What a joy it is to have Ashes & Stones Shortlisted by the Royal Society of Literature for the Christopher Bland Prize–a prize that celebrates older debut authors. What and honour. Thank you to the judges Josh Cohen, Niall Griffiths and @ShappiKhorsandi
Read the article in The Bookseller or see the update on the RSL website.
In good company here!
As a sick young woman I poured over Vogue Italia—imagining not wealth nor thinness but the ability and desire to get dressed, to adorn.
Bed rest, runway shows and being hame-drauchtit, or homesick: This month’s essay is free to read at my Substack.
For the month of April, Amazon.com is offering the Kindle edition of Ashes & Stones at only $1.99!
In this two hour master class we will centre on facets of place writing informed by anti-colonial re-enchantment of land, place, and home.
28th of April, 2024. 7pm GMT £25, tickets via Eventbrite
I’ll share practical tips for forming or renewing a sense of place in your writing. Together we’ll examine our places, sharing discoveries and challenges as a group, exploring forces shaping our place-writing from gentrification to the Scottish Diaspora, and more. There will be prompts and inspiration for future work.
I bring decades of experience teaching writing to my online workshops. I’ve taught at the University of California and Colleges in the US, delivered community writing workshops as well as master classes for the Taibhsear Collective.
Paid subscribers to my Substack receive a 20%discount cod
Find out about past and upcoming workshops at my Workshops page.
Writing as Ritual is a two hour masterclass for people are writing for publication as well as writers who are embarking on or renewing a writing journey.
January 28th, at 7pm GMT.
Find your timezone here.
In decades spent facing the blank page, sometimes I’ve been dormant and other times I’ve needed to jumpstart my practice, and that’s changed over time. I’m going to be sharing ideas about my journey, also things I’ve learned over the last 30 years about maintaining a practice. In this video up at my Substack, I talk about what this workshop is about and what you can expect,
This event is free to all my Substack subscribers. Find more information here: https://allysonshaw.substack.com/p/dark-night-writing-ritual
To find your time zone, go here.
We will be writing together for about 45 minutes. I will have some prompts to inspire you. You can also bring anything you are currently writing or would like to journal about. I will be writing with you and holding space for your work.
You might like to light a candle and set out any objects that want to be with you during the hour, but this is optional.
Working in collaboration with artist Laura Splan in the mid-90s, I created a zine called Beehive. Issues of the zine will be included in the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum, opening this month. There will also be a short video poem called “Truss,” included in the show which I created, born out of this collaboration.
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines is the first exhibition dedicated to the rich history of five decades of artists’ zines produced in North America. Since the 1970s, zines—short for “fanzines,” magazines, or self-published booklets of texts and images, usually made with a copy machine—have given a voice and visibility to many operating outside of mainstream culture. Artists have harnessed the medium’s essential role in communication and community building and used it to transform material and conceptual approaches to art making across all media. This canon-expanding exhibition documents zines’ relationship to various subcultures and avant-garde practices, from punk and street culture to conceptual, queer, and feminist art. It also examines zines’ intersections with other mediums, including collage, craft, film, drawing, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Featuring nearly one thousand zines and artworks by nearly one hundred artists, Copy Machine Manifestos demonstrates the importance of zines to artistic production and its reception across North America.
[above text from the Brooklyn Museum]
I have my own reflections about the zine from my perspective as a disabled, queer, working class woman working outside of mainstream culture looking back on this work.
You can read it at my Substack here.
The exhibition is accompanied by the first comprehensive publication to explore artists’ zines, co-published with Phaidon Press.
Beehive is included with with Niagra’s Destroy All Monsters & Kathleen Hanna’s Bikini Kill zine in Hyperallergic in a piece by Maya Pontone.
My early zine work led circuitously to the ‘gathering of texts’ in the writing of Ashes and Stones. I have my own reflections about the zine from my perspective as a disabled, queer, working class woman working outside of mainstream culture, looking back on this work. You can read it at my Substack here.
“My own ordeal was my link to those accused of witchcraft in the 17th century. Writing about women’s tribulations in a culture that deliberately disbelieves women’s pain gave meaning to the meaningless anguish I faced daily in my own life as well as the women’s lives I researched.”
–World Menopause Day: a witch chimes in
Last year I wrote about my struggles accessing HRT and my disabling perimenopausal symptoms I experienced while writing Ashes and Stones. I revisit this up at my Substack. We should talk about the menopause to everyone who will listen and even those who won’t–I’ve thrown the discussion wide open in a sister thread at my Substack.
An excerpt from Ashes and Stones appears this week in the Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable. Read it here.
Allyson Shaw, Author of Ashes and Stones 