A Festival of the Sea and a magazine called Pushing Out the Boat. A match made in heaven, no?
 
Regular readers will know our magazine’s name is a play on the English language idiom for generosity or extravagance [very appropriate – ed.].

But located where we are on North-East Scotland’s coast, we can’t avoid featuring a lot of great writing and art that relates one way or another to matters maritime. The cover of our latest issue, Harbour by Orla Stevens, makes the point.

So we couldn’t resist volunteering for a slot in the community programme at Aberdeen’s 2024 Festival of the Sea, a precursor to the return of the Tall Ships’ Race to the city in 2025. Which is why a near-capacity audience gathered in the Footdee* community hall on a balmy July Saturday evening to hear a selection of our contributors read poems and short stories about ‘The Power of the Sea’.

We’d identified contributors whose work in Pushing Out the Boat related one way or another to the sea and invited them to read their work at the event. In an act of rough justice essential when multiple readers are involved, we asked prose authors to limit themselves to a five-minute slot each (thanks for complying, people), but invited poets to read a second poem that was marine-related, if they had one on the stocks.

The result was a rich mix of words, from work brought to vivid life by a mere glimpse of distant sea, through poignant humour, to deep thoughts about the state of the world and full-blown horror. It would be invidious to highlight individual contributions at the expense of others. Suffice it to say that the whole was blended into a perfectly balanced programme by our MC for the evening, Peter Burnett. You can see a full list of readers, everything they read, and its availability at the end of this post.

Thanks to those attending who gave us feedback on the evening:

a lovely event, really enjoyed it

a great evening and I very much enjoyed participating. It’s not often that we get such a good crowd for events like this

 an excellent event which I thoroughly enjoyed. Well organised, well compered, well attended and an interesting variety of powerful writing

a very supportive atmosphere, and

I love Fittie … what a fine community hall.

And of course, our thanks to everyone who joined us for a great event, and to Lesley Anne of Open Road Ltd who invited us to take part in the Festival of the Sea community programme.

Dorothy Baird, Alistair Lawrie, Peter Burnett (MC), Nicola Furrie Murphy, Don Taylor, Morag Smith, Heather Reid, Bernard Briggs, Martin Walsh and David Ewen (left-right)

* Note for non-Aberdonians. Footdee is the posh Sunday name for the 19^th century planned village originally built for fishing families and tucked between Aberdeen beach, the entrance to our city’s harbour, and the oil-related quays and docks that surround it. Universally known as ‘Fittie’, how we say it is a perfect example of our own Scots’ dialect, the Doric.

Everything read at the event.

Dorothy Baird

The Complexity of Simplicity. Pettiwick Bay, August 19^th 2022 (poem from Issue 17)
Barra Ferry (poem from Dorothy’s collection ‘Mind the Gap’ published by Indigo Dreams Publishing).

Bernard Briggs

Darcie (poem from Issue 17)
Mother’s Lace (poem from Issue 9)

David Ewen

Backwater (extract from a short story in Issue 15)

Alistair Lawrie

Switherin (Harbour of Refuge) (poem from Issue 16)
Uncle Jim (the first  part of a two part poem of that name in Alistair’s collection Caal Cries, available from the Drunk Muse Press)

 

Nicola Furrie Murphy

Blue Egg (poem from Issue 17)
True Colours (poem written for this event. As yet unpublished but subsequently read by Nicola at Stonehaven’s Wee Gaitherin 2024)

Heather F Reid

Whatever the Sea Brings (short story from Issue 8)

Morag Smith

Swim (poem published in Issue 16 and later included in Morag’s anthology ‘Daughters, Wives, Resilient Lives’, available by messaging her via her Facebook page)
This Summer (poem published in Issue 17)

Don J Taylor

The Sneck (condensed version of Don’s short story published in Issue 17)

Martin Walsh

Martin read from his short story Walrus on the pushing Out the Boat website, kindly donated by him as part of our 2022 fundraiser (donations still welcome).

He also brought copies for sale of the Lemon Ttree Writers’ latest anthology, Peeling Back the Years, in which a chapter from a novella of his appears. Copies available here.