Foreword
When you have written your first works the natural thing is to look around to find
a place to publish. The same applies to creating your first images — where
can these things be shown? If you are lucky there will be a good magazine in your
part of the country. For me growing up in Belfast it was The Honest Ulsterman
and a little later New Irish Writing in the Irish Press, edited by David
Marcus.
In the mid eighties I was Writer-in-Residence at Aberdeen University (more accurately
Non-Writer in Residence) and the magazine there at that time was Scratchings.
The quality was in the writing and not in the production. But that's as it should
be, there being no money at the time. Scratchings was a good name for it
— porous paper and a couple of staples.
But things have changed. Last time I was in Old Aberdeen I was given a complimentary
copy of Pushing Out the Boat — a delight to the eye and to the inner
ear. For the last 10 years North-East Scotland and its writers, artists and readers
have been well served if this edition was anything to go by. Beautifully produced,
stylish and with writing in English and Doric (when I eventually got round
to reading Sunset Song I was amazed at the power and elegance of Grassic
Gibbon's language). The editors are proud of their track record in giving a worldwide
circulation to new poetry and prose which includes work in Doric.
So congratulations on the Tenth Anniversary Issue. Long may it continue.
Bernard MacLaverty
Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast but now lives in Glasgow. He has published
five collections of short stories (the latest is Matters of Life & Death)
and four novels — Lamb, Cal, Grace Notes (short listed
for the Booker Prize), and The Anatomy School. He has written versions of
his fiction for other media — radio plays, television plays, screenplays and
libretti. He was Writer-in-Residence in the Aberdeen University English Department
in the mid 1980s and later, in 2007 to 2008, he did some creative writing teaching
at AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. He is a member of Aosdana in Ireland.
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