summer light

 

I’m writing from America.

Specifically, from an a-frame cabin in New Hampshire, by the shores of a glittery blue lake. It’s been nearly two weeks of flurrious (flurrying? I like flurrious better) activity. A wedding, trips around DC, a brief stop in New York, and now here, to the quiet speckled surfaces of the woods and the water.

 

 

 

Before this, I hadn’t been back to the states since D and I migrated home in 2011. However, this won’t be the last time I visit America even this year – I will be back in August, and for a book tour for On the Edges of Vision. That’s my surprise news, the one I have been holding back while work was being done. Already there are reading venues lined up along the Eastern seaboard, with a few others hoping to be secured. The full calender is for another day. I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped. Later this month, I will be launching a Kickstarter campaign to help defray costs (there are some fantastic perks for donors) but! Later, later. Two speedboats are crossing on their white wakes. Someone in a house next door is calling to their friend in a muffled happy voice.

 

We head home tomorrow. And right into the thick again, but for now, and all of today – this:

 

Advertisements

Visual notes

 

 

Things are brewing here, but nothing I want to lay out yet. If we are friends on Twitter or Facebook, or in real life you probably know the plans. But it’s early summer, and the process of fermentation is a slow one that cannot be rushed.

 

 

 

 

Summer barbecue smoke drifting across The Meadows. Little day trips when the weather holds. And very soon, at the end of the week, a trip back to America for a family wedding. It’s been four years since D and I left. All these things to be done, and quietly, this great exciting thing that will follow, at the thick end of the season.

 

 

 

Forgive me for taking up this space with dreaminess and vague words. But I hope these images will be enough to charm a little.

 

 

 

For now, this waiting, exploring, hoping with purpose and work that’s too young to share. See you again with photos and snippets of America, sometime in the next few weeks.

 

Bright weather

It was sunny at the weekend, and D and I went to the botanical gardens. Here I am meeting a leaf. I thought it was Giant Hogweed, so I didn’t actually touch it.

The gardens were full of life and people wandering slowly between the trees and around the pond and walls. An idea of a utopia of the future, the kind where people might reach up and pull fruit off the trees for their meals (though it’s too early for fruit yet).

there was a house over the garden wall that looked like something out of a Studio Ghibli film, stately under ivy, possibly haunted by various spirits.

there were trees high and low, like this willow (lowest, clinging to the ground as it would if it were in its natural spot up on a mountain

some like this pine rose up with branches spread, perfect for lounging, if there wasn’t more to see.

Aside from wandering among the plants and sunlit spaces, I have a little bit of news – this morning I woke to the news that I was a semi-finalist for Tarpaulin Sky’s book prize, which I am pleased to hear! I also have something coming out with Irish lit/art mag ESC [zine], though it’s in print, so you will have to order it to read (or wait until my collection comes out, as it’s a story from there).

I have bigger news too, but it is still brewing. Plans for the collection, for later this summer. I hope to be able to share more on this soon. I’m excited, but trying, as ever, to be patient. Plans aren’t set. But! But – just a little while longer, and I promise not to be so obscure.

three views of an evening

 

sunset, woodlands road

 

 

 

the River Kelvin

 

 

 

Facing south on the bridge over the Kelvin

three views of a morning

Kelvingrove park, towards the spire of Glasgow University

 

 

City of Ghosts

 

 

 

Lowland fields from the Edinburgh bound train

blue and gold the gloaming

 

 

working, reading, waiting for elements to come together, as patiently as possible – I have little news to share. So for now, just the rare snow here in the city of Glasgow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2014 Roundup

2014, in some pictures:

 

 

 

January – the train ride between Edinburgh and Glasgow

 

 

 

February – in Amsterdam for D’s birthday

 

 

March – I read Kirsty Logan’s The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, one of my 2014 books of the year

 

 

Standing stones on Machrie Moor, erected c. 3,500-1,500 B.C.E

 

April on Arran – ancient standing stones and a strangely dry looking landscape (don’t let it fool you)

 

 

photo credit: D

 

May – D, A and I went to Moscow

 

 

 

 

June – two images since I couldn’t chose just one. A fantastic birthday trip to Iona and the finished first draft of Monstirs, which would go on to be accepted by Queen’s Ferry Press and renamed On the Edges of Vision – due out in August of the new year!

 

 

 

July – a trip to Butterfly World/ metaphor of the busy bee

 

 

August – York from on high (up on York Minster)

 

 

September – what else but the Scottish Independence Referendum. The country wasn’t ready yet (and the media was determined it would stay unready). The world turns, and I feel like it will happen in my lifetime.

 

 

October – a ghostly park in Glasgow

 

 

November – in the Winter Gardens at Glasgow’s People’s Palace

 

 

December – lingering seed heads on a vine, in front of a Christmas tree in a window.

 

 

This year:

 

 

I’ve read 35 books (which is good for me)

 

Travelled abroad to The Netherlands and Italy

 

Visited islands and breathed good sea air, damp fog, cut grass –

 

Wrote – a collection of flash fiction and longer pieces, pieces from which you can find links to HERE and at some point in August or July if you pre-order and if you have the notion you will be able to BUY the COLLECTION because it will be a real object in the real world all holding its many fragments close to itself oh my heart. (And though I linked to it before, here is my essay on the writing of On the Edges of Vision)

 

Wrote – a novella in flash fiction which was an honourable mention for the CCM Mainline contest/readathon/act of readerly epicness

 

Wrote – a chapbook of flash which is floating out there being read

 

– and began writing a linked flash fiction collection/narrative thing which I have neglected recently in the festivities

 

Read so many stories for Necessary Fiction as the new Fiction Editor there. Here are all the stories I’ve selected so far –

 

• Ghost Prostitute for War Vets by Carroll Sun Yang
• The Garden Sky by Dave Petraglia
• Teacher of the Year by Dan Townsend
• Say by Thomas Cardamone
• Cossacks and Robbers by Maia Nikitina
• The Centaur’s Wife by Amanda Leduc
• Burn This by Rob Roensch

 

I am trying to keep things at gender parity, without imposing quotas or any such thing. It can be done – it truly believe the ‘but quotas harm art!!’ is a strawman argument. In that light, I will keep calling for submissions for people outside the straight-white-male venn simply so that I can reject just as many stories by diverse writers as by the would be Earnest Hemingways (who I read too, every one). I won’t be able to tell much by a name or the content of a story but I want all writers to feel that they will be read judiciously, where the balance in publishing (in literary journals, reviews, and so on) is weighted currently askew.

 

The new year will bring more trials and travels (America for one, for a much anticipated wedding AND hopefully readings from me. More details when I have them), more reading and editing and listening and I’m sure joy and grief and dreamy landscapes to photograph and that first collection of mine (have I mentioned it enough yet? It keeps escaping from my fingers) and moves and jobs and writing and writing –

 

Wishing all of you the best of Hogmanay, whether you spend it out in the cold, cheering fireworks, or inside warm and happy.

 

 

Here’s to 2015!