Writing News

The Travel Guardian (22nd September) was all about autumn walks, and I contributed a small piece to a collection of writers' walks, highlighting Dorothy Wordsworth in Perthshire. If you are interested in Scotland in the early 19th-century and in travel writing, I highly recommend looking up her 'Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, 1803', full of insights into nature and social conditions.
 
In more on walking, my latest piece for the online Walkhighlands magazine is about a short walk up Ullapool Hill where local artist Peter White has been walking as a form of memorial and secreting some beautiful painted stones. You can read it here. My piece about a hot overnight trip to Glen Coe's Lost Valley was published in the latest issue of Womankind, an interesting international magazine that takes no advertising, published in Australia. 

I'm delighted that a piece I wrote as an essay for BBC Radio 3 about quartz has been included in a beautiful anthology 'Cornerstones' edited by Mark Smalley and published by Little Toller. It has already attracted considerable attention and takes some fantastic writers in literary explorations below the surface of the earth. My essay can be read in its entirety on The Clearing blog here and is still available for listening on i-player here.

Finally if you are a teacher of creative writing in secondary schools you may be interested in this resource I wrote for the Scottish Book Trust, suggesting ways of using authentic writerly activities in the classroom.

Upcoming events

Tall Tales, Tall Trees is a walking workshop with myself and storyteller Claire Hewitt as part of the inaugural Birnam Book Festival 23-25th November.

Looking ahead I will be running a two-day writing workshop for women as part of the 'Into the Mountain' initiative inspired by Nan Shepherd at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in the Cairngorms next year, 24/25th of March, as well as the usual Moroccan Sahara travel and writing adventure February 15 - 24 2019 (please E-mail me about this if interested).