Writing Week in Shetland and Fair Isle

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

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

The final flush of dog-violet...

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

Sun-addled

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...

as the votes come in...

A.B.Jackson's Apocrypha

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...

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.