Issue 11
Published by Pushing Out the Boat, 2012
Issue 11 of Pushing Out the Boat, North-East Scotland’s Magazine of New Writing, was launched on Sunday 6 May 2012 at Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen, and was showcased at the SMART Gallery’s IMPRINT Weekend on Sunday 27th May 2012.
FOREWORD by Brian Johnstone
Having run a festival for over ten years, the selection of a balanced and diverse programme of writers is never something I would underestimate. It is almost an art in itself, as vital as the selection of images in a poem or the paring down of narrative in a short story. Get it wrong and the whole will fall with the parts; get it right and the selection will enhance the contents, each resonating with the other.
Enhanced by beautiful artwork, this excellent collection takes the reader through a positive festival of forms – from poems to short stories, prose poems to found poems – through haunting images, intriguing stories and allusive narratives – looking intently at families, relationships and domestic life, at the natural world and the cultivated world.
The journey takes us from an Indian cremation, past neighbours calling the social worker, to the old Botanic Gardens Station in Glasgow. Along the way we encounter Moebius strips, flying bananas, the daily alien, aphid sex, a night ritual and a gentleman spider. We take in unbaked dough, zeppelins, spaces-ships and submarines, even a really strong glue that fixes chairs to walls! We pass peacefully by the River Don, roll place names round our tongues and study maps of the Angus coast. All set for Pushing Out the Boat where we surely get the widest view of great new writing and the visual arts from the North East and beyond. Anchors aweigh!
Brian Johnstone is Festival Consultant, StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival (Co-founder 1998; Festival Director 2001-2010).
Contents:
Sample Pieces:
His Heart’s in the Right Place
poem by Heather Reid
Hopening
poem by Graeme Smith
They Live Like Trees
poem by Lara S Williams
Words o Wisdom fae my Omniscient Auntie
extract from story by Alison M Green
Waiting for William
extract from story by Douglas Bruton
Inhabiting the Door
poem by Angela Arnold
The stories may be read in full in issue 11.
Contributors
Kris Erin Anderson
Angela Arnold
Janette Ayachi
Eleanor Leonne Bennett
Douglas Bruton
Stephen Busby
Valentina Cano
Chelsea Cargill
Mark Cassidy
E E Chandler
Stuart Condie
Jen Cooper
Ann Craig
Hilary de Vries
Mark Edwards
David Elder
Eleanor Fordyce
Rachel Fox
Alison M. Green
Lesley Harrison
Jill Henderson
Haworth Hodgkinson
Hana Horack
Fiona Jappy
Lindsay Johnston
Vivien Jones
Gerrard Lindley
Richie McCaffery
Mandy Macdonald
Fiona Maclean
Keith Moul
Morag Paterson
Kate Percival
David Pettigrew
Heather Reid
Anne Rogers
Donnie Ross
Maureen Ross
Neil Russell
Denise Setteringham
James Sinclair
Graeme Smith
Linda Smith
Judith Taylor
Sarah Ellen Taylor
Lucy Telford
Val Thomson
Martin Walsh
Richard Watt
Lara S Williams
Lynn Winters
Tim Winters