Kona Macphee speaks with James McConnachie about being an outsider, the challenges of generalism, her relish for constraints, and the transcendence to be found in the experience of creative flow.
Donny O'Rourke takes us to Edinburgh in August, for a Lughnasadh harvest festival — but one of culture, not of crops.
Tiffany Murray flees the over-familiar, but still creatively disabling, complaints of a despondent writer, by escaping to the strange new world of Iceland and its music.
Andy Jackson speaks with John Greening about the patron saints of obscure and modern things, the sonnet as a ‘design classic’, anthologising as the joy of involving other poets in ‘daft ideas’ and the fun of ‘otwituaries’.
Donny O’Rourke visits old haunts in Dumfries and the Borders, ghosted by the bards of Scotland’s past, for the liminal Celtic festival of Samhain.
Julian Turner considers the usefulness of imagination, not just to the writer, but also to the exile and the abused child, and suggests that metaphorical thinking may be psychologically essential.