As promised, this is a nanoBOOK™

Here we are, a nanoBOOK™ we made earlier.  Credit to my younger son for idea and artwork.  To join the Science Fiction in a Flash workshop for children aged from about 9 years upwards (but younger if they are keen writers), book places on 07504 649 150. 

Science Fiction in a Flash, where you get to make your own nanoBOOK™, is part of Wild Science Family Mayhem! Day at the Rutherford McCowan Building, Crichton Campus, Dumfries.  The workshop is from 10.30-12 noon.

Getting ever so 21st century

Ravenglass Poetry Press have just arranged for 'The Treeless Region' to appear as an e-book.  If I had a Kindle, I could read it on it.  This is simultaneously very nice, and quite strange. 
It's probably a good thing, because of course if you write, you hope someone else will read, and perhaps new platforms for reading will just increase readership, and even opportunities for reading.  I like to think of executives skiving into poetry during long meetings. 

Here it is, anyway.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/THE-TREELESS-REGION-ebook/dp/B004ZULP6Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM

I'm thrilled to relate that 'Lost At Sea' has been shortlisted for the Callum MacDonald Memorial Award, http://www.nls.uk/news/press/2011/04/callum-macdonald-competition-shortlist .  I feel I'm in tremendous company, and am much looking forward to the big night on 19 May, when all will be revealed. (But I think Anna Crowe should win! See below, I am a fan.)

And I'd not got over this before Hugh Bryden was on the phone again to announce that Roncadora Press has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publisher's Award.  I am very proud to say that 'Lost At Sea' was part of his submission.  Hope Hugh wins, he deserves it.  I've not forgotten seeing his studio and his house stacked high with half-built pamphlets, which he equably stitches and glues away at with astonishing speed and deftness.  http://www.bl.uk/poetrypamphlets/publishers.html

Places & Poetry Postcards - my free workshop for children at RSPB Mersehead

I'm running a free workshop for children as part of Dumfries & Galloway Wildlife Festival.  It's called Places & Poetry Postcards, and it's at RSPB Mersehead on Friday 15 April.  Meet at 10am.  We'll go outside first for inspiration and exploration, then come in to draft, edit and generally write some poems onto Poetry Postcards, hand-stamped and decorated to take away with you. Ring me on 07504 649 150 to book.

Scotland's Poetry Capital

I've returned from my first visit to St Andrew's and StAnza 2011, head spilling over with words.  It's felt like a long weekend because so much was new and so much was going on, and now I'm back, a short one.

The town seemed almost constantly sunny, crowstepped, winding, full of people.  Hey, it's nice, though I did think the high-end shopping must reflect the royals-at-uni element.   

The only regular festival dedicated to poetry in Scotland had chosen as themes for 2011 Timepiece and The Poet's Ark.  Certainly I heard great discussions of history in poetry - and some great poems - at a delicious Poetry Breakfast (pastries, poetry and coffee, I rest my case).  And interesting thoughts about how writing about place implicitly invites us to write about time.  And Polly Atkin did a great reading (at pointblank range, standing in for a missing poet) which addressed the Ark.   Eerie, feral foxes and a wonderfully exact little poem I've heard before featuring frogs in a child's red tin wheelbarrow.

A treat for me was to be there with what Hugh Bryden calls the 'Roncadora Stable'.  www.hughbryden.com  Roncadora featured in the StAnza programme as one of the invited exhibitions ‘Black and White’, which was installed in the picturesque – and appropriate – half timbered surroundings of the Trust House Museum. 

Rab Wilson and Hugh McMillan both read on the main programme.  Rab was launching not only his new pamphlet (though that is too small a word for this creation) ‘Ye’re There Horace!’, a Scots version of Horace’s Odes, but also his great new collection from Luath, ‘A Map for the Blind’.  (I still want one Rab).

Hugh McMillan’s reading was likewise at sell-out, with the audience emerging still grinning.  His new Roncadora pamphlet, a nifty version of drystone origami, ‘Cairn’ is a bit of a beauty.

Andy Forster, who was Literature Development Officer in D&G for 5 years before he went off to work for The Wordsworth Trust over the border in Cumbria, was at StAnza with his lovely Roncadora pamphlet ‘Digging’.  He was very good at being there for the craic, too.    

I went to see my Roncadora pamphlet, ‘Lost At Sea’, looking beautiful in an old fashioned glass-topped museum case in the Trust House Museum.  I met many new friends in the space of three days, and was made very welcome.

From Catriona Taylor's 'A Thousand Sails' inspired by Sorley McLean

 Sleep was short and the gaps between readings, workshops, exhibitions, discussion groups and talking a lot in the café-bar were extremely short.  Highlights were the Poet’s Market, the SPL's gigantic Knit A Poem (it’s a Dylan Thomas poem and would cover a village green), Philip Gross, Ciaran Carson, Douglas Dunn, Marilyn Hacker, Catriona Taylor’s gorgeous exhibition ‘A Thousand Sails’ inspired by Sorley McLean, and more…

Writing about a derelict beauty spot

Crichope Linn was once a destination.  It possessed all that a devotee of Romantic Landscape could desire, and folk came on the train, got off at Closeburn Station, queued up in the station yard to board a charabanc, and bowled between the narrow dykes and hedges to the foot of the Linn Burn some three miles away.

No-one's got off at Closeburn Station for some time.  In fact the last time I remember it being in the news some entrepreneurial villager was caught using a station shed for the cultivation of a cannabis crop.  But Crichope Linn was much visited throughout the 19th and early 20th century. It was much written on too, by early Banksy types who could handle a neat chisel for Roman capitals.

Perhaps its paths were better maintained then, and its vegetation managed.  It was in a wild state when I clambered up in mid February, trees down and tangled, the path sliding away, fresh rockfall damming the burn. It has a bleak and gothic appeal.

Here's a cinquain about those trees.

Wind like
a weight that can’t
be borne.  The sound of wood
tearing.  Enormity of dark.
Treefall.

I'm writing about it for a project called 'Writing Ground', as are friends and poets Vivien Jones, Jackie Galley and Fiona Russell.  We'll present our efforts at a reading on Friday 15 April, with support from University of Glasgow at the Crichton,.as part of the programme for Dumfries & Galloway Wildlife Festival.  7pm.  The Midsteeple, Dumfries.  Free wine, you know.

Finding Archipelago

I went along to The Crichton where indefatigable Dumfries poetry campaigner Dave Borthwick had arranged no less than the launch of Archipelago 5, from Clutag Press.  Bending my flexi-time at work quite elastically, I managed to get there to hear Andrew McNeillie deliver a really interesting talk about the origins of this creamy, slow-paced, textured publication.  Apparently Archipelago was born after a liquid lunch in Barcelona, which is quite a pleasing thought in itself, but I really enjoyed Andrew's descriptions of his early life in Wales, and his sense of his destiny across the Irish Sea to Galloway, and the lost wonder of North Clutag, the family farm in Galloway.  He talked then about spending time as a young man on the Aran Islands, and waved around a book or two, which I will track down.
We all went off with a back number of Archipelago, which I have enjoyed so much I've actually bought the next one off the website http://www.clutag-archipelago.com/  Beautiful artwork by Norman Ackroyd, Stac Lee and Stac Armin, and more.  Some satisfying essays, strange, edge of the horizon poetry from Peter Mackay and John Burnside.

'Lost At Sea' launches (no tacking)

The grey waters of Hugh Bryden's beautiful treatment of my 'Lost At Sea' saw their official launch last week.  Gracefield Arts Centre Cafe was so packed out for me and Andy Forster (launching the excellent 'Digging') that more chairs were scurried for.  Oh it cheers you up so much when you're about to read.

I realised on the way to the event, packed into a car in the murky dark of February with rather a lot of my family, that 'Lost At Sea' is a kind of travelogue.  It proved to be one of the easiest readings, because of this, I think - it has its own internal narrative, in which both the Shetland Islands and my great grandfather and his family are explored, and glimpses caught of them.

My 82 year old mum came along, and it was lovely to read to her, as she has done all the family research that I have (rather) plundered.  She kept beaming at me.  I found reading 'The Ditty Box of Thomas Gilbert Hunter Aiken' to be a strange kind of crux, as it contains many of the fragments of story that come down the generations.  I suppose this is how our lives are likely to be summarised.  And they're not likely to be so adventurous. 

I've got his telescope safe.  But will I one day have to decide whether to keep that charts table?

The Ditty Box of Thomas Gilbert Hunter Aiken


That he left Church Closs
and his mother and stowed
away on a Tyne collier
at thirteen, dodging on board
in the wash and blow
of Lerwick harbour.

That sometimes he ate
ships biscuits so maggoty they
shuffled across his plate. That he sailed
round the Horn. That he shivered
one winter on a vessel held ice-bound
for weeks in the Baltic.

That he was wrecked
in the tide-race of Ushant, rescued
by a brig bound for Cuba and dropped
at the mouth of the Tagus to row
under Torre de Belem
into white-paved Lisbon.

That in Valparaiso he
punched a man and knocked him
overboard and then
jumped in and saved him. 
That he married twice but no-one
ever mentioned the first time.

That he had a strong face, a trim beard
and fierce eyebrows.  His eyes look far
past my shoulder.  That we know this
from a photograph.  And also have his telescope,
his drawing instruments and his cut-down,
hacked-about charts table.

That he lived to see his sons survive the War
and held his grandchildren, as babies.
That his sextant and the ditty box went missing
at last, in the bombing of Liverpool
in 1940.  That he never
went back to Lerwick.

Real Place and Katrina Porteous

Spent Saturday down at The Wordsworth Trust, enjoying a workshop run by Katrina Porteous entitled 'Spirit of Place' and looking at writing about place.  I liked her take on keeping it real, as it were, and being outside.  She'd brought a mysterious tupperware box full of soily, sandy objects (I had to imagine them, as will be explained) - which was never opened, due to the workshop taking place in the inner sanctum of the Wordsworth Trust, the Reading Room in the Jerwood Centre.  Strikingly beautiful, this room houses the treasures of the Romantic Era and as such has its light and heating controlled for the preservation of irreplaceable manuscripts.  No sandy, soily pebbles, rabbit skulls, damp bits of moss are allowed. 

So we went outside and did entertaining exercises based on close focus, and sounds near to and further away.  Truly interesting conversations and readings of different poems.  Dialect words and placenames.  I'm obsessed by placenames and besotted by maps.  I bought a copy of Katrina's 'Dunstanburgh', which was created as a radio play and designed for many voices.  I am very taken with its rhythms and half rhymes, and its sense of interrupted narratives and layered voices -

'In the courtyard, around the foundations,
The kitchens, the chapel, the Constable's chambers,

Leathery wings flit.  Woodlice trundle,
Armour on stone.  A spider trembles

A web's bull's-eye in the moon's full glare
On the arc of its journey, fierce white fire

Catches and fills a heart-shaped window.

And the deepest dark of the castle walls -
Doors going nowhere, hearths, holes,

Gardrobes, stairways bent at odd angles -
Join with the wider dark, the miles

Of field and heugh, and wind-blown fell,

Millenia of dark, the men
And women lost beyond recall,

Absorbed in silence, earth and stone.

Stones, Motels and Roncadora Press

Graham Fulton reading from Black Motel



Hugh McMillan reading Cairn



The cafe bar at Gracefield Arts Centre was filled with laughing people this evening, who just now and again emitted The Pause, followed by The Slight Sigh.  So it was cracking good poetry from Graham Fulton, visiting us from Paisley, and from Hugh McMillan, who must have rowed in from Penpont.

Roncadora Press has its beautiful work all over the walls.  There was Rab's 'Horace's First Buik o Satires', and Andy Forster's 'Digging', the Devorgilla Bridge (that got its piccy in The Guardian last year) and John Burns' new pamphlet with the glorious coloured cover. Hugh B has made such an amazing job of 'Lost At Sea' that I feel no shame at all standing in front of it admiringly. 

The Poetry of Soup

I have to say that in this pic we have already
eaten rather a lot of it.

Our last and largest pumpkin ripened in the conservatory, turning from a striped green to a deep orange in light and frost-free conditions.  Though it got so sharp outside(so minus 16)that in the end I did worry about the frost free bit. 
Every now and then I remembered to check the pumpkin was still solid.  Last weekend I carried it back into the kitchen, and distilled a huge pot of golden soup from last summer's store. 

Sorry if this sounds smug, but, you know, I am.  Think of all that weeding and forking compost.  My dues are paid.  The ends have justified the means. I claim this comfort in the black-ice dark of January. 
As Robert Crawford so rightly said:
'A soup so thick you could shake its hand
and stroll with it before dinner.'