Scottish writing
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I was shocked and saddened, like the Scottish literary world in general, to learn back in February that Gavin Wallace, the head of literature at Creative Scotland, had died. I didn’t know Gavin well, but I can say with certainty that The North End of the Possible would not be the book it is without the
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There was a goodly crowd for the Scottish Poetry Library‘s flash mob outside St Giles this lunchtime. It was fun! I saw several lovely people I wouldn’t normally see of a lunchtime and was interviewed by a journalist, though I probably wittered nonsense away at her. There’s a video on The Scotsman website with footage
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January 25th is nearly upon us once more, and the world resounds to the tones of Burns’s poems. The Scottish Poetry Library and Let’s Get Lyrical have come up with a typically fun and inventive way of celebrating our most celebrated of Scots poets: a flashmob outside St Giles cathedral tomorrow at 1 pm. Instructions
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At last I’m able to unzip my lips and announce that The Ambulance Box has been shortlisted for the first book category in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards 2010! I’ve had to sit on the news for about a fortnight until the Scottish Arts Council, which administers the prize, made it public. I
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It’s just over a week to Linlithgow Book Festival 2009. The festival has managed to attract another great line-up on the usual funding shoestring, so please support it. I’ll be running a workshop on the Saturday morning, compering the open mic event on the Sunday evening and reading along with Jane McKie, Alistair Findlay, Douglas
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It was a week for anthologies last week, what with the Forward book arriving in the post and the launch of The Golden Hour Book Vol ii at Blackwell’s on South Bridge (the old James Thin shop, for those who remember that much-lamented Edinburgh institution of yore). The GH book is a triumph, I have to
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Tomorrow night, I’m on home turf to launch The Ambulance Box in Linlithgow’s Black Bitch Inn*. I’m expecting a smaller crowd than at the SPL, but looking forward to it just as much. The event kicks off at 8 pm. There’s a bar and I’ll be reading two 15-minute sets, though I’ve yet to decide
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I’d been exercised by the second half of this all day, and then I see that not only has Rob Mackenzie blogged about it already, but Roddy Lumsden has replied in the comments section. Briefly, Roddy is baffled by the sparse number of established Scottish poets in my generation: those born in the 1970s and
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Jane McKie’s Knucker Press launches what looks like an interesting new pamphlet tonight: Way Out by Victoria Macrae. Here’s what the press’s website has to say about it: In early 2008 Victoria Macrae spent 65 days, 19 hours and 37 minutes as an in-patient in Ward 6 of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. During this period
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Linlithgow Book Festival now has a Facebook presence. With the full programme listed there, it’s a great way for Facebookers to keep up to date with what’s happening with West Lothian’s literary festival.
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One of the questions that one always faces with an anthology is what is its rationale, its purpose and aim? Like its team mates 100 Favourite Scottish Poems and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems to Read Aloud, 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, edited by Alistair Findlay, hints at a kind of democratising of the canon in
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One question that arises for the new terminology is whether it can cover rhyme practice in languages other than English adequately. It ought to be able to, as it’s based on phonetic/phonemic correspondence rather than any single tradition of what does or doesn’t constitute a rhyme. In this post, I start to test it out
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Alistair Findlay, notable not least for The Love Songs of John Knox, has just edited an anthology entitled 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems. More of that in due course but, meanwhile, here here is some related light entertainment, courtesy of the Tartan Army on its way to do its gentlemanly battle with the Ukraine. Proof
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If you’ve been following my and Rob A Mackenzie‘s posts about our manuscript swap, you’ll probably be waiting for the more detailed comments I promised on Rob’s poems*, so here they finally are. There’s a lot of very good stuff in Rob’s MS, with a few really fine poems. Think of Rob A Mackenzie, and
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I can’t help but think that last night’s Shore Poets event could have shown some of Thursday night‘s slammers a thing or two about how imaginative and contentful something that might be described as a performance poem can be. Nowhere was that more the case than in the closing set, from the night’s main reader,
Amy Jo Philip 