publications

The Don: A Sacred River

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

“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

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

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

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

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.

Cover Reveal!

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

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

/ isgfreelance / Leave a comment

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.