Eggplant.place

2d

WayWORD Festival 2025
1–5 October, Aberdeen

The programme for WayWORD 2025, the University of Aberdeen’s cross-arts literary festival, is now online.

#Scottish #literature #writing #creativewriting #WritingCommunity

3d

Remediating Stevenson: Reframing perspectives through graphic novels
28 August, Edinburgh University – free, ticketed

Launching 3 new graphic novels inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Tales: The Bottle Imp, The Isle of Voices & The Beach of Falesá. The event is aimed at upper primary & secondary teachers with an interest in English, Literacy & Art.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/remediating-stevenson-reframing-perspectives-through-graphic-novels-tickets-1575626052939

#Scottish #literature #graphicnovels #RobertLouisStevenson #teachers

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2d

Stone going home again to stone;
poor helpless house, your heart is ash,
bone-shelter of this country’s bone…

—Walter Perrie, “Stone Going Home Again”
published in Stone Going Home Again: New Writing Scotland 28 (ASL, 2010)

“the job of poetry is not to explain the magical mysteries of life but to enumerate and illuminate them”
—Richie McCaffery reviews Walter Perrie’s THE AGES OF WATER (Grace Note Publications, 2020)

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2023/11/the-ages-of-water-by-walter-perrie/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #poem

Walter Perrie
STONE GOING HOME AGAIN

Stone going home again to stone;
poor helpless house, your heart is ash,
bone-shelter of this country’s bone,
abandoned arteries, old Perthshire flesh,
stoor smothers every good Scots word.
Ghosts, who, though the roof-beam falls,
who brought you sheep and the shepherd,
speech and song, still prowl your walls.

Only the rowans they planted
keep them out. Only from haunted
sky and wood their silence to your silence calls –
now only the wild birds; starling, mavis, rook,
brown wren that through the thicket moves,
and buzzard piaow and pheasant croak,
and the untranslatable noise of doves.

ALT

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2d

The Scottish Novel – book launch & seminar
5 Sept, Edinburgh – free, ticketed

Are novelists from Scotland merely contributors to English literature, or is there a separate & distinctive tradition of the Scottish novel?

This seminar presents papers by contributors to The International Companion to the Scottish Novel (ed. Cairns Craig) with a focus on literature from the 20th & 21st centuries.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-scottish-novel-tickets-1541851020909

#Scottish #literature #novel #novels

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2d

“A poetry of self-conscious listening, of placing sound carefully. Like the plover, here I am, sitting on this stone, testing out sounds and patterns in order to record how it is to be here in this now.”

—Lesley Harrison, “Do Birds Sing?”, in the PN Review

https://www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/do-birds-sing/11958

#Scottish #literature #language #poetry #birdsong #birds

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3d

There is recent talk
of re-introducing wolves
to this demi-nation
of lambs and glaikit rams
and scraggy ewes,
(and – let’s face it –
hardly any shepherds left to care)…

—Douglas Lipton, “Wolves”
published in Such Strange Joy (inyx, 2001)

Today, 13 August, is International Wolf Day 🐺

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/wolves/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #wolf #wolves #InternationalWolfDay

Wolves
Douglas Lipton

for the new Scottish Parliament

The icy rain is spitting
on the pines and golden birches.
Hangings of black cloud
are torn apart by sunbursts
and then tugged shut again.

Behind us wait Przewalski’s Horses,
black Aurochs, Arctic Fox, Wisent, Lynx
and the other extinct of the country.
We are approaching the enclave
of the Wolves. You hold me,
Kiss me. The children are scurrying.
Our friends, too, are there
with two more scurriers
and a screamer in a papoose
and we are followed by other little packs
of back-bitten families,
out for a day of different frictions,
weather-incited.

From a crag of varnished wood
and plate-glass
we watch those almost-
wild dogs of the north
examine their territory,
tear meat and socialise.
Their puppies play,
rollicking like boulders of fur
in a river of pure air.

There is recent talk
of re-introducing wolves
to this demi-nation
of lambs and glaikit rams
and scraggy ewes,
(and – let’s face it –
hardly any shepherds left to care),
but the wolves are sure to be enclosed
or else we’d dare
to be entire again,
let forests grow,
and take our chances.

ALT

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3d

Thar na sìorraidheachd, thar a sneachda,
chì mi mo dhàin neo-dheachdte,
chì mi lorgan an spòg a’ breacadh
gile shuaimhneach an t-sneachda:
calg air bhoile, teanga fala,
gadhair chaola ’s madaidhean-allaidh…

—Somhairle MacGill-Eain, “Coin is Madaidhean-allaidh”
published in Caoir Gheal Leumraich / White Leaping Flame (Birlinn, 2023)

International Wolf Day 🐺

https://birlinn.co.uk/product/white-leaping-flame-caoir-gheal-leumraich/

#Scottish #literature #Gaidhlig #Gaelic #poem #poetry #InternationalWolfDay

Coin is Madaidhean-allaidh
Somhairle MacGill-Eain

Thar na sìorraidheachd, thar a sneachda,
chì mi mo dhàin neo-dheachdte,
chì mi lorgan an spòg a’ breacadh
gile shuaimhneach an t-sneachda:
calg air bhoile, teanga fala,
gadhair chaola ’s madaidhean-allaidh
a’ leum thar mullaichean nan gàrradh,
a’ ruith fo sgàil nan craobhan fàsail,
a’ gabhail cumhang nan caol-ghleann,
a’ sireadh caisead nan gaoth-bheann;
an langan gallanach a’ sianail
thar loman cruaidhe nan àm cianail,
an comhartaich bhiothbhuan ’na mo chluasan,
an deann-ruith a’ gabhail mo bhuadhan:
rèis nam madadh ’s nan con iargalt
luath air tòrachd an fhiadhaich
tro na coilltean gun fhiaradh,
thar mullaichean nam beann gun shiaradh;
coin chiùine caothaich na bàrdachd,
madaidhean air tòir na h-àilleachd,
àilleachd an anama ’s an aodainn,
fiadh geal thar bheann is raointean,
fiadh do bhòidhche ciùine gaolaich,
fiadhach gun sgur gun fhaochadh.

ALT

Dogs and Wolves
Sorley MacLean

Across eternity, across its snows,
I see my unwritten poems,
I see the spoor of their paws dappling
the untroubled whiteness of the snow:
bristles raging, bloody-tongued,
lean greyhounds and wolves
leaping over the tops of the dykes,
running under the shade of the trees of the wilderness,
taking the defile of narrow glens,
making for the steepness of windy mountains;
their baying yell shrieking
across the hard barenesses of the terrible times,
their everlasting barking in my ears,
their onrush seizing my mind:
career of wolves and eerie dogs
swift in pursuit of the quarry,
through the forests without veering,
over the mountain-tops without sheering;
the mild mad dogs of poetry,
wolves in chase of beauty,
beauty of soul and face,
a white deer over hills and plains,
the deer of your gentle beloved beauty,
a hunt without halt, without respite.

ALT

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1d

Walter Scott (1771–1832) was born #OnThisDay, 15 August, the son of Walter Scott, Writer to the Signet, and Anne Rutherford.

Scott is one of the most significant figures in Scottish, British, European and world literatures. In 2014, The Bottle Imp dedicated a special issue to celebrating Scott’s work.

A 🎂 🧵

@litstudies

1/10

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/issues/issue-16/

#Scottish #literature #WalterScott #19thcentury #Romanticism

A portrait head of Walter Scott, painted by Sir Henry Raeburn, c.1822–23, oil on canvas. Walter Scott is clean shaven, with thinning fair hair brushed across a high forehead. His grey-blue eyes look out past the viewer, at something we cannot see.

ALT

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12h

The Laird o’ Cockpen, he’s proud an’ he’s great,
His mind is ta’en up wi’ the things o’ the State…

Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne (1766–1845) was born #OTD, 16 Aug. Oliphant wrote over 100 popular songs to traditional Scottish tunes. Although she shunned publicity & never acknowledged her authorship, along with Robert Burns she is one of the most significant figures in Scottish folksong

1/2

#Scottish #literature #song #folksong #18thcentury #19thcentury #romanticism #womenwriters

Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne
“The Laird o’ Cockpen”

The Laird o’ Cockpen, he’s proud an’ he’s great,
His mind is ta’en up wi’ the things o’ the State;
He wanted a wife, his braw house to keep,
But favour wi’ wooin’ was fashious to seek.

Down by the dyke-side a lady did dwell,
At his table head he thocht she’d look well,
M’Leish’s ae dochter o’ Clavers-ha’ Lea,
A penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree.

His wig was weel pouther’d and as gude as new,
His waistcoat was white, his coat it was blue;
He put on a ring, a sword, and cock’d hat,
And wha could refuse the Laird wi’ a’ that?

He took the grey mare, and rade cannily,
And rapp’d at the yett o’ Clavers-ha’ Lea;
‘Gae tell Mistress Jean to come speedily ben, –
She’s wanted to speak to the Laird o’ Cockpen.’

Mistress Jean she was makin’ the elderflower wine;
‘An’ what brings the Laird at sic a like time?’
She put aff her apron, and on her silk goun,
Her mutch wi’ red ribbons, and gaed awa’ doun.

An’ when she cam’ ben, he bowed fu’ low,
An’ what was his errand he soon let her know;
Amazed was the Laird when the lady said ‘Na’,
And wi’ a laigh curtsie she turned awa’.

Dumfounder’d was he, nae sigh did he gie,
He mounted his mare – he rade cannily;
An’ aften he thought, as he gaed through the glen,
She’s daft to refuse the laird o’ Cockpen.

ALT

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1d

He will outlast us, churning out his books,
advocate and historian, his prose
earning him Abbotsford with its borrowed gates,
its cheap mementos from the land he made…

—Iain Crichton Smith, “At the Scott Exhibition, Edinburgh Festival”
published in DEER ON THE HIGH HILLS (Carcanet, 2021)

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800170940/deer-on-the-high-hills/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WalterScott #IainCrichtonSmith #writers #writing

AT THE SCOTT EXHIBITION, EDINBURGH FESTIVAL
Iain Crichton Smith

He will outlast us, churning out his books,
advocate and historian, his prose
earning him Abbotsford with its borrowed gates,
its cheap mementos from the land he made.
Walking the room together in this merciless
galaxy of manuscripts and notes
I am exhausted by such energy.
I hold your hand for guidance. Over your brow
the green light falls from tall and narrow windows.
His style is ignorant of this tenderness,
the vulnerable angle of your body
below the Raeburn with its steady gaze.

It was all in his life, not in his books
‘Oh I am dying, take me home to Scotland
where I can breathe though that breath were my last.’
He limped through an Edinburgh being made anew.
He worked his way through debts, past a dead wife.
My dear, we love each other in our weakness
as he with white grave face diminishing through
stroke after stroke down to the unpaid room.
We know what we are but know not what we will be.
I tremble in this factory of books.
What love he must have lost to write so much.

ALT

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1d

Did Walter Scott Invent Scotland?
Dr Juliet Shields’ 2017 Gresham College Fulbright lecture

Walter Scott’s phenomenally popular novels & poems created an image of Scotland as a land of sublime scenery & heroic chivalry. Why is it Scott’s version, rather than any of the many other 19th-century literary representations of Scotland, that has endured in the popular imagination?

@litstudies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxBpDfV6SHE

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #WalterScott #CulturalStudies

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7h

“I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did. I was attracted by the romantic notion of sitting on a rock, writing haikus & dashing off the occasional watercolour.”
—Peter Hill in the London Review of Books

16 & 17 August is the International Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n11/peter-hill/diary

#Scottish #literature #lighthouse #lighthouses #lightship #lightships #ILLW

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1y

Lord Byron – “half a Scot by birth, and bred / a whole one” – died 200 years ago #OTD, 19 April 1824

This poem was written in a letter to Thomas Moore from Venice in 1817, when Byron was feeling particularly shagged out after Carnevale…

#Byron #LordByron #Scottish #literature #poetry #18thcentury #19thcentury #romanticism

1/4
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43845/so-well-go-no-more-a-roving

So We'll Go No More a Roving
BY Lord Byron (George Gordon)

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

ALT

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1y

“THE DYNAMITER is a hugely inventive & brilliant book, at once a political thriller, a blackly comic satire, & a female adventure”

Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne married #OTD, 19 May, 1880. In this article, Prof Penny Fielding explores the dangerous #collaboration between RLS & his wife: granting female agency on the page & in life

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #RobertLouisStevenson #WomenWriters #humour

@bookstodon

https://dangerouswomenproject.org/2017/01/06/a-dangerous-collaboration/

Book cover

More New Arabian Nights

THE DYNAMITER

By R. L. & F. Stevenson

London

Longmans Green & Co.

Price One Shilling

Cover illustration shows a man in a Victorian frock coat nervously descending a ladder which is propped up against a tall stone wall. At the top of the wall we can the head and shoulders of a smiling man with side-whiskers and a slouch hat.

ALT

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1y

What Scotsman was caught up in a civil war before the age of twenty? Wrote a book that became the inspiration for an Oscar-winning film? Met a runaway teenager in Paris and married her against the wishes of his family? Lost his ranch to raiding Apaches?

Buckle up – it’s going to be a long, wild #Scottish #literature 🧵 …

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1y

“[Milne’s] cryogenics story, ‘Ten Thousand Years in Ice’, in which a survivor from an ancient advanced civilisation is revived in the present, unintentionally became one of science fiction’s great literary hoaxes”

Robert Duncan Milne (1844–1899) was born #OTD, 7 June, in Cupar, Fife. He emigrated to the USA & became America’s first full-time writer of #sciencefiction

#Scottish #literature #scifi #Victorian #19thcentury

1/5
https://theconversation.com/remembering-the-lost-father-of-american-science-fiction-and-his-scottish-roots-78968

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349d

A birthday 🧵 for Violet Jacob (1863–1946) – poet, novelist, short story writer, & key figure in the 20th-century Scottish renaissance & #Scots language revival – born #OTD, 1 September

#Scottish #literature #Scotslanguage #19thCentury #20thcentury #WomenWriters
1/7
https://www.scottishwomenwritersontheweb.net/writers-a-to-z/violet-jacob

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310d

Fossil hunter, folklorist, evangelist, stonemason, newspaper editor, social justice campaigner, & geologist, Hugh Miller (1802–1856) – born #OTD, 10 Oct – deserves to be remembered in the company of Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold & JS Mill as one of the leading moral & social thinkers of the 19th century

A 🎂🧵

1/4

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #geology #fossil #HughMiller

A faded 19th-century sepia photograph of Hugh Miller. He is standing, dressed in workman's overalls, his shirt-sleeves rolled up. He has bushy hair and large sideburns, and his left elbow is propped up on a carved gravestone. His right hand rests on a large stonemason's maul, and he holds a chisel in his left hand.

ALT

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302d

Curly Highland cow portrait - handmade acrylic painting.
Have a great day!

See more here:
https://karen-kaspar.pixels.com/featured/curly-highland-cow-portrait-karen-kaspar.html

#cow #highlander #cattle #farm #MastoArt #art #AYearForArt #FediArt #FediGiftShop #artist #arte #InteriorDesign #MastodonArt #ArtistsOnMastodon #TraditionalArt #kunst #contemporaryArt #creativeToots #ArtForSale #handmade #farming #animals #portrait #scottish #animal #painting #schottland

Curly highland cow portrait is a handmade acrylic painting by artist Karen Kaspar.
A shaggy Highland cow with a thick, reddish-brown coat looks directly at the viewer, its long horns extending outward. The background is a solid light blue, contrasting with the textured appearance of the cow's fur.
I painted this portrait in landscape format. This painting is also available in my shop. Here I cropped it to portrait format, so you can choose what best suits your walls.

ALT

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78d

Isobel Wylie Hutchison (1889–1982)—author, poet, film-maker, botanist, #arctic explorer—was born #OTD, 30 May. A 🎂 🧵

WalkHighlands shares an extract from PEAK BEYOND PEAK, describing how she tackled the Corrieyairack Pass between the #Cairngorms & Loch Ness

1/4

https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/news/peak-beyond-peak-the-unpublished-scottish-journeys-of-isobel-wylie-hutchison/

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #womenwriters #hillwalking #mountaineering

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266d

The City is of Night; perchance of Death…

James “B.V.” Thomson (1834–1882) – poet, journalist, translator, anarchist, atheist – was born #OTD, 23 Nov, in Port Glasgow. Best known for his long poem THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, he influenced TS Eliot & is seen as a progenitor of Modernism

1/3

https://psychogeographicreview.com/the-city-of-dreadful-night/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #Victorian #19thCentury #modernism #TSEliot

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78d

When you were people
We could have loved you,
Found out your names
And brought you presents…

—“Poem for Innocent Victims of War” by AC Jacobs (1937–1994) – born #OTD, 30 May

Published in NAMELESS COUNTRY: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2018)

A 🎂 🧵

1/6

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781784106751/nameless-country/

#Scottish #literature #poetry #Jewish #diaspora #20thcentury #warpoetry

Poem for Innocent Victims of War
A. C. Jacobs

You did not die for me
Or love or desperation.
No-one chipped your names
On plaques on peaceful blocks of stone.
You are just the useless dead
Who mock our daily sin of passion,
Climb through our heads in cold, slow silence.

When you were people
We could have loved you,
Found out your names
And brought you presents.
We could have walked around with your response.

Or even if you chose to die
We might have understood your longing
And written down your utmost fear.

Now, though, you have got beyond our feelings,
And we can never almost follow
To learn your last shared and perfect secret.

ALT

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182d

Mastodon.scot is a Mastodon server mainly intended for people in Scotland or those who identify as Scottish:

https://mastodon.scot

You can find out more at https://mastodon.scot/about or contact the admin @trumpet

#FeaturedServer #Scotland #Scottish #Scot #Scots #Gàidhlig #Gaelic #Mastodon #Fediverse #FreeFediverse

Edited 182d ago

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67d

"Give me a little less
with every dawn."

Marjorie Lotfi performs John Burnside's "Prayer" in a film directed by Savannah Acquah, from a new series from the ‪Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation & the Writers’ Mosaic

https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/prayer

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #JohnBurnside

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142d

“its power as a starter in crowd psychology comes from Mackay’s insistence on humanising the follies he describes. No macroeconomic constructs here – just good old greed, optimism, superstition & cunning plans”

—Charles Mackay (1814–1889) was born #OTD, 27 March – best remembered today for his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

1/3

https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/the-great-and-awful-book-of-human-folly-charles-mackays-popular-delusions-2/

#Scottish #literature #19thcentury #Victorian #psychology #masspsychology #economics #stockmarket #bubbles

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