Page 3 - POTB 13
P. 3

PUSHING OUT THE BOAT  -  Issue 13






                  FOREWORD by Esther Woolfson




                  Literary and arts magazines are special.  They’re important, and necessary.  Nothing
                  else provides the opportunity for a writer or artist to be published as an individual
                  but in collective form, part of a singular, ambitious endeavour.  Nowhere else does
                  the new artist appear in democratic proximity to the well-known veteran.  In no
                  other publication is each offered the same small, concentrated space in which to
                  make a mark. Both mirror and reflection, the pages of the literary magazine are
                  where the artist and writer can be bold or restrained, loud or quietly measured,
                  where the reader can follow a career from first published work to literary or artistic
                  stardom.  They are, at the same time, destination and launch pad.

                  A love of the literary magazine was one I acquired young.  I used to watch my
                  parents avidly reading their separate magazines, my mother’s austere in plain cover
                  with the sailing ship motif, my father’s arriving by post from America, bearing the
                  now-lost glamour of distance.  Now, in spite of being able to read them online, I’m
                  still among those who keep their journals, pile them in cupboards, unable to break
                  the habit of delighting in the written word or image, on paper.

                  For the reader, or perhaps more correctly the devotée, waiting is part of the
                  experience.  We enjoy the anticipation.  Happily, we wait for a week, a month, a
                  year for the next edition of our chosen magazine because we know it may be the
                  one to hold that particular poem, that story or image, that dazzling short piece of
                  writing which will stay alight in our memory for decades.

                  Literary magazines gain stature through longevity.  Pushing Out the Boat was
                  established in 2000 and now, this 13  edition demonstrates brilliantly how and
                                                        th
                  why.  It has expanded its horizons while maintaining the tone and savour of place
                  which has always made it unique.  Through the words and images of this edition,
                  we experience established and distinguished voices side by side with new, bold,
                  exciting ones.  Through different forms and words, they are all contributing
                  superbly to this most important of human endeavours - portraying and reflecting
                  with profound thought and beauty, the lives we lead.





                  Esther Woolfson’s account of sharing a home with birds, the acclaimed Corvus - A Life With
                  Birds, was published in 2008, as was her novel Piano Angel.  She has won prizes for both
                  fiction and non-fiction and was shortlisted in 2014 for the Ondaatje Prize.  An anthology
                  Cold Vision, inspired by her residency and those of Kathleen Jamie and Paul Farley, in
                  Kielder as part of the 2012 Hexham Book Festival, was published in 2014.  A former Artist
                  in Residence at the Aberdeen University Centre for Environmental Sustainability, Esther
                  was recently appointed Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at
                  Aberdeen University.




                  Pushing Out the Boat 13                                                                    1
   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8