Chapbooks from the Scottish Writers' Centre

On Tuesday 10th March, just before everything got a bit mad on the meeting up front, at the very lovely Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in inclement Glasgow, the Scottish Writers' Centre launched its beautiful chapbook - Island & Sea - the first in a series of five. I'm really happy to have had my poems chosen to be serialised throughout the series, and was delighted to have the chance to take part in the launch, and to get to hear the other work in the gorgeous wee chapbook, and the stories behind it.

Also I'd never before had the experience of a signing table, and that was gloriously friendly

I can't find the details of how to buy your own copy, because the Scottish Writers' Centre are working on their website just now, but perhaps you could email them here. It's a truly lovely little book, put together by Figment Books under the meticulous eye of the very lovely Laura Fyfe. I was hard pressed to choose a wee snippet to quote, but I couldn't go past Leonie's lapwings.

If you fancy getting your own poems into a future chapbook then I'm pleased to be able to tell you that submissions are open now, until May 24th, on the theme of city, town, and village. Apparently more details will be made available any moment now, but until they are, here are the details I used for submitting mine. The Scottish Writers' Centre are on Facebook and other social media, and should be getting their website sorted out soon.

Just while I'm here and talking of submitting work, Gutter magazine is also currently open for submissions (click here) until 27th March, and so is Dreich Magazine (I just got some poems into issue 4 - come join me - click here).

Comments

February update!

Hello! Please see above for a screenshot (not sure who the photo is by) from the lovely Fragmented Voices website which has my poem, Escaping Pheasants, as their featured poem today. This poem is inspired by the pheasants which are brought in to our local country house for people who are that way inclined to shoot. Sometimes I see them flapping down from the estate wall and on to the busy road, making a break for it toward the moors. Good luck pheasants. Escaping Pheasants also features in my book, Little Gods, published by the marvellous Roswell Publishing and available from booksellers and Amazon, or get in touch to get a signed copy from me. Other recent successes include two poems in Obsessed with Pipework #105, a Haiku in Coin Operated Press ' Haiku Zine, The Libraries came out in Culture Matters' Bread & Roses Anthology, and, as I mentioned last time, When you slow a bit you can see the way , another poem from Little Gods, came out in Butcher's Dog #19. I have ...

Happy New Year!

I can still wish you happy new year before January's out, right? Having spending a while doing research and convincing myself I can't write, I'm back in the room in 2019, sending my little baby poems out into the world. I have broken up the chapbook I was trying to get published, I've rewritten lots of stuff, and I'm happily sending them out to places where I hope they might find a happy home, while supporting some of the fantastic poetry magazines out there. One of those fantastic poetry magazines - Picaroon Poetry - run by the marvellous Kate Garrett - has already accepted one of my babies. It was one of the ones that I'd started to feel bored by, so I tore it to bits, rewrote it, and sent it off to Kate, who will be sending it out into the world in Picaroon Poetry #16 in May (which is terribly organised if you ask me, I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow!). Thanks Kate! Hopefully I'll be letting you all know about more successes soo...

discovering Iain Crichton Smith

I think I don't like poetry. In fact I'm pretty sure. What I like is a brick of a book with well rounded characters, who can take me on a journey with them. I find that for me poetry can be navel gazing, twee nonsense, so caught up in its clever cleverness that it drives me to distraction. But then again, I like lots of songs for their lyrics, and sometimes, just sometimes, I come across some poetry which just blows me away. I came across Iain Crichton Smith recently at my writing group. I live in Scotland, and the other members of the group were all saying that Smith is so much covered in Scottish English (and Gaelic) classes that people don't tend to notice the beauty of his poetry. I didn't go to school in Scotland. The poets I studied at school were people like Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley. I don't recall ever coming across anything like this. That said, I'm not sure that as a teenager I would have noticed it. Perhaps you have to have some i...

Skeleton Architecture

Search This Blog