My piece on the witches stone of Dornoch, “The Cailleach of the Borehole,” is published in The Bottle Imp, the online journal of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. You can read it here: https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2019/12/the-cailleach-of-the-borehole/
This is part of the larger project I’m working on at the moment, writing about the witches monuments of Scotland. You can read more about that project at my Patreon Page.
I’m excited to have my short story “Gald” included in this magnificent anniversary issue of Luna Station Quarterly. The beautiful cover is by Anna Steinbauer. “Gald” is about a mysterious Pictish potion and its use in a dystopian future on the north coast of Scotland.
This issue is packed with brilliant stories of potions and makes great holiday reading–curl up with your animals and a cup of mulled wine and these magical stories! Find myriad ways to purchase the ebook or paper issue here: http://lunastationquarterly.com/issue/issue-040/ and support an exceptional journal that has published women writers for TEN YEARS. We have long been out locked of genre, and Luna Station Quarterly is one of those game changers that is making the landscape easier for our voices to be heard. LSQ has always been on my A list in terms of publishers for my stories, and I’m so honoured to be included in this benchmark issue.
Happy October, the best month of the year! Have a ghost story to celebrate– “The Ghostberry Bush” is in this month’s Enchanted Conversation, The Thirteenth Hour.
It is a version of the The Juniper Tree, or the Aarne Thompson tale type 720, or “my mother slew me; my father ate me.” Good times.
I’m delighted that a poem of mine will be included in the Monster Verse, Poems Human and Inhuman anthology, to be published by Random House on September 15th, 2015. The anthology is edited by Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust.
About the anthology, from the Random House website:
Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.
Allyson Shaw, Author of Ashes and Stones 