Jen Hadfield

Share your poetry with a large, appreciative & captive audience!

2011-12-01T06:35:00.000-08:00

As the Shetland Library's Reader-in-Residence, I'll be selecting six new poems to grace the doors of public toilets in Shetland in a new round of 'Bards in the Bog'. Poems can be on any subject, but must be written by the entrant, unpublished and less than 12 lines so that they can be enlarged

to large print. Send/drop in entries to the Shetland Library or email them to jen.hadfield@shetland.gov.uk, including contact details so we can let you know if your poem's been chosen.

Deadline for submissions 21st December. Poems will appear in public toilets from January 2012.

Shetland Library, Lower Hillhead, Lerwick, Shetland, ZE1 0EL

shetland-library.gov.uk

Readers in Residence is developed and administered by Shetland Arts Development Agency and part of Creative Scotland¹s Creative Futures programme<http://www.creativescotland.com/investment/creative-futures>: promoting, connecting and developing Scotland's creative practitioners

Creative Futures Blog

2011-11-25T02:33:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a partial sabbatical from this blog to post about my tenure as Reader-in-Residence at the Shetland Library on Creative Futures. Hopefully see you there!

In between lots of exciting Reader Development work...

2011-11-23T07:55:00.001-08:00

I'm thinking about my 'jargon' collaboration with Doug Robertson again...I wish I wasn't so SLOW...

'Go not – today at least – through the wilds of Dunrossness...'

2011-11-09T09:48:00.000-08:00

My second day in as the Shetland Library's Reader in Residence, I join a lunch-hour book-group on the Mezzanine. It's grim out, but the Mezzanine's a comfortable place to nest down in, with Scott's The Pirate on the menu.

'I liked it...until I fell asleep in the middle' confesses one member. Like many, I find dense, historical tales like The Pirate a wee bit daunting, but the group agree that they've found a good way to tackle the Victorian novel. Reading manageable portions each week, with the prospect of discussing the chapters informally, helps them appreciate things like Scott's dramatic scene-setting and wry, self-deprecating humour.

The Pirate is set in Shetland, and a debate follows about how true we feel Scott's depiction is to Shetland landscape and culture. Some think Scott's Shetland – such as his account of the Shetlander's delicacy and hospitality on meeting a stranger – is convincing. A reader has brought along a portrait of Scott's Magnus Troil that currently hangs in the Shetland Museum, sporting some very dashing Fair Isle socks. The connection is made between Norna, with her supernatural powers, to Bessie Millie of Stromness, who used to sell favourable winds to sailors. We think Scott slips up a bit when he describs the typical Shetland female as blonde and blue-eyed though...

The time comes for me to introduce myself and my post as Reader in Residence at the Shetland Library. It's basically – as one of the book-group says – the perfect job. The writer's life is rewarding but often solitary. It's going to be a treat to drop the hermit bit and to work with our heroic library staff, who toil to help readers across Shetland get hold of their next book-shaped fix.

A library is one of the most democratic institution we have: giving everyone in its community the same opportunities for professional and personal growth. It's a no-brainer that libraries are good things but, at the risk of sounding partisan, I think we're particularly blessed with ours.

Whatever you want to read, the staff will do all they can to help you get your paws on it. Mobile and housebound staff zip around Shetland all week to bring the collection to those who can't get to Hillhead. School librarians are champing at the bit to help students with their research and literacy skills and dedicated volunteers offer other services such as recording the Shetland Times for the visually-impaired, so that no one has to miss out on Friday's all-important news, info and gossip.

The Shetland Library also brings Scottish Government schemes like Bookbug and Booktime to brand-new readers, and will help you click with computers. They host book-groups, readings and author events, and on Monday and Thursday nights open late, providing a peaceful and relaxed place to hang out, read, work or check your emails. Immense beanbags and squashy sofas at your disposal. They'll help you set up your own book-group, too.

So what's left for a Reader-in-Residence to do? It's my job to encourage folk to step over our threshold for the first time and to bring brand-new projects, like our 'Poetry For Tea' sessions, starting Thursday 10th November, to existing users. I'll be trying out all kinds of ventures with schools, care-homes, book-groups and community collections. Readers in Residence is all about encouraging the Shetland community to read books, talk books, recommend books, swap books, write about books.

And this is just the tip of the book-berg. Keep an eye on shetland-library.gov.uk , follow us on twitter or like the Shetland Library facebook site to keep in touch with the full range of events, projects and services. And if you're lucky enough to stay in Shetland, contact me at the library or

readerinresidence@btinternet.com to find out more about what the Reader in Residence Scheme will be doing in your community.

Readers in Residence is developed and administered by Shetland Arts Development Agency and part of Creative Scotland¹s Creative Futures programme <http://www.creativescotland.com/investment/creative-futures>: promoting, connecting and developing Scotland¹s creative practitioners.

Poetry For Tea

2011-11-08T07:46:00.001-08:00

Have Poetry For Tea this Thursday at the Shetland Library! Bring your favourite poem to read or just sit back and listen. From 6-7 on the Mezzanine. Alright, we're not actually going to feed you...but the poems will be good...

Readers in Residence is developed and administered by Shetland Arts Development Agency and part of Creative Scotland's Creative Futures programme : promoting, connecting and developing Scotland's creative practitioners.

New Project!

2011-11-01T03:55:00.000-07:00

For the next six months I'll be working with the Shetland Library as one of Creative Scotland's five new Readers-in-Residence, administered by Shetland Arts Development Agency.

Readers in Residence is part of Creative Scotland's Creative Futures programme: promoting, connecting and developing Scotland's creative practitioners.

I'll be collaborating with library staff on their book-groups, promotions and services, offering events and projects in community venues, care-homes and businesses, making full use of the website (shetland-library.gov.uk) and facebook page (go on...like us...) and, inevitably, tweeting

for the first time.

More details about the inaugural projects to follow, but they will certainly include the return of the much-loved Bards-in-the-Bog.

The other Readers-in-Residence are Zoe Strachan for East Ayrshire Libraries, Margot Henderson for Highland Council Library Service, Maureen Sangster for the Library Service at Carstairs State Hospital and Ian Stephen for Western Isles Libraries.

First day tomorrow...can't wait...

Notes For Editors

1. ‘Creative Futures’ is an ambitious programme of residencies and related activities designed to promote the professional development, vision, connectivity and ambitions of Scotland’s creative practitioners and organisations. It is the largest co-ordinated residency programme in Europe, and includes residencies that are single discipline, interdisciplinary, cross sectoral and international.

Writing about James Goodwin's 'claytown' for the Edinburgh Review

2011-10-27T03:46:00.001-07:00

..I'm reminded of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's large-scale industrial landscapes: mines, nickel tailings, quarries, ship-breakings, container ports...

...today's tasks then, were and are as follows: finish the Goodwin review; a phone call with Polly Clark about speech, poetic voice and identity; apply for membership of PVG Scheme and get public liability insurance for my upcoming project (news of this to follow); finish off another four limpets. And with the wind having dropped a bit, collect another swatch of seggies (iris leaf) to make a thick, new rope...

a typical sort of day...

Nigel Lambert mug!

2011-10-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

Just back from a reading and a workshop in London, and failed as usual to walk past the Contemporary Ceramics Centre on my way out of the British Museum. This may be my favourite place in London, though rivalled now by the Ish-Horowicz's fruit-hung bamboo sukkah, where we shared mushroom risotto on Wednesday, celebrating the first night of Sukkot. Strange to be out in shirt-sleeves on an October evening; lovely to be included in the festival & blessings. There's something similarly harvest-celebratory about Nigel Lambert's strong, swashy strokes of glaze. I'm drinking endless brews of tea out of this one, with a lot of manuscript appraisals/mentoring/reviewing on my plate before I leave for Lancaster Litfest next weekend.

The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc

2011-10-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

An evening reversing slowly across my kitchen at the end of a rapidly-lengthening rope made of sanitary disposal bags from the Scourie Hotel. The thin waxy paper makes a nice cubist sort of rope, which I'm thinking of interleaving with the rich brown rope of iris leaves collected in Skye and Uist. So a memento of the 'Poet's Tour' much in the line of Caroline Dear's make a rope a day collection...I wish I'd got to see this in Inverness.

For rope-making best choose new music you want to hear over and over again, in this case the eagerly-awaited Nordic Fiddlers Bloc CD (comes with Norwegian stamp!) that was waiting for me when I got home. You might remember me going on about them after 'Fiddle Frenzy' this year. If it reminds me of anything I've ever heard before it's 'Appalachia Waltz' by Yo Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor. The (NFB) sound is constantly self-contradictory: wobbling in the best way between poised and unhinged; eerie and airy; acetic and ascetic, dissonant, inordinate, rapturous, just as the new October light is here. Also often earthy, as in the case of 'Maria's 27th Birthday Plattgympa' with its oscillation between lewd and douce. (I wish there was on youtube a clip of Anders Hall demonstrating the plattgympa (dance); all the more reason to try and see them live...)

It's the nature of harvest (hairst) to be a rich and melancholy time – the lambs are being driven by quadbikes around the knolls and eventually into the trailers, five whiting were swinging, yesterday, from the neighbour's washing line, drying; leaves and shaws in the veg garden rusting and rotting even as my purple turnips continue to burgeon. I've hung some coriander sprigs up in the kitchen, in case the green seeds dry enough to use for spice. It's not winter yet, but autumn's a blink here, almost as it is in the Arctic, and there's two new snow tyres on the back seat of the car, waiting to be fitted.

Busy time: rope, the first online workshop for the Poetry School tomorrow night, mentoring deadlines, and trips to readings and workshops in London and Lancaster in the next couple weeks. I'm making fleeting edits to the 'Byssus' poems on the basis of the recent readings. More about all this later perhaps...

Road Blog Books!

2011-09-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

Taobh an Iar, Dòmhnall Fearghasdan
Grain, John Glenday
Undark, John Glenday
North Uist Works, Andy Goldsworthy
A World of Strangers, Nadine Gordimer
My Childhood, Maxim Gorky
The Torrents of Spring, Ernest Hemingway

Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway

The Europeans, Henry James

The Dogs of Riga, Henning Mankell

The Concise British Flora in Colour, W. Keble Martin

The Koran

Weaving & Other Pleasant Occupations, R.K. & M.I.R. Polkinghorne

The CEO's Scandalous Affair, Roxanne St. Claire

Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Confluence, pub. Taigh Chearsabhagh

Secrets of the Sea, Reader's Digest

the outer hebrides – made in holland, fred schley

Road Blog # 5 Wick – Kirkwall & Home...

2011-09-30T05:40:00.001-07:00

Here's Niall Campbell on the Hamnavoe, on the way to Stromness. Keep an eye on him, I would – after sharing two readings with him, I can see why he's doing so well, having won this year Eric Gregory Award, a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, and with a pamphlet forthcoming with the excellent Happenstance Press, who also publish Gill Andrews. (Gill wrote 'Tom Potter', one of my Best Scottish Poems 2010). Niall is having his own Poet's Tour in October (scroll down for the dates), so catch him in Inverness, Skye, Lochmaddy or Ullapool if you can...

I gave a workshop at breakneck speed in Wick, having driven from Scourie along the North Coast on a persistently rainy day. I did get a clammy walk at Faraid Head and a hot chocolate at the Loch Croispol Bookshop and Cafe, and snacked as I travelled east on fairly elderly date slices and Manchego. Nice to meet some Wick writers and read in the lovely Fergus Gallery above the Library, and then it was the early boat to Stromness and a slow drive to Kirkwall, detouring by Scapa Flow and the Italian Chapel. VERY TIRED. Sat and stared into middle distance at The Reel for a few hours in the afternoon...and revived with hot pot at Judith Glue before reading at the St Magnus Centre with Niall, and the Orkney poet Morag MacInnes, whose performance is always explosive. She's a fantastic reader of her work – that night, from her Hansel Cooperative Press pamphlet, Alias Isobel, (audio clips here) and from These Islands We Sing.

This morning I finally tottered off the Hrossey in Lerwick, and drove home and unpacked the car. The cat is preparing himself to forgive me, as Uncle Monty put it in Withnail and I, the pressure has been boosted in the boiler (it goes into hibernation when neglected), and there's three days to clean, do laundry and catch up with friends, emails and work before I head off again. I'll make one final post to list the books bought, borrowed and gifted over the last two weeks. Many thanks to Peter Urpeth for the 'Poet's Tour' and to all the folk who put me up, fed me, took part in events and shared their work...

Road Blog # 4 Skye – Assynt – Wick

2011-09-27T15:17:00.001-07:00

MacCaig country – looking southish from the shank of Stac Pollaidh. But it's late, and Niall Campbell and I are booked on the early boat to Orkney...so more of Wick follows...

Skye Rope – Iris blades & plastic

2011-09-27T15:12:00.001-07:00

Road Blog # 3 Stornoway – Harris – Skye

2011-09-25T05:45:00.001-07:00

Petrol gauge on the red, but I turned North again in Tarbert to retrace a couple miles and photograph this beautiful mountain – Sron a' Sgaoth (?)

I was a bit raddled by the time I'd crossed North Harris and Lewis on flooded roads, and gone astray in the outskirts of Stornoway. I'm not great at reverse parking these days either. I revived at the Golden Ocean, finishing off the set list while wolfing chilli squid so hot it blistered the roof of my mouth. Big Mamma Frog asks how a poet decides what to read: in my case, the set list is a bit of a comfort blanket, part of the process of persuading myself that it's alright to stand up in front of a group of people and speak. Which poems I read depends a bit on who I'm reading to, where I'm reading, what's on my mind.

I know plenty poets who decide what to read as they go along. I couldn't, but I often substitute, remove or add poems, as I did that night. I shared a stage in the Library Cafe with the Gaelic poet Anne Frater, whose collection Fo’n t-Slige is not easy to get hold of, although her work does appear in Kevin MacNeil's new anthology These Islands We Sing. Anne opened her reading with a set of wry love poems, explaining it took her a long time to 'find her prince' after which I decided to begin with 'Love's Dog', which I don't read very often these days. (Talking of 'Love's Dog', I'm typing this whilst heavily leant on by a spaniel, Max, the 'Orchid Dog' of my first collection, Almanacs.)

I wish I knew Gaelic. But if you don't know a language, you've still the pleasure of dwelling on its song, undistracted by meaning, even punctuated with the words 'laminator' and 'serial killer'. In fact I'm not sure how much information I take in from a single hearing of any poem: an image or phrase or two usually sticks, little more. A great deal of the pleasure taken in someone else's reading is in its ephemerality. Of her English translations, though – Frater's first line invariably plunges you into the heart of her poem. There's absolutely no word wasted, and no blousiness in her imagery, with an added sere edge in poems about the loss of the Iolaire, and about the Iraq War.

Thanks to the staff of the Stornoway Library for their hospitality, and Peter Urpeth for introducing the event, and for organising this Poet's Tour. And for a fine night in the Criterion afterwards, with fiddle, banjo, whistle, bodhrán, dancing and the good company of writer and artist Ian Stephen among others. I'll be AWOL for a couple days now, next reading in Wick on Tuesday night.

Saturation in Harris!

2011-09-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

Amazing colours, even in the rain. My jeans are over the hotel radiator drying out, hopefully in time for my reading here in Stornoway. One hour to go, and I've yet to make an set-list...

Road Blog # 2 Portree - Lochmaddy

2011-09-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

Welcomed to Lochmaddy with a stack of Taigh Chearsabhagh publications, including a beautiful book 'Taobh an Iar', about the work of painter Dòmhnall Fearghasdan. Plenty paintings and sketches in the book to tide me over after I leave. I love North Uist, the little I remember from a visit a few years ago, and saw through the rain today: lots of tempting looking sand-flats, inklings of waterlilies. Frustrating to leave this morning, but I took a detour to Sollas Bookbinding and had good talks about text and authority and translation with Corinna Krause, who generously showed me her new work and new tools. Thanks to Alex and the folk at Taigh Chearsabhagh for a very fine if too-short stay, and to those who read at the Open Mike!

Workshop at the Portree Library

2011-09-22T02:02:00.000-07:00

The student on the right is Calum Kelly, who wrote a great poem in the session: surreal and really original...

Road Blog #1 Inverness – Portree

2011-09-22T01:25:00.001-07:00

I'm only two days into the Poet's Tour and already the car is beginning to smell like someone's living out of it. Total chaos of books (22 copies of mine, John Glenday's wonderful 'Grain' and 'Undark', and ten or so secondhand I've picked up at Leakey's in Inverness and the Nice Cafe and Bookshop in Kyleakin), clay, picnics, clothes escaping suitcase, full array of coats, waterproof and otherwise. Having a lovely and hectic time. I met the Highland Literary Salon on Tuesday night, including Angus Dunn, whose name I've known a long time but never met. Given my love of marine life, it was great to hear about his mobile whelk – wish I could see it for myself.

Yesterday I drove to Skye through Glen Shiel in heavy rain and launched almost immediately into a workshop that included school students and members of the Skye Literary Salon, followed by an interview for Charlotte Johnson's new Atlas Arts Cafe on Radio Cuillin, followed by a reading with Mark O. Goodwin, Iain Oughtred and Val Fellows of the Skye Literary Salon at the Isle of Skye Baking Company. Wonderful to meet Meg Bateman too. It's a great venue: relaxed, easy acoustics, and brilliant food. Thanks to Orla Broderick for organising both events in Skye, and Stewart Lackie for the event in Inverness!

Getting ready to leave for Uist around midday...the sea looks bumpy. Ick.

Porcelain stop...

2011-09-18T04:39:00.000-07:00

Home with my mum and dad for the weekend before I head to Inverness for the first of the Poet's tour events...and taking advantage of being near the Potteries to pick up 25kg of porcelain from Potclays for the limpets. I'm travelling Pictishly with an eye for commodities: the clay, a few kilos of sloes, and a mind's-eye compilation of ropes. The thick, adder-striped hawsers that are reeled onto great drums on the Hjaltland's deck as we left the dock at Holmsgarth; an exhibition of steel winding ropes from coal mines at the brilliant Heritage Centre at Apedale, North Staffs.

Venues & Dates for Poet's Tour

2011-09-14T03:46:00.001-07:00

Here's the finalised details for my tour round the Highlands and Islands. Hi-Arts have got lots of other poetry events on this autumn, so keep an eye out. Pass it on and hope to see some of you there!

Tuesday 20th September 2011, 7.30pm: The Poets' Tour - reading at Highland Literary Salon, Glen Mhor Hotel, Inverness: free.

Wednesday 21st September 2011 (afternoon): Poetry workshop, 2pm, Portree Library, Portree, Isle of Skye. Places limited, please reserve a place via Portree Library on 01478 614820. Free.

Wednesday 21st September 2011 (evening): The Poets' Tour - reading at Isle of Skye Literary Salon, Isle of Skye Baking Co. Dunvegan Road, Portree: 7.30pm, free, with Myles Campbell and other local poets. Refreshments available, plus the very popular option of a light meal will be served from 5.30pm- 6.45pm in the Bakery with homemade soup, freshly baked breads, salads, cakes & tea/coffee £9.50pp – booking essential for meal on 01478 612669.

Thursday 22nd September, 2011, 7pm: The Poets' Tour - reading at Taigh Chearsabhagh, Lochmaddy, North Uist, 7pm, free.

Friday 23rd September, 2011, 7pm: The Poets' Tour - reading with Anne Frater at The Library Cafe, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, 7pm: free.

Tuesday 27th September, 2011, 5.45pm - free: poetry workshop at St Fergus Gallery, Wick Library, Sinclair Terrace, Wick, Caithness KW1 5AB - booking essential, places limited, please e-mail Peter Urpeth at peter@hi-arts.co.uk to book a place.

Tuesday 27th September, 2011, 7pm: The Poets' Tour - reading with Niall Campbell at St Fergus Gallery, Wick Library, Sinclair Terrace, Wick, Caithness KW1 5AB. Free entry, refreshments available.

Wednesday 28th September, 2011, 7pm: The Poets Tour - reading with Morag MacInnes and Niall Campbell. St Magnus Centre, Kirkwall, Orkney, 7pm, free.

The Elves & The Shoemaker

2011-09-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

The other day a friend asked me if I had a new manuscript on the go and I said no, believing it. So I'm genuinely surprised to sift this pile of clumsy but sometimes songish drafts on my desk. How to explain it except that someone else must be sneaking in at night and writing them?

The Best British Poetry 2011

2011-09-12T03:10:00.000-07:00

is now available...and includes my odd response to Rabelais' wonderful poem 'The Descriptions of King Lent'...all very marine...

I'm just getting ready for my tour of the Highlands & Western Isles: order books; set up autoreply; get in a big store of catfood; check oil, tyres, camera, ferry confirmations...it'll be exciting to be on the road again! I'll be giving readings & workshops in Inverness, Skye, North Uist, Stornoway, Caithness and Orkney...hopefully be able to update the blog a bit as I go...

Old Scatness

2011-09-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

Managed to squeeze a third visit to Old Scatness broch and iron-age village in before it closed for the season. Now, I am not good with archeology. I can't hold those great swathes of time in my head. But Scatness is kind of different on account of its living history approach. You get the tour of the aisled wheelhouses and the massive broch that was discovered by accident when diggers building an access road to Sumburgh airport ploughed into its side, but what I love about the place is that the archeologists and historians there also devote time to demonstrations of Pictish crafts, such as the tablet weaving above (photo by Susan Timmins), woodturning, pottery, soapstone carving, silverwork, rope-making. They're making some beautiful work: artists as much as archeologists.

You can also, in quite a casual way, hang around the replica wheelhouse, with its fish-oil lamps and peat fire burning: a quiet, safe, warm, smoky place to hunker down out of the wind and try to imagine what the Pictish life might have been like. That's tricky, because Pict seems to be more a cultural term than a temporal one...the Picts 'appear' later in Shetland than South. That makes it sound like the Picts arrived from somewhere else: not so. The late Iron Age people just start being called Picts when certain decorative artefacts, like Scatness's carved bear stone, begin to show up. It's this cultural definition that makes me long to be able to relate to this lost community. And after all, some things about Pictish Shetland haven't changed much. It's still a place rich in resources, and in its creative and expressive folk.

What I took from this particular visit was a metaphor, but I don't want to speak about it until I see if it's going to become a poem or not...in the meantime, I've got a terrible yearning to build a turf kiln...

Very happy with my new header!

2011-08-28T12:58:00.001-07:00

You can see more illustrations by brilliant Goutwort here.

Eagerly awaiting arrival of LEDs...

2011-08-27T06:40:00.001-07:00

...next stage in limpet evolution...

The Poetry School

2011-08-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

The Poetry School's autumn/spring program is out, which includes poetry workshops in various UK venues, downloadable writing exercises, and a series of online courses too! I'll be teaching one titled 'Make It Strange' – see here for details...

Nordic Fiddler's Bloc

2011-08-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

– magic. Sound clips here..and a CD out very soon...

Lina Peterson at Cove Park

2011-07-30T08:32:00.000-07:00

Jeweller Lina Peterson has just posted some images of her work-in-progress from Cove Park...

Downloadable Poetry Poster

2011-07-29T16:23:00.001-07:00

Just found out that the Scottish Poetry Library have made a downloadable poster of Alasdair Paterson's wonderful poem 'on the library'. Print one for yourself here!

Tall Ships, Lerwick

2011-07-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

The band on the Victoria Pier stage gets most of the cold crowd's attention. The fiddler's wearing fingerless gloves; the singer's hood's hooked on her head. Half the audience is in the steamy beer tent. The rain sweeps down on the other half, and the northerly bells out the flagged rigging in tense, shivering arcs on 47 tall ships.

The audience stamp and sway and yell and whistle but half the collective consciousness is always going to be distracted, glancing all about to see who's joining the crowd, who's fraying away. The influx of new souls that have come with the boats have changed the dynamic, too, like a sudden plankton bloom. There's face-painters, bands, crews, food sellers, fairground rides, craft stalls; man on stilts, person with a puffin's head. There's a guy clinging to a hauled anchor, painting it black. There's the fisheries boat. A container ship passing up. The Bressay ferry trundling back and fore. Ropes slapping in the wind.

And folk. Colleagues and bosses from all the jobs you've ever done, and there are the dear friends and the ones you like but never seem to see and the surprising number of faces you don't know. Folk you know but don't recognise until the last minute because of the waterproofs cinched tight about their faces. Ones who've moved away but come back for Tall Ships. People who are good at names, and people who are good at faces. People who are good at both, or ones like me who are good at neither. Local celebrities. Neighbours and their families. The friends who give you a home. The friends who tell you what you want to hear and those who tell you what you don't want to hear, and the ones that listen, and the ones that don't, but make you laugh, and there are the ones whose communication is coded and clever, talking on one level and meaning on another, and the ones who are completely transparent in all their communication. There are the ex's and the new partners, and the ones terrified of running into them; and there are more whose losses are more present and more painful.

This hyper-sensitive consciousness, generously and necessarily aware of other lives, is always vulnerable. The Town Hall flag's at half mast, and everyone is thinking of Norway.

Leaving Cove Park

2011-07-18T03:02:00.000-07:00

Leaving day is strange. I spent the moment preparing cuttings of hazel, holly, rowan, birch and honeysuckle in the hope they'll survive my roundabout return to Shetland (a complicated tupperware contraption with wet paper towel and seperated ice; making one final rope (last year's reeds and pink plastic marine fibre); porridge; packing; sweeping (I like sweeping); strip the bed; goodbyes – I'm so happy about the folk I've met here. Ducks and deer this morning. Heading off for the little ferry from Kilcreggan soon, then Gourock – Glasgow – Edinburgh.

I said I'd try and articulate a little of Jan Vervoert's lecture. Better to look his new book up, but I'm taking away with me his extrapolation of the idea of musical instruments that can protect you from demons because they contain a demon; that perhaps, when you draw something, what you draw enters your moving wrist, demon-like. I couldn't help but think of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Art as mimicry. Which is moving to me, so interested as I am in how we mimic each others' spoken language both deliberately and involuntarily.

Ideas about different ways to bear emotion and responsibility. Ideas about emotion being a public and not a private thing, as we often like to think. And this is where I'll have to stop, because my lift is waiting...

Day 11: Gone A Bit Quiet Hasn't It?

2011-07-14T11:09:00.001-07:00

But that's a good sign...the last few days have been increasingly intense. Each residential cube is provided with a little deck over a shared pond, and I've been spending my working hours drifting between the deck and desk. On the deck a length of grass rope hangs from the rail which I've been laboriously wrapping with the pink nylon marine line (remember the craze for hair-wraps) to make a slightly repellant string that resembles coral, or bronchi of the human lung, if you've seen images of a preserved one. Some kind of basket/sculpture has been shaping up in my subconscious: it's either going to look marine or human; I think perhaps a heart-like structure from which might or might not sit a couple of washed up lighters in strong and mild transparent pinks, like valves. And on the desk the novel is ... metamorphosing, I'm not entirely sure what into, but it's feeling good...

Last night curator and art critic Jan Verwoert gave a talk. My head's still ringing with it all; as ever, I'm afraid to paraphrase. I might try and articulate some of this stuff in a bit.

The Archipelago: Day 6

2011-07-10T07:02:00.000-07:00

My second night here, I crossed Cove Park's watershed and looked down upon Helensburgh and Faslane port, with its booms and docks and alarmingly extensive accommodations. It wasn't just the sight of the nuclear missile base that made me feel odd; something has been coming clear in my head about Shetland, being here. I realise I relish the fact that I can position myself at the top of Sannick Hill, at Houlland or Dunscanclate, and see most of it in one go (at least the south mainland), clear down to the cliffs and red radio light of Fitful Head. If people were inclined to call this awareness of your boundaries 'limiting', Shetland compensates with extraordinary richness on the macro level: the tiny exotic plants of bog and heath, the sundew and butterwort, milkwort, orchids and squill, tormentil, heather, bog asphodel, scabious, bog-cotton...let alone the shore.

Perhaps there's a corresponding perturbation about the lack of boundaries in my attempt to write this novel. I can't hold the story in my head: its endless narrative linearity; unforeseeable consequences; it's as my imagination isn't strong enough to clear the watershed. Which might sound negative, but I'm feeling very freed by the possibilities of it. I went back to that view last night, climbing the forestry track, picking up pine cones, putting them down, walking fast, resolving to let that narrative find its own form. Perhaps that form will be more archipelagic in some way...

Little holiday yesterday: I walked to Kilcreggan for grocery shop, chocolate ice-cream and a coffee. Sunburn, and a monumental blister on my right heel from walking 4 miles or so in wellies...

'The Good, Kind, Sane Little Animals' – Cove Park, Day 4

2011-07-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

The last couple of days I've been reading Beyond the Outer Shores, Eric Enno Tamm's biography of Ed Ricketts 'The Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell.'

Ricketts spent a summer in Clayoquot, where my story's set, albeit a decade and a half earlier, and this episode is brilliant for insights about the Princess Maquinna, the legendary steamship that serviced the lighthouses, missions, logging camps, canneries and villages of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

"The Maquinna is an ugly ship [...] with her thin, elongated funnel and her illproportioned bow, she is ugly from any direction in which you look at her [...] she has stolen the hearts of the people, and I doubt if any vessel afloat could be more beloved."

Ricketts, (the barely-disguised 'Doc' in Steinbeck's Cannery Row) spent his Clayoquot summer foraging at low tide for marine life, making a painstaking inventory of the 'good, kind sane little animals' of the shore. I've been using the book to extend my reading list, get a better sense of the huge significance of the pub at Clayoquot (one of only three on the west coast of Vancouver Island at the time), then sitting and staring and eventually drawing out a little more of my own story, which has been so neglected for the last month or so.

The folk are good. Last night I spent some time talking novel (particularly the pure intent of the ones which are never meant to be published, and what a luxury the absence of ambition can be) with Claire Wigfall. Her debut The Loudest Sound and Nothing was published by Faber in 2007 and she's currently the Book Trust's Writer in Residence.

The others are visual artist Chris Evans, James Rigler, a ceramicist, with whom ('with whom'!) I've debated benefits of various courgette species; Olufemi Terry, who won the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing, currently resident in Berlin, Lina Peterson, a jeweller; Roanne Dods and Frances Priest – this weeks 'Creative Catalysts', who led us astray yesterday to the ruins of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, just down the road from Hell(ensborough); a vast tangle of graffitied concrete and drifts of shattered glass. It rained and thundered, what Rickett's might have called 'Old Testament Rain'. It looked like the multi-storey carpark in Altrincham Town Centre. The niches in which the trainee priests (we speculate) could pray, dripped. Frances directed us to 'Concrete Britain' when we got back which merges footage of the seminary ruin and the building in use: elegant, bright, airy, modern.

In the evening Roanne opened a discussion about the artist's perception of their place in our culture. It wasn't long before we'd all got hung up on the money, which is always a circular kind of riff. It's a bit of a necessary purge, maybe, to talk about it but I usually feel as if I've been a bit foulmouthed afterwards.

Something new feels possible in the work in this reprieve from habitual life. It's occurred to me that a pessimist consciousness almost can't help but express a pessimist world populated by pessimists, which certainly has never struck me as the prevailing weather in 1930s Tofino, whose country dances Ricketts describes as 'peppy and drunken', despite its hardships.' Whisky crops up a lot, as I believe it did in my grandfather's days as G.P. in Tofino in the 30s.

'"It was at Tofino," a passenger once remembered, "that we realized to our absolute horror that we were running out of Scotch." [...] Ricketts had taken action by "self-consciously" carting a couple cases of beer up the Maquinna's gangway.'

So maybe I should follow Rickett's example when I finally get around to going into Kilcreggan for groceries. Sort of looking forward to getting my hands on the truck, but I'm liking walking the roads and forestry tracks in the immediate vicinity even more. I enjoy the limits of what's walkable. And to be seen there are: bats, dragonflies, newts, swallows, swifts or housemartins (some time I'll learn the difference) a herd of Highland cows that drowse around the pods and cubes, and this morning I found an owl feather, that jumps in your fingers as you draw it down through the air, thick brindles softened by the extra pelt that acts as a silencer.

Still missing the cat though.

(All quotations from Beyond The Outer Shores, Eric Enno Tamm, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2004)

Extremities: Cove Park, Day 2

2011-07-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

I could've been in Tofino this morning with the boggy Argyll forest smelling of wet dog and the visible spears of rain driving through me like mycelial threads. Being shot through with some binding material, web or spore. I didn't mind the wet at all until I crossed the road that leads to the naval base at Coulport and over the trampled fencing into that meadow of buttercup and tufted vetch and long grasses just at the point of spilling their seed. I was up to my waist in it, and felt the waste as the rain-laden seedheads burst across my jeans. The denim drank down that rainwater so fast that before I was halfway across the field my boots were filling up with water.

I crunched over a brittle crust of spootshells, cockles, smislins, live mussels, like the caramelised glaze on creme brulee, thick, so there was no way you'd see a siphon beneath. Nor did I feel like hawking about in that mud for nothing. I waded out into the shallows, to just below the throats of my boots. I always end up with my boots filling with water at some point anyway, even on a still day when the waves are a mild uplift and drag down on their rubber. Mostly I just like an excuse to stand in the water and feel the gristly membrane respond to the movement of the water. I like to wade into the water and see the membrane of the sea undulating away from me. Immersion is important. The amphibious mode.

There's a lot more going on than I expected in the mud of this populated shore. Something that might be young lobsters or perhaps some kind of shrimp, their front ends a bustle of busy transparent proto-claws. About the length of my thumb. I wonder how much marine life, when it comes down to things that we might eat, gets measured in relation to the human hand. Welks, by which I mean winkles, are considered large enough to pick if their operculum is the size of your thumbnail.

After the recent hot spell, my right hand is much more tanned than the left, being my writing hand. Due to the positioning of my desk at the east-facing window, it travels across a sunlit page for most the morning like the stylus of a lie detector, or some kind of knitting, knotting or netting machine, fussy and abrupt, making sloppy or tight fankles of ink, a spidery black lacework. I like to see the branched veins close to the surface, strong and rich, like mandrakes (I mean mangroves): it means I'm warm through, right to the tips of my Reynaud's extremities. Reynaud's doesn't do me any harm, except for chilblains in winter, and a listless, uncommitted, unhopeful mood that comes over me when a few fingers in the sheaf are white and yellow, like chloropyll-starved leaves.

Those little lobsters darted away from my boots and lay as still as they could on the sandy bottom. Then, with a sly whisking of transparent feelers, they sank below the surface of the sand, one fussily arranging a square of shell on its back as it submerged. I remember when we used to beg to be buried on the beach. Wet sand was best because whoever was getting buried could be neatly plastered with a smooth skim of sand. I remember the deadened percussion of palms slapping the shell over torso and legs. There was the pleasure of shifting subtly below the carapace of silica, breathing shallowly, guessing how your bodily disturbance would crack the dome of sand above. Then there were the games of abandonment, where your family pretended to have lost or forgotten you, trapped in your sand lung like a larvae, responsible for your own hatching, the possible ticking or scratching or tunneling of sand life against your skin, horrible lugworms, perhaps. You exploded from the sand cast like a lugworm yourself or someone took pity and turned back or the game became the one where your sister pretended you were a bone and dug you up like a dog. You broke free anyway, still belonging, caked in grit, which no amount of ducking in the sea or towelling would get off entirely before you piled tired and sticky into the car.

The rain hissed on the water and my hood and the mountains on the far side of the shore were obscured by low cloud. Apt scene for a submarine to cruise. Below the surface the huge colony of hermit crabs, mostly inhabiting empty welk shells, rolled about in pursuit of each other like marbles, deflecting and diverting. The urgent activity extended over the flats. I panned out and then waded out and wondered what the consequences of almost exclusive use of the macro lens may prove to be.

I found a way back to the gate through shorter grasses but it was too late for my socks. As I walked uphill water was forced out of my socks and insoles and up around my ankles with each step. My two feet a sort of composite heart structure, pumping cooling fluid around the rubberised chambers.

First Day at Cove Park – Chatter

2011-07-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

"There is the silence before one just as difficult to disturb significantly as before.What one has learned is inadequate against the new silence presented."

('The Nightfisherman – Selected Letters of W.S.Graham (Carcanet, 1999).

Yesterday I arrived in Argyll for a two week residency, and I've spent today slowly settling in, starting coming to terms with the fact that "no outcomes" are expected. Pretty rare, that. Basically, you get paid to shack up with your own funny head for a few weeks and work if you feel like it. You're allowed to just sleep if you like. Now, it sounded very enlightened, but it turns out that 'no outcomes and nothing expected' isn't just as easy to accept as all that. If I don't work, what am I? So I've been a bit unsettled today: new place, working out where to start, how I'll begin to try and 'disturb the language'. Missing the cat.

Last night I walked down to the beach. Muddy shingle; hermit crabs; lots of spoot shells, but no sign of siphons. It would be good to forage here. The different light you get on water when there are mountains. Bewildering lack of wind and occasionally, an inexplicable urgent backwash on the shore, which gave me the willies as I considered it might be caused by submarines passing underwater to Coulport. Don't think I'll be swimming after all. But I gathered some dry seaweed and some of the everpresent plastic fishing fibre you find at the tideline, and today I've made rope out of them. The fibre is salmon pink, and nicely luminous within the red and coppery weed. I might get around to making a basket out of it. It's good to make rope out of seaweed: your hands slick with agar as if you were assisting a birth; or as if you were actually extruding the vegetable hawser from your own spinnarets, as a spider extrudes web.

Some reading today. Gerald Manley Hopkins, but I didn't have the patience for the God-bit, although I enjoyed his mania and the drubbing his verbs give you 'does so rinse and wring/The ear [...]' And I admire the way he couples those bleached abstracts with imagery that's weird enough to be compulsive. Can't imagine getting away with the opening line 'Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –' myself, and yet I love this, that follows 'When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush[...]'

Otherwise, I've snacked compulsively (the visibility of the little kitchen from the writing desk may be a problem) and napped (the visibility of the bed from the writing desk may be a problem.) But napping, I propped the notebook and pen on my knees and shut my eyes, and everytime I became aware of a bit of 'chatter' rising up through my subconscious, I wrenched my eyes open and wrote it down.

"No, I'm a member of staff! No, I'm not slow –"

"Phone your baby. I'm gonna di–"

"Keep crisscrossing for mixed stones and make sure they're all of one colour."

"So you're both Mrs B.S.?" (Checking my eyelids, friendly-like. )

"Bob, it'll only take you one minute" (American)

"Have you heard about the three Danes? There's one sitting where I'm sitting..."

Although it's tempting to try and use this stuff for divination, my fascination with it is that it's so aligned with my preoccupations in poetry just now. Obviously, it's the reverse of intention, it's a way of forgetting the self, and there's a spookiness about it. Where does it come from, after all? Who's doing the voices?

Then I passed out for real. 'Nap' seems an incongrously cute word for something you start up from with your heart pounding, trembling all over.

This evening there's going to be a kind of happy hour to meet the other residents...

Sunday's littoral...

2011-06-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

Danish migraine tablets...Nivea Classic Care Shine Shampoo: 'reveals fascinating shine in all its facets – silk protein and orchid extracts'...right...'for normal and unproblematic hair'...fishbox from MFV Miraculous, Clogherhead...vegetable crate from Prince de Bretagne: 'Défendons le goût de frais'...an eider on her nest, so a quick retreat...

and Monday's literal....

'The eyelids are formed as small cutaneous folds which about the middle of the third month come together and unite in front of the cornea...'

Gray's Anatomy 'The Organ of Sight'

Credo The Day

2011-05-30T02:29:00.000-07:00

Something is wrong in the way that I'm writing

what I'm writing about or why.

I asked the poems to be Aztec descriptions of things

in the familiar world and that is all they obediently are.

They have the rhythm of things that are like other things

buckled and braced with similes, turreted clauses.

When you say, it is like, it is like, it is like, you make emphatic

equations: inward-looking things. The true poetry

can't be far off – like parallel universes, you're nearly there –

but not until you shrug off this vector.

Places still available for creative writing workshops in Shetland

2011-05-26T08:44:00.001-07:00

More info here.

Patella – The Dominant Species

2011-05-20T06:48:00.001-07:00

Time for an update on the limpet situation. I picked up my latest batch this week and feel like I'm getting somewhere: their form is much blousier, and I'm finally getting the porcelain thin enough for light to shine through. Incredibly exciting, because for me, its translucency is the most mesmerising thing about porcelain. I'm intending to try firing some of these with in a matt, translucent glaze, but in the meantime, I settled the colony in on my windowsill, and peered over the laptop at them as I worked to see how they would behave. As soon as the sun hit the windowsill, they began to glow with a lovely submerged golden light, making me think this species is one of those furnished with photophores: light-emitting cells. Speculate that these may attract prey to within the reach of the hunting limpet.

My feeling about these limpets has been that they should seem subtly animated in some way, but I wasn't quite sure how this would happen. I've had ideas about an installation where they move up and down the walls of a gallery space 'with the tide'; and I noticed that the ones with a single feeding pore gave the impression of having a vestigial face. When I tilted a couple towards each other, they seemed to be communicating or negotiating.

Instead of a single large feeding pore, some have a ring of small holes around the shell (females?) Through these emerge fans of retractable 'hairs' with which they sweep the current in search of their very small beer.

Welk-ebb

2011-05-18T01:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went from the literal to the lovelier littoral, bending, picking, swilling about in the warming shallows. A pair of loons (I think) barked on the water and the eiders and skylarks lightened my mood after the morning's work on the novel, which was grisly and effortful. I gave up after a while to open Bull of the Woods – The Gordon Gibson Story. Gibson grew up making a tough living from lumber and later shipping on the West Coast of B.C. in the 20s and 30s. He can hardly get through a page without a reference to his interest in 'the ladies'. He's continually hopping in and out of windows and letting himself into hotel rooms: 'I crept along the hall and picked a door that seemed about right [...] crawling on my hands and knees over to the bed, I felt about the covers to make my presence known to the young lady.'

The winkles on the rocky bottom here were caked in a Battenberg-pink coral or sponge and I saw more of those animals that are like transparent potatoes. Does anybody know what they are? Broken shells of smislins and spoots, but no sign of siphons. Yearning for a new language for the draining meadows coming firm underfoot, the distended hill, the time of butterwort (penny-girse) and royal blue milkwort; tirricks, geese and shalder. That yearning is the place from which poems have so often started for me but I'm still pretty self-conscious. In the meantime I sorted out some things that have been troubling me about the novel, in my head, at least, which doesn't mean all that much. Guddling in the chiffons of algal bloom: "you're asking too much of the narrative to try and set the action in a space of three winter months; it might not work to relegate so much history to the back-story."

I'm working on too many different things at once, again, I think. In the last two days I've worked at novel, welk-ebb, poetry; then there's been mentoring, plans for woven baskets made from bruck materials, sequinned (I think) with with plastics reclaimed from the sea and hole-punched. I might make Greenlandic/Danish sequins from that shipping ticket, too, or opercula of (poor old) winkles. I'm looking forward to picking up a batch of the bisque-fired porcelain limpets today too. I feel like a prism, splitting the light. But what else can you do with so much light?

O help, I'm making poems

2011-05-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

Bruck

2011-05-09T05:12:00.000-07:00

I went for a walk in the wind yesterday, roundabout high tide. I wanted to see how all that stuff that piles up behind the geo – heavy yellow wellies, planks, pallets – scales that three or four metres of rock. It must come up on a westerly, though, and this was from the east, pouring over the Clift Hills and smacking into the Voe, plucking at the windbreak round my veg garden. The warm wind wrenched me like a bad tooth and drove me towards the cliffs. My rocket and radish and beet seedlings were burnt to the earth, but the little purple flowers on the cliff were fine, just shaking and bending. I'll call them rubber-wort. What I did find was a plasticised shipping document from the Royal Arctic Line, bilingual, in Greenlandic and Danish. It was lying in a ditch that runs near one of the lochans behind the house. You can look up live ship positions on the Royal Arctic website, and it shows one of their routes running just south of Shetland on its way to the Western Coast of Greenland. Up to this point my favourite piece of flotsam has been a crate of Russian ketchup. Now I'm having a nice lunch-break from the novel, trying to work out which of their ships it fluttered off, using google translate for a crash course in Danish, trying to work out the 'Vejledning' (Instructions) on the reverse:

'Containerens endelig DESTINATION angives tydeligt med stor skrift': 'The container's final destination indicated neatly in big font' (capitals?) Ah dear. For time-wasting, who needs Facebook?

'You can't hand someone a lump of uranium. You have to wrap it in lead.'

2011-04-21T04:21:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview at Cyprus Well with Rachael Boast about her new collection, Sidereal, which is out now with Picador. I like what she has to say about where poems come from, and about how a poet has to manage the two contrary impulses 'the heightened sense of something...and the managing of that into poetic form.'

Best Scottish Poems 2010

2011-04-01T05:13:00.001-07:00

Last year I was asked to select the Scottish Poetry Library's 'Best Scottish Poems' for 2010. Here's my choice...

Best Scottish Poems 2010

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T06:15:00.000-08:00

'Cameron to measure nation's happiness' says the BBC. Alternatively, try this tall tale from British Columbia...

2010-11-25T02:10:00.000-08:00

'112. Insider's View of Moose

KEITH HENDERSON: People today, they think that the economic crunch and the hard times are bad, but they don't really know what it's all about. It's really the lap of luxury we're living today compared to the dirty thirties. I remember my dad, he was living in a French community at the time. And they're predominantly Liberal, as they always are. Oh times were tough, you know [...] as far as meat was concerned, we didn't have any. So the winter was bad and he decided to go up in the northern part of B.C., and he was going to do a bit of trapping and he was going to shoot a moose. We'd have our meat then. And he hoped to make a few dollars by trapping [...] A storm blew up and just then he shot a moose. He gutted and cleaned this moose out and oh, the blizzard blew up just terrible. He knew there was just no way with the low temperature, and the freezing and the blizzard [that] he was just not going to survive the night. There was no shelter. There was little or nothing to make a shelter out of there. So he looked at this moose and he thought, "Well gosh that carcass is pretty warm, I have a heavy coat, I'll just crawl in this carcass of this moose and it's warm. At least it will protect me from the blizzard and the driving wind and the snow and everything. I'll survive the night that way." And so he got his big coat and he bundled up and he crawled in this moose, and he pulled the sides down–the flaps of the skin down. And he did. He survived the night real well, [and was] warm as toast in the morning. But god, when he woke up in the morning, he saw that there was just no way that he was going to get out. That damn carcass had frozen solid. Well he knew that death was going to come to him, and there was a tear came in his eye as he started to think of his wife and all the kids at home, and how were we going to survive, and things like that. I guess in all such cases, you know, your life sort of passes around in front of your eyes. It all unfolds like a motion picture. He thought back over happier days, and he was getting sadder by the minute. And then he finally remembered one time–the one and only time–he voted Liberal. And you know, he felt so small, he just crawled out of that hole in the gullet, and went off home.'

Tall Tales of British Columbia, ed. Michael Taft, Sound Heritage Series, No. 39, Victoria, 1983

If anyone's in London next week...

2010-11-24T11:02:00.001-08:00

Oxfam Christmas Poetry Night
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
7.30 pm

Oxfam Books and Music Shop
91 Marylebone High Street, London W1
near Baker Street tube.

The Oxfam Poetry Reading in Marylebone series ends its 7th year of events on
a high note with six guest poets - including two coming especially from
Scotland for the occasion - TS Eliot Prize winning Bloodaxe poet Jen
Hadfield and Picador poet John Glenday whose recent collection Grain has
been shortlisted for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work In Poetry.

This internationally-minded series will also be featuring a poet from
Ireland (Barbara Smith), reading on her birthday, two prize-winning American
poets, Dante Micheaux and Michelle Boisseau and England's own Sheila
Hillier, whose recent collection was shortlisted for this year’s Aldeburgh
Prize.

The host for the evening will be Todd Swift.

The event is supported by Kingston University. Tickets are £5 / £3
concession (students) in advance or at the door (if seats remain). Do call
or email the shop to buy or book tickets:

Telephone : 020 7487 3570.

Email: oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com

Here is the chaff

2010-10-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

This is the second part of the work, the chaff or carvings out from the clay tablets. They were as much Juana's name as the cuneiform incisions I thought. I have wanted in this work to suggest something about the precious and irreplaceable. Here's what I came up with.

Lithified

2010-10-30T07:35:00.001-07:00

Well the firing's gone fine. The whole process is astounding. The kiln has a lit instrument panel on which you can see the heat building gradually through 600 degrees, followed by a short spike of 1200 degrees. And clay becomes stone. Even at that temperature, the sharp contours of the carved clay were preserved. I'm amazed with what I got away with. Last night and this morning have been the last minute fixings and packings-up which always take much longer than you think. I'm writing this post in town: the broadband's down. Now I'm going home to clear up the packing materials, the fragments of gold leaf, the clay dust, the sticky smears of gold size on the counter. Vacuuming, washing up, changing the water in the fish tank, and with that, I accept it's out of my hands, and I get back to something like what I call normal...

An image of the second part of the work follows...

Just heading to town to see what's happened in the kiln...

2010-10-29T04:00:00.001-07:00

fingers crossed. In the meantime, here's the poem for Juana...

Petroglyph
i.m.

When I doodled
my own name

in dirt and sand and snow
I was also learning how

to map the cursive sierras and barrancas
of her name,

the swash J we share,
mem, mu, the sign for water,

the many aleph snarled
in its current like fish eggs,

Juana Aguinaga Mares.

Resh, rho, the head,
he, the praying or calling figure,

shin or sigma. Only as we designed
and redesigned our first signatures

am I tutoring my hand in the quickstep
of her name, her names,

Juana Aguinaga Mares
Juana Iñiquez Mares

and the stylus to hop and prod and probe
in its plateau'd clay-flats like a wading bird.

With the acute awl of its bill
it's hiding her name in her name

Juana Aguinaga Mares.

Here is the codicil,
the indelible petroglyph of her name,

here are its watersheds,
here is its chaff or till,

here are the untranslateable
canyons and the lunar basin

and range of the name
of her daughter's mother and her mother's

niña,
mi hijita

Juana Aguinaga Mares.

Petroglyph

2010-10-26T02:15:00.000-07:00

After gunmen murdered 14 teenagers at a birthday party in Cuidad Juarez on Friday, the Mexican president's response on twitter was cursory, suggesting that brutal violence in the state of Chihuahua is beginning to be seen as the normal order.

Tamsyn Challenger has asked 200 artists to create portraits of 400 women who have been murdered in Chihuahua in the last decade, 'confronting us with and safeguarding in our memory the dead and disappeared.' The exhibition is curated by Ellen Mara De Wachter.

Juana Aguinaga Mares was murdered in the Palo Chino neighborhood in 1997.

Tamsyn asked me to write a poem for the exhibition catalogue, to which Juana's name was integral. Amnesty International's Mexican team and the Rape Crisis centre in Cuidad Juarez were able to provide photographs of many of the murdered women, but none existed of Juana. I found it hard to imagine making something for Juana that was of any value. Except that she was a mother, everything I knew about her was inseparably connected to what I knew about her murder: the cause of her death, what she was wearing, where her body was found.

I wrote her name out in full. And again.

There was a tub of liquified porcelain on the kitchen counter. I poured some into the lid of a tobacco tin and set it on the radiator to dry. What fell from the tin the next day was a smooth tablet of clay, slightly rust-stained. I was able to erase the rust with nothing more abrasive than my fingerprint. I began to write Juana's name in the unfired clay. I wrote her name again and again until it was illegible.

It occurred to me that her name, written like this, was inseparable from the clay, as our DNA is inseparably written through us. Even when the tablet cracked, which it did, often, it cracked along the contours of her name. Since then, I've written her name hundreds of times, as you do when you're a child, learning to write your own name, as you design your signature for the first time. The poem for the catalogue is just an account of the work in porcelain, really. I'll post it in a day or so.

On Thursday I'm going to try firing the tablets. Fired porcelain is surprisingly strong, despite its translucency and apparent delicacy. Unfired, it's exceptionally fragile. The difficulty will be getting the tablets through the firing. They're thin and necessarily contain hundreds of weak points. They're also likely to warp, apparently. Updates on Friday as to how that's gone.

If the firing goes well, the tablets will be set in tobacco tins, lined with gold leaf. There's another tricky procedure, but I like the fact that the materials I am using to commemorate the name of Juana Aguinaga Mares are fragile and precious, difficult and dear.

Snow in October...

2010-10-20T02:02:00.001-07:00

what kind of winter does that portend? Well, I'm liking staying in, anyway. I've been looking after some friends' creatures over the October break: ducks, hens, cats and a glorious ginger pig called Mildred. I let them out of their houses in the morning, back in at night to protect them from polecats, and in between, water, corn and vegetables and Whiskers and something that looks like cornflakes for the ducks, keeping an eye on the weather. A matins, compline and vespers. In between I'm working hard and better. I've succumbed again to the temptation to rewrite the first 80 000 words of the novel, finally settling it in the first person and the past tense. This is clearing out some of the clag: it's flowing better. And I'm making writing tablets of unfired porcelain, for a project by Tamsyn Challenger and Ellen Mara De Wachter called 400 Women. I'm writing one woman's name over and over in the unfired clay, retaining the shards and clay dust that I carve out. I'll post photographs soon and write a bit more about my thinking, but I'm wanting to go a bit further with the technique first...

Guillet's Goby

2010-10-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Very excited that my pal Rachel Hope with Richard Shucksmith has found and photographed Europe's smallest fish here in Shetland.

Poetry Week on Radio Shetland

2010-10-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

To celebrate National Poetry Day this Thursday, Radio Shetland's hosting local poets reading their own work on the theme of "Islands."

Listen again to Keith Simpson reading 'Miss South Shetland' and keep an ear out throughout the week for readings by Mark Ryan Smith, Rhoda Bulter and me...just before the 6 o'clock news. I'll post a link to Laureen Johnson's excellent reading of 'Islanders' from yesterday if I can but work out the iPlayer!

Limpet Fever

2010-10-05T03:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the new generation of limpets. These are in unfired porcelain so they're still fragile and dusty and I have to watch out when I open the curtains each morning. I really like them at this stage: if I decide I don't like the shape of this one or that (I'm aspiring for a very particular shape: not too scalene, not too equilaterial, not too pointy, not too bulgy) I can crush them into a tupperware tub of water and melt them down to wet clay again. A sort of life cycle. At some point I'll bite the bullet and fire them.

Limpet fever. At least I'm not the only one...

Long Live the Limpet

Save The Arts

2010-09-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

A petition and an excellent video defending the arts against government spending cuts

Writing Week in Shetland and Fair Isle

2010-07-02T04:56:00.001-07:00

Places still available on this year's Fiddle Frenzy writing course, including writing workshops, one-to-ones, cultural trips and an optional retreat to Fair Isle..

Scroll down through the brochure past the fiddle stuff...

Craning out of the kitchen window

2010-05-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

while eight whooper swans made a low double pass over the house.

The final flush of dog-violet...

2010-05-27T04:27:00.000-07:00

Heath milkwort, starry squill, the new blue...

Sun-addled

2010-05-16T09:08:00.001-07:00

I went straight from bed to the garden this morning, taking the mexican blanket with me to finish off my lie-in outside; dogroses hectic with bees and flies, feet bare to sun my single chilblain. Every so often Owl would stagger out from the ribena bushes with buckling legs and fall over on the blanket next to me, and when we both got too hot, he'd stagger back into the shade, and I staggered up to the wall to get the sea-breeze on my face. Yep, summer. Yachts from Brittany and Trondheim in Lerwick Harbour, snipe drumming last night under the finest skelf of a moon, tiny little flowers coming out on the moor and sassy grasses, and the broken blue eggshells of starlings everywhere. I met a cormorant (let's plump for a cormorant and not make a meal of it) sitting by the second of the three lochans, quite distant from the sea. He had his wings out limply and looked about as addled as I feel now.

Knitting...

2010-05-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

as the votes come in...

A.B.Jackson's Apocrypha

2010-04-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

Thrilled to get a sneak preview at the manuscript for A.B.Jackson's new pamphlet, due out with the very elegant Donut Press in October. It's rare that I recommend poems so fervently, being very hard to please, but these are surreal as sherbert, right as rain, delicious, hilarious, heart-breaking, big-hearted.

Here's the link to Donut Press

And the author's website...

2010-04-22T09:19:00.000-07:00

the lochan in wind's the busy brain
of a computer, its binary of dip and wave
so far sophisticated from the yes/no
of grey or eye-blue/lake-bottom indigo
that forms and faces evolve on its shroud,
and are erased, and gulls on the pasture
shelter from its news. News is never now
plain good or bad white foam gathers
at the northernmost shore.

2010-04-22T09:15:00.001-07:00

the lochan in wind's the busy brain
of a computer, its binary of dip and waves
so far evolved from the yes/no
of grey or eye-blue/lake-bottom indigo
that forms bloom upon it like a relic shroud
and are erased

2010-04-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

the lochan in wind's the busy brain
of a computer, its rattling binary of dips
and waves, pale/indigo

2010-04-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

The lochan in wind's the busy brain
of a computer, a

Lie Detector

2010-04-14T06:46:00.001-07:00

I've always recommended reading new writing aloud, as a test of fluency, as a way to replace those irksome editing commandments, such as 'the use of adjectives is lazy' or 'show, don't tell!' with a reliance on a more abstract, and more instinctive sense for what does and doesn't work. If you read a passage aloud, and it embarrasses you, or worse, bores you, the urge to see if something else might be more successful is pretty irresistible. It doesn't seem to work in your head. Well, it doesn't seem to work in MY head.

You need to...I mean I need to...apply the lie-detector, the tongue tapping away at the palate, prodding the backs of the teeth, wriggling in its soft bed. But I've always thought of this as a negative process, a way of putting wrong things right. What I had forgotten is how the act of animating text in my mouth makes the fictional voice go live, meaning the voice, finally, has begun to make its own demands, and the story begins to write itself. All of a sudden, my characters are jostling to tell the story. All of a sudden, 1000 words a day is easy as breathing, though it takes much, much longer.

Homesis

2010-04-13T04:46:00.000-07:00

Home again, and the two bunches of tulips I bought cheap at the end of the Saturday market, kept in the fridge and coddled all the way home through two overheated airports, planes, are stuffed in a too-big too-square glass vase by the side of the sofa I write on. They are red like the inside of a black cat's ear is red when the sun shines through it. This is the most beautiful little room in the sun. My windowsill covered in limpet shells, and some unfired attempts to evoke the limpet in porcelain. I still haven't seen the results of the bisque-firing. Beyond, Mary's roof, with yellow lichens incandescent in sunlight, the shadowed Clift Hills. Hot, happy cat, piled on my ankle.

Delft

2010-04-08T08:43:00.000-07:00

I'm in Delft, enjoying the apparent simplicity of my task: to look after three very kittenish cats while my sister is away, to walk about the tilting, tiled streets and canals, learn how to cook some new food, write my 1000 words a day, read, a lot – Landing Light (Don Paterson); Distance and Proximity (Thomas A.Clark); The Complete Writings of Emily Carr; Strong Words (Bloodaxe's Modern Poets on Modern Poetry) and Strong Medicine, a book about the history of general practice on Canada's northwest coast.

It's perverse how much easier these things are, away from home.

The Dutch folk big and small whizz about very upright on their bicycles, and I am accommodating to the generalisation; walking more upright, and feel my lungs unruffling, uncreasing, unrolling like a pair of sails. Sometimes it's a relief to be anonymous, and sometimes, as the other day, it's a treat to have the small-world experience.

When I leave Shetland, I don't expect to run into anyone I know, but in Edinburgh Airport I met a friend, from Edinburgh, who I first met at the Fiddle Frenzy writing course last summer, in Shetland, who was on my flight to the Netherlands with her partner. When I settled into my seat, the woman next to me said "excuse me, I have a feeling I know you, from a reading at the Scottish Poetry Library..."

Squid for my tea...

O Dear

2010-03-26T06:51:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure I should be allowed a blog. It's been months, hasn't it? Fluency, whether in poems, novels, blogs, emails, seems to be a discrete with me. Either I am or I ain't. I haven't been. I am being, a bit more, now. 60,000 words and some months of grimly putting one word set in 1930s Canada after another, I suddenly have the feeling that things are beginning to get easier; something is about to happen, this character or that is becoming someone...

Maybe it's just that I'm reading two very impressive books: Mantel's Wolf Hall, and Janice Galloway's Clara...and that always makes me feel creatively hopeful. As for my own effort, I daren't read it back. It is still too stumbling. Not yet, not yet...

New poem at Seven Short Sails

2009-11-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

Great project creating a set of Chinese whispers between artists in film, sound, poetry, stories and song.

http://www.studiolog.heriot-toun.co.uk/7sails_7_intro.php

On the go again...

2009-10-24T08:47:00.001-07:00

I'm just getting ready for another bout of events and travel: I'll be reading with Kathleen Jamie at the Southbank Centre on Monday night, and flying out to Toronto the next morning for the International Festival of Authors. After that I'm visiting friends and family in Vancouver, Edmonton and Victoria, where I'll also get into the BC Archives for research on West Coast life in the 1930s. Grandmere has told me about the legendary diction of CKCD radio presenter Earle Kelly, "Mr Good Evening". All being well I should be able to hear clips of his shows in the Archives. It's very exciting.

Here's links for the readings...

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/literature-spoken-word/tickets/jen-hadfield-and-kathleen-jamie-49037

http://www.readings.org/?q=biographies/jen_hadfield

Poetry Reading in Perth on Oct 1st with Gordon Dargie and Andy Jackson

2009-09-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.perthshireadvertiser.co.uk/lifestyle/arts-perthshire/2009/09/18/jen-hadfield-to-read-for-poetry-at-winery-73103-24718768/

Poetry Readings in Orkney

2009-09-13T12:40:00.001-07:00

I'm heading to Orkney next Sunday to give two readings – the first at Woodwick House, as part of the Poet Partner scheme, on the 20th. This is the first leg of an exchange between Orkney and Shetland's Poet Partners: myself and Pam Beasant. Looking forward to welcoming Pam to Shetland this autumn; perhaps she'll bring North the renga form that sounds as if it's thriving in Orkney.

The second reading is in the Pier Arts Centre on the 22nd September as part of EQUINOX – An Evening for Orkney Futures http://www.sand14.com/relocatinginnovation/orkney/index.htm

I'm very excited about that: the Pier was closed for its refurbishments when I was last in Orkney.

The Second Dose of Bards in the Bog!

2009-07-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.shetland-library.gov.uk/BardsintheBog.htm

Our Sweet Old Etcetera...interview with the Scottish Poetry Library

2009-07-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/owl-other-answers-an-interview-with-jen-hadfield

Sorry, the Blogger links don't seem to be working just now...

Message bundle collaboration

2009-07-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Eagerly awaiting the first of Doug Robertson's message bundles. Pocket Noost should arrive in the post in the next couple days...hoping to meet it with a bleat, blurt or poem...

Scottish Poetry Library for the National Lottery Awards

2009-07-10T14:27:00.000-07:00

All the more a national treasure for now housing the Edwin Morgan Archive...and you can vote here...
http://www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk/awards/shortlistitem.cfm?id_category=1&id_entry=53

The Poetry Archive

2009-06-30T03:47:00.000-07:00

I am VERY excited about this!
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=11433

Creative Writing Summer School in Shetland

2009-06-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.shetlandarts.org/events/creative-connections

New Music/Poetry Commission on Radio 3's The Verb

2009-06-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

Toddling out of creative hibernation...this piece commissioned by The Verb to celebrate the Shetland Simmerdim, in collaboration with electronic musician and songwriter, Leafcutter John. The piece includes voices translated to Polish and Shetland Dialect by poets Klaudia Marosek and James Sinclair

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l13w6

It's on Listen Again for two more days...

Guilt & Remorse

2009-06-23T10:47:00.001-07:00

After two years of neglect, Jen is reviving her blog...

2007-01-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

At the writers' group the other week, one poet suggested to another that they could chop a problematic line from a poem without too much angst, because the line might still come in handy for a poem in the future.

I've heard quite a few writers recommend this tactic. I've tried it myself and – living as I do amongst several kilos of thwarted drafts – I can see how attractive it is. You can get ridiculously emotionally attached to a metaphor/word picture, considering it won't cuddle up to you in the morning.

And it's hard for folk to clip something so dear to them, that perhaps is dragging the rhythm down, or is just too brand-spanking clever to slip into the tone of this/that poem. So it's nice to think your brilliant image might have its fifteen minutes' fame in the future.

The other extreme is the scorched earth policy where folk rigorously chop out particular types of word – all the adjectives have to go, any phrase or image that seems "lazy"... Often folk give the haiku as an example of the ideal – a couple molecules of distilled image and meaning.

But not all poems are haiku. Nor are images and phrases bits of Lego to click into any poem.

So this leaves the poet in an uncomfortable place where a poem "working" is a rare event to which thought and experience and rhythm and personal idiom and image are bespoke.

And in this arid place, sometimes a line starts in your head and your experience crowds up to meet it. At which times a line you saved specially from a previous poem is usually far inferior to the wealth of perfect accidents you are about to be able to select among.

The Printer's Devil & The Little Bear

2007-01-02T07:09:00.000-08:00

In July and August I stayed with Ursula Freeman at the Redlake Press in Shropshire, where she guided me through a two-month apprenticeship in traditional printing methods, collaborating on a limited-edition letterpress book of poetry and photography.

Our hard-won 30 pages made use of a brand-new Epson R800 with which we could print to archival quality, a Vandercook Proofing Press, my own linocuts, photographs and rigorously-edited tiny poems.

The Printer's Devil & The Little Bear is presented in a choice of two formats – the Solander box as shown, by Salisbury Bookbinders (£50.00), or a lined folder (£30.00)

This project was realised with the assistance of Arts Council England.

To buy a copy of The Printer's Devil & The Little Bear, contact The Redlake Press at the following address: –

Brook House, Clun, Shropshire SY7 8LY U.K.
Tel: +44 (0)1588 640 524
email: info@redlakepress.co.uk
http://www.redlakepress.co.uk

Sophie and A Wowl

2007-01-02T06:53:00.000-08:00

I've just acquired a brace of household gods; named after the wizard and old lady in Miyazaki's animated film Howl's Moving Castle. Sophie is an elegant and indigo cat, skilled in ju-jitsu. Owl is a couch potato.

First poem for Owl and Sophie

The sure-to-god hoax of his footfall
as he burgles his house for the very first time,
his audible paws squishing the carpet,
smacking his lips and sampling
the apprehension around things
that should be doling out light and heat –
cadaverous boiler,
dark grey light-bulb.

And she packs into the crook of my knees
a drift of scalloped, chilly fur.

And the gale tries to thresh the boons
from the house – the onions poked down
in their fishbox of earth,
the broken gate braced and percolated by darkness,
the small folk milling round the sofa, perplexed –
what's wrong? what's wrong? what's wrong?

2007-01-02T06:48:00.000-08:00

From 9/06 to 12/06 Lucky-Minney has been a guest of the Peedie Gallery in Orkney; and Rik Hammond and Claire Gee escorted her to the Highlands and Islands Visual Arts Gathering in Ullapool.

She's made from a broom-handle and named for one of the "Guidfick" (Good Folks – mischievous fairies) referred to in John Graham's Shetland Dictionary.