suffering as the people of Ukraine continue to be an inspiration.

Earlier in February my writing was included in Echtrai Ed. 1 with some wonderful company, and that led to an engaging chat with the lovely and never still Helen Needham for the BBC Scotland Outdoors podcast. I also had writing published with Little Toller’s The Clearing, Paul Scraton’s online journal Elsewhere, Southlight Magazine and Poetry Scotland.

In May I read work at a symposium with The Sir Herbert Grierson Centre, and in September I gave a workshop on writing Landscape and Place as part of the 2022 Wayword Lit. Arts festival. In November I gave a paper at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt for the Practicing Place conference.

Finally, my work featured in the long awaited book Four Rivers:Deep Maps with a chapter on the River Don, tracing its sacred associations from source to sea and exploring how they have shaped the area’s geography and identity over time. The book was published by UWAP in late September. 

I’m nearing the end of my major work-in-progress now and hope to get it out there next year which looks set to be as busy as the last, with some teaching work lined up, and hopefully an academic publication on my research and a further conference in the summer. Beyond that I hope to do some more workshops and get my thesis in on time! 

Wishing you all the very best for the year ahead and hoping the world finds itself a little kinder in 2023.

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.