Beltane

We had our Beltane fire a day late. The night itself, 30 April, was poor weather, I was out for most of the evening and had work to do the next morning, so we delayed. Call me a fair-weather pagan, but everything conspired to make last night feel right. As we finished eating, an otter came by, dipping and cruising along the bladderwrack fringe of the shore. Two bats performed invisible calligraphy on the sky, spelling out a mystery. It was a calm, clear evening.

The recent northerly wind had cleared all the seaweed off the rock where we always have fires and the circle of stones always manages to withstand the spring tides. We took a bottle of wine down there and set to.

The makings of a fire are inauspicious: a scrumple of waste paper and a heap of scrap, bits of broken pallets that have spent a few years as steps or fencing until they're too rotten for that, old planks and offcuts and a few chunks of driftwood. I made a tower of little bits and set it alight, then as the flames started licking I laid some bigger sticks into a spider shape and let it weave its web of mesmerism.

All the scraps unify into a single thing - the fire is singular. The pieces of wood line up, like a narrative adventure, one by one, building to a blazing climax. The wood that seemed to be rubbish comes back to life. Flames seem to remember the movement of leaves, the shimmying dance of wind through a woodland canopy, and all of the colours and warmth of sunshine.

A fire is magic. I know nothing so completely absorbing. I can't remember what we thought or said while the fire burnt.

Eventually, after the last pieces of wood found their place and burned, the last flame flickered out, and the fire-web released us to go to sleep. The embers (plural again now) glowed on through the night, cooling.

This morning we woke to the first cuckoo. Its two-tone song seemed to follow the fire, as two follows one. Suddenly everything has coupled up, and everywhere I look there are pairs of leaves opening, pairs of legs, lips and beaks. Soon we'll be awash with the froth of blossoms and clusters of berries and the world will be myriad and many and too numerous to count, until the autumn.

Then, with another fire, we'll welcome the big zero of winter, out of which this miraculous May has sprung.

Bears on the loose!

It's out! Bear Witness was formally launched on Monday at Glencanisp Lodge, and we sold all the copies we had available, so that's a great start. It is now available from all good bookshops. It's also available as an ebook and an audio book from Amazon. I hope you all enjoy it. If you would like a signed copy get in touch.

As well as the book launch we had a great debate about reintroducing bears (and wolves and lynx) back to the Scottish Highlands. We heard inspiring talks and readings from Roy Dennis (who reintroduced red kites and sea eagles and has brought red squirrels north to Dundonnell), Jim Crumley (author of The Last Wolf), David Hetherington (who did his PhD on the reintroduction of lynx to Scotland) and Mark Foxwell (who talked about the Scottish Wildlife Trust's reintroduction trial of beavers). It was soon clear that a future where bears, wolves and lynx roam wild in Scotland again is not just fiction, it's within the realms of possibility.

There seems to be a real willingness to share the land with all the other animals that are native to here and I found it really exciting to see the enthusiasm for returning bears to Scotland.  Here's some BBC coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-22280586.


The first reviews of Bear Witness are starting to appear. The Scotsman's review called it 'lyrical and tight'. Jason Donald calls it 'Passionate and subversive, with a poet's touch...'

I'll be signing them at the Made in Assynt Craft Fair in Lochinver on Friday 3 May (10-4) and there will be another launch event at Waterstones on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, on Thursday 16 May at 6.30pm..

A chainsaw attack on Highland culture

Arts and culture in the Highlands and Islands seems to be under attack from the powers that be. Last month we had the news that Northings magazine will be no more, and this month all the staff of our arts agency Hi-Arts have been given their notices.

I have written for Northings for the past three years, mostly writing features of artists and reviews of art exhibitions, plays and other events. It has been nothing less than a joy. The editor Kenny Mathieson has been a pleasure to write for. Some of the time he'd make suggestions to me, and other times I'd propose ideas to him, and he has always made my job as straightforward as possible with a speed of response that puts every other editor I've ever experienced to shame. I've interviewed a huge range of craft makers and artists from the northwest, making connections and helping to raise their profile.

As time has gone by I have realised that Northings is not only a magazine, it is the hub of an artistic community. Because it was set up as a social network, it has always encouraged comment and discussion, and I have hugely enjoyed receiving feedback from readers, whether agreement about my take on an exhibition or another point of view about an artist.

This raising of profile and interaction with audiences is not just a fluffy thing. As everyone in the arts knows, reputation, profile and audience reach is core business. I know that my pieces in Northings have generated other commissions in other places and sales of artists' work. They have also generated more work for me. Northings was therefore not just some kind of mirror on the cultural world of the north, it was part of its economic engine. Why therefore, has it been refused the sustenance it needed to continue growing?

Hi-Arts, the agency which created and ran Northings, has been funded by Highland and Islands Enterprise and Creative Scotland, but this funding will cease in June 2013. We get the impression that some aspects of Hi-Arts' activity may find new homes, but when it has been sawn up and the dismembered limbs of the organisation have been distributed, where will we go for the help and support the arts in the north really need? It isn't enough that writers may have a literature officer to talk to, or crafts people may have someone to talk to about crafts promotion. My experience shows that we need the whole thing.

My involvement with Hi-Arts goes back much longer than with Northings and I don't really know where to begin describing the support that they have given me. They helped me set up community arts organisation Top Left Corner. They helped us to run a wonderful centenary celebration for Norman MacCaig. They helped to set up the Assynt Festival. They seed-funded the A-B-Tree project, which involved a creative writing event for each letter of the Gaelic Tree Alphabet, all around Scotland, to celebrate the International Year of forests in 2011, and a host of other events and spin-offs including my relationship with publisher Saraband, with whom I'm producing an anthology of tree poems, and with whom I've found a home for my novel Bear Witness.

As I have fledged as a writer, struggling to make a livelihood in this notoriously difficult field, I really don't think I could have survived, and certainly not flourished as I have, without the help of Hi-Arts. It wasn't just the literature officer, Peter Urpeth, though he's a great guy. Enormous help came from Robert Livingston, the director, who despite having the task of running the organisation, has always seemed to have time to nurture new ideas, to visit in person or video-skype to talk through plans at their earliest stages, and to offer real vision and moral support in developing them through to fruition. Their business manager, Karen Ray, spent ages with me showing me how to keep clear and competent books. Their audience development expert, Sian Jamieson, made me laugh and get inspired about how to use social networks to make and keep contacts with potential audiences for my own and others' work. They have run promotional events here, so that we didn't have to make the four hour return journey to Inverness to benefit from opportunities.This is just a little bit of what they've done.

Hi-Arts is an organisation that understands what is actually required for rural artists to turn themselves into managers of an arts enterprise. And the Highlands and Islands really badly needs arts enterprises, both to keep us alive culturally but also to contribute to our fragile rural economies. Has anyone at HIE studied the scale and distribution of the contribution of arts to our economy? I really doubt it.

In this corner of the world, I bet there are more people making part of their livelihoods out of arts and crafts than off the land. Crafting is the new crofting. Art about, of and from the environment is a huge part of our economy - from Highland Stoneware, one of our biggest employers, to the galleries of internationally renowned artists like James Hawkins and Fergus Stewart, to the dozens of self-employed people who sell their crafts at fairs like Made in Assynt, or in village halls, like the co-operative in Achiltibuie, and the Market Street Collective at An Talla Solais in Ullapool. Tourists love our art, and increasingly seek it out. Some of our makers, like jeweller Barbara MacLeod and yarn-dyer Helen Lockhart's Ripplescrafts, have online shops that bring them income from around the world. All of these people are bringing money into the Highlands and contributing to the economy.

Did HIE measure any of this? Has Creative Scotland really understood the significance of these tiny businesses that collectively make up our creative industry, particularly to remote communities where there are so few other options to make a living? If so, why oh why, are they cutting down the one big tree, Hi-Arts, that has seeded so many of these enterprises?

How Wild Can We Go?

The launch of my new novel Bear Witness on Earth Day, 22 April 2013, is shaping up to be part of a memorable and exciting event.

How Wild Can We Go? will be a day devoted to envisioning the future of wildlife in Scotland. The launch of Bear Witness will be at 5pm, at Glencanisp Lodge, Lochinver, with readings, wine and a chance to buy a copy of the book, hot off the presses and signed by the author. Read what people are saying about the book here.

In the morning, there will be a children's event, playing with the kinds of fruit and nut bearing trees that bears like. This will involve the local forest school and the Coigach and Assynt Living Landscape project.

Prior to the book launch, from 1-4pm, there will be a guided walk to the Inchnadamph Bone Caves. Here we'll see the site where bones were found from several species now extinct in Scotland, including lynx and brown bear. This will give us all a chance to think about where we are coming from in terms of Scotland's wildlife past, and to look out at the landscape and reflect on the land's capacity at present.

Then we will return to Glencanisp Lodge, and start thinking into the future. After the book launch there will be a buffet dinner (a bargain at just £7.50) followed by a debate led by an august panel of speakers (tickets are £10, with a chance to win a free signed copy of Bear Witness, and you can buy them by paypal here).

The headline speakers will be Jim Crumley, author of The Last Wolf,  and Roy Dennis, Scotland's leading expert on reintroductions of various species, including the osprey, sea eagle and red kite. Joining them on the panel will be a representative of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, which is leading the beaver reintroduction in Argyll. There may be another special guest. I'll let you know as soon as we know...

The primrose proof of spring

Every year it's a different date. Last year it was February 19th. It has been as late as 23rd March. One freaky year it was late December. This year it's today, the first primrose, and the official start of spring on the croft.

Winter is over, so we have migrated to the caravan at the shore. It is a shock to be back to life at ambient temperatures after months in a well-insulated cabin with stove, but waking to the dawn light on the loch is the reward. As well as the move, other spring activity has begun: potatoes are chitting, the brussels sprouts seeds are sown, the onion sets are in the ground. I look at the list of winter jobs and think, well, next year...

Of course, we have been known to chicken out and return to our winter quarters. March often throws us some pretty ferocious weather, but even if it proves to be premature, it feels good to declare the winter season closed. It has been milder than usual, with fewer storms than we often get and we had a mind-blowing stretch of good weather in February which made it feel much shorter than it sometimes does. But it was long, nevertheless. The primroses are so welcome.

Help please! Do you know these poets?

Over the past year or so I have been gathering poems about the species in the Gaelic Tree Alphabet for an anthology, which will be published in the autumn by Saraband. It will be called Into the Forest - A Celtic Alphabet of Tree Poems. The whole process has been a delight so far, but I'm reaching the part of the process I was warned about by other anthologists: finding copyright holders to seek permission to reprint poems.

About 80% of the poems are either published in books by successful publishers, or I know or have been easily able to make contact with the poets. Without exception I have had lovely messages of support, encouragement and enthusiasm from the poets whose poems I have asked to use.

But now I've reached the last 20%, I have a list of poets who I don't know how to contact. Mostly I found their poems in magazines, now defunct, or in books whose publisher no longer exists. I've asked on Facebook for leads for them all. There are also poets I know to be dead, but don't know who holds their copyright.

So, I am appealing to the world, please, if you know how to contact any of these poets, or know who holds their copyright, please contact me (hag@worldforests.org) and let me know!

A J McGeoch, Andrew Landsdowne, Alice V Stuart, Annette Berman, Barbara Cormack, Colin Oliver, David Nicol, Derek Bowman, Eric MacDonald, Francis Duggan, Harry Rutherford, Ian MacDonald, Jay Howard, Jean Monahan, John Esterbrook, Moira Cattell, Rob King, Robert B Shaw and William Oxley.

And the ones I know to be dead: Gabriela Mistral, George Bruce, Louis McKee, Margaret Winefride Simpson, Tom Rawling and William Heinesen

Any leads much appreciated.  Thank you!

The Power of the Wind

The power is out in Lochinver, so thanks to the wonders of off-grid living, ours might be the only household around here on the internet this morning (or maybe there's one other, hi Stevan and Helen!). Bill took the generator down last night once the wind began to look serious, and we've just put it back up again. In between, it blew a hoolie.

It was an eerie night. I didn't sleep much. The moon was just past full, giving the blanket of cloud a weird, white glow - floodlights on something unthinkable, in another part of the world.

The cabin vibrated and shuddered as gusts galloped in, battering us. I imagined the wind as a horde of wild, dancing creatures. The woods roared, birch trees bucking and cavorting like they wanted to uproot and follow the storm. The aspens on the crag strained and tossed their upper bodies around for release. And every now and then, one of the passing dancers would kick our cuboid little home as if to say, 'Oi, come out, you squares, we're having fun.'

They must have kicked a power line down somewhere in their frenzy. I hope everyone's coping without electricity. I can't help feeling a bit smug - elated with the energy of the wind and glad we're not dependent on the national grid to keep working. And the boat is safe.