“…wintering out/ the back end of a bad year…” -Seamus Heaney, “Servant Boy”
🪨 🌚 🪨 🥃 🪨 🕯️🪨
It’s said that on Hogmanay the Stones of Stenness walk to the loch of Harray for a drink—yet none have witnessed this—perhaps until now…
The first instalment of my field notes on Stenness is up at my Substack. I explore the accused witch Alison Balfour’s relationship to what is now known as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. This one is for paid subscribers! Become a paid subsciber to read all my Orkney field notes. 📸 Image is a picture I took of the Stones in the snow last January, 2023.
Every month I share a curated list of what I’m reading, watching, listening to and thinking about with my newsletter subscribers. Read the latest, all about Yuletide Ghost stories—with a brief mention of the extraordinary ceremony held in Sweden this month to remember those persecuted for witchcraft. Find out more at r Rebecca Tiger’s Instagram. (more on this soon.)
Two years ago I set out a plan to write about the folklore of witchcraft in Orkney and its intersection with the lives of Orcadian women accused of witchcraft. During the witch hunts in Scotland, the people of Orkney were slow to demonise witchcraft and the hunts never reached a full blown panic. There are reasons for this that I might unpack further in another Substack post, but the story of the accused is often eclipsed by legend. Scota Bess on Stronsay is an example of a larger-than-life persona—a mixture of storm witch with elements of a creation goddess. The lived reality of an actual woman named Scota Bess, and indeed any historical record of her life, is seemingly lost to the shadow of her tale. I have written about her for paid subscribers of my Substack.
My obsession with the painter John Atkinson Grimshaw is rekindled by the mouldy prints of his work hanging in an abandoned croft on Stronsay. Shipwrecks, mermaid chairs, selkie songs and seal culls…The final instalment of my Stronsay field notes is free to read at my Substack.
Ashes & Stones: a Scottish Journey In Search of Women Hunted as Witches is an US Amazon Daily Deal this Monday, October 28th. Kindle edition is only $1.99 for one day only!
My latest Substack post is the beginning of a series of irregular long reads for paid subscribers of my Substack—sketches for a book I thought I might write about Orcadian women accused of witchcraft.
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.
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,
Myself and Laura Splan in the trailer park where we lived while making Beehive. Film still from the video poem “Truss” included in Copy Machine Manifestos at the Brookly Museum.
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.
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.
Allyson Shaw, Author of Ashes and Stones 