Non-Fiction Following Tracks explores beauty in the quotidian, extracting poetic pleasure from everyday scenes and objects encountered on a coastal walk. Featuring photography from Dean Smith. Knowing how way leads on to way Robert Frost A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I …
Non-Fiction Et In Argot Ego is a genre-leaping essay which delivers a passionate defence, and celebration with relish, of the English language’s reflexivity. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the cases for and against those who stand before you. You have heard that while they admit they have been seen, heard and …
Non-Fiction Marka Rifat returns to the Leopard Arts pages with another thought provoking essay with Here’s a Tip a short musing on tipping in Theatres. The theatre, remember that? Over the hubbub of voices, assuring the harassed woman at the reception desk that you really do have four tickets to collect and, as the growing …
Non-Fiction Try Reading essay reflects upon the mundanity of lockdown and considers an approach taken by Poet laureate Simon Armitage. “…from a creative point of view, everything has just become a little bit overfamiliar,” observed poet laureate Simon Armitage (8 May edition of the Guardian Review) and this has been a common enough comment since …
Non-Fiction Tom Byam Shaw reviews the new collection of poetry from Aberdeen-based poet Parel Joy and shines a light on some of the nuances there-in. “time is not linear” opens Parel Joy’s first poem titled ‘queen of cups’ in their collection of the same name “but lately it’s been disaster / after disaster / after …
Non-Fiction Playing With(in) Boundaries responds to a previously published essay by Will Creed arguing against the position that TTRPGs can create art. I am writing to respond to your article entitled, “Co-creation in Table-Top Roleplaying Games after Waiting for Godot.” As an avid games master and ethnographer of roleplaying groups I whole-heartedly welcome the inclusion …
Non-Fiction Examining the absurdism of Samuel Beckett’s ‘ Waiting for Godot’, Will Creed turns his attention to TTRPGs as a new outlet for art. One night, a few months ago, I was running just another session of my Dungeons and Dragons campaign when something happened that made me stop for a moment and think. I …
Non-Fiction In this essay concerning two local musicians, The Glamour of Mica lays the groundwork for a new genre: Aber-disco. SIDE A This isn’t going to be a conventional music article because I know the two musicians I am about to discuss. So, from the get-go, I have probably already broken a bajillion journalistic standards …
Non-Fiction This essay, from soon after the launch of this website, explores the ideas of the ‘Cutesy Weird ‘ so important to the Spectra festival of 2020. I Sianne Ngai came to mind when watching Designs in Air’s multi-site work Creatures from the Deep (2020) at this year’s Spectra festival What was being depicted here …
Non-Fiction ‘Aberdeenshire Walks: A Primer’ is a lavish account of the experience of walking, exploring, and experiencing the North-East’s roving hills. When the daylight first hits your face – it may be directly from the sun, or it may be sunlight through clouds, but it’s light, and it’s day, and it’s jubilant – you can …
