Geopoetics News December 2016

The latest issue of our online journal Stravaig is now available to read here: http://bit.ly/2hWgzdI

It’s been a long time in the making but its poems and essays are well worth reading. The essays include the first and second place prize winners in the Hugh Miller Writing Competition.

Many thanks to all the contributors and to Bill Taylor who designed the new look Stravaig. Your feedback on its content and form would be most welcome.

2017 promises to be a big year for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics with our Expressing the Earth conference in collaboration with the University of the Highlands and Islands taking place from 22-24 June 2017 in Argyll. Full details will follow in January but right now we’re looking for proposals for engagement in the event:

Expressing the Earth

A Trans-disciplinary Conference
the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics
in collaboration with the
University of the Highlands and Islands
Seil, Easdale, Kilmartin and Luing, Argyll
22-24 June 2017
Call for Engagement:
Creative workshops, presentations, papers and performances

‘Geopoetics is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and the opening of a world’.

The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and the University of the Highlands and Islands will host Expressing the Earth in Argyll 2017 to bring together creative artists, musicians, poets and film makers along with academics, researchers, students and teachers to explore, create and debate the earth and the environment in this spectacular area of Scotland.

‘Atlantic space, the west coast of Europe, is characterised in the first instance by fragmentation … a multitude, a proliferation of islands and peninsulas separated by difficult waters. It is a territory of dispersion and precariousness – but each fragment is exact in itself, there is no confusion in this plurality. In a word, unity is not something given, to be taken for granted, it has to be composed.’ (Kenneth White, 2004)

Expressing the Earth will look to the multitude and proliferation of the islands and peninsulas and address the ways in which people are influenced and brought together by these features from the Neolithic and Bronze Age, early Celtic Christian heritage and seafaring history to more recent industrial exploitation of the Slate Islands.

Themes and activities, rooted in Geopoetics, include literature, history, visual arts, film making, archaeology, geology, geography and theology – with active engagement and creative outcomes as central to the conference as academic papers and presentations.

The conference will take place at the Seil Island Hall in Argyll with field activities also in Kilmartin Glen, Easdale Island and the Isle of Luing. Poetry readings, musical performances and social gatherings will play a key part in the conference programme and it is intended that publications and exhibitions will follow.

Please send a 200 word proposal, title, short bio and supporting images, if appropriate, to Mark Sheridan, Reader in Music and Creativity at the University of The Highlands and Islands, by 15 January 2017 – mark.sheridan@uhi.ac.uk.

Further information on the programme, key speakers and content will be published in due course.

Membership

Please join or renew your annual membership (£10/£5 unwaged)
by sending your name, postal and e-mail address & a cheque
made out to the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics to our Treasurer,
David Francis 214 Portobello Road, Portobello EH15 2AU.

Please spread the word by sharing this Newsletter with others.

Season’s Greetings to you all! We hope to hear from you in 2017.