Each place, each time, waymark the stories of our lives. Like a pebble plucked from a beach, or a feather caught on a sleeve, we carry them with us, wishing to hold on to something that has passed.
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It’s great to see this anthology come into the world and to have a contributing essay within its pages.
Published by the wonderful Arkbound UK,’The Weight of Quiet Things gathers essays, stories and poems that explore the deep, enduring relationship between the Scottish landscape and its people.’ Edited by Bridget Reaume, this is a collection ‘about what we take from the land, what the land takes from us and the weight of what remains.’
My essay ‘A Bridge to Nowhere: Land Use and Misuse on the Isle of Lewis’ comes out of a return visit to the Isle of Lewis where I lived for a time in the early noughties. As an incomer, I wanted to understand more about the island’s history and culture, and how the legacies of the past continue to shape its identity today. An abandoned bridge project spearheaded by Lord Leverhulme as part of his ambitious plans to commercialise the islands in the years following WWI seemed emblematic of both the misplaced good intentions of the outsider and the spirit of the islanders themselves.
The collection is published in April but you can order ahead at the presale link below:
Some of the output of the critical component of my PhD project is a chapter in this book of collected essays, edited by Sarah Earnshaw and published just this month by Palgrave Macmillan:
Things take a long time in academia and it’s great to see this out in the world three years on from its origins at the ‘Here, There, and Somewhere In-between: Practicing, Placing, Configuring’ conference at the Practicing Place Centre, University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, in November 2022.
The collection pulls together contributions from literature and the humanities, the social and political sciences, and cultural studies, to offer a truly multidisciplinary examination of the different ways place features, and is expressed, in our lives.
Cultural Geographer Tim Creswell, writes in the Afterword:
‘Collectively, these essays make it clear that thinking about place, and specifically its links to practice, is an intellectually ongoing business that brings a conceptual and political liveliness to the ways we contemplate and act in the world.’
Place for me is at the heart of things, and my contribution explores the methodology of relating place to self through a creative practice and others’ lived experience.
From the Introduction by Sarah Earnshaw:
‘Ian Grosz […] embarks upon an interdisciplinary reflection on his autoethnographic creative writing practice in Chapter 9 to explore the role of landscape in individual and collective senses of place, and thus, in the formation of identity […] Weaving perspectives from social scientific literature with [British] nature writing alongside his personal narrative with the stories of interview partners, Grosz’s contribution exemplifies the dynamic and relational practices of place through an inquiry on the bread and butter of knowledge production—narrative writing, the stories we tell and share.’
I feel very privileged to feature in this collection of essays and to have met the people in and behind its publication.
I’m very proud to have co-edited Issue 6 of the Paperboats Writers E-Zine alongside Alex Nye.
The issue incudes such a great range of thought-provoking writing by a diverse group of wonderful writers, all responding to the issue theme of ‘Nature’s Voice’ in inspiring and imaginative ways.
In poetry and prose, our contributors bear witness to the vulnerability of birds and other animals; the human impacts on climate and environment; hear the imagined song of trees; give voice to glaciers and storms, mosses and lichen. We learn of grass-roots efforts to respond to the threat of extinction, and we recognise the need to pause and to listen, to take note and act before it is too late.
We are particularly delighted to feature specially commissioned work by poet, artist and curator, Madhu Raghavendra, who was awarded the Charles Wallace Writing Fellowship at Stirling University in 2024.His opening poem ‘Orbit’ sets the scene and encapsulates the themes of this issue perfectly.
Please do grab a cuppa and enjoy a great read by going to the link below.
Looking forward to giving an online talk and reading from my essay ‘elm is me and I am elm’ at Plymouth State University this Friday – part of the Museum of the White Mountains Tree Talk series.
‘elm is me and I am elm’ was published in Issue 5 of the Paperboats Writers E-Zine and explores our deeply entwined relationship with nature through a personal exploration of a local area of ancient woodland, the story of the wych-elm, and recent thinking in anthropology and ecology.
Join me on Friday 17th November for a human-nature entanglement.
Details here.
I’m proud to be co-editing the next issue of the Paperboats Writers e-zine with author Alex Nye, on the theme of Nature’s Voice.
The zine has featured some fantastic writers over each of the five issues that precede this one – both long-established, well known writers and emerging talent, and we hope to be able to continue to bring this diverse range of voices with our call to speak from the perspective of the more-than-human world at this time of climate and ecological breakdown.
Keep a look out for Issue 6, due out in late autumn 2025. In the meantime, you can catch up on each of the other five, fantastic issues, with the link below.
Groundings 