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 …
Prose Duncan’s Last Request tracks three men in the highlands exploring trauma, companionship, and the unexpected tenderness of an old alcoholic. After a week of drunken arguments and even drunker confessions, we were surprised to learn that Duncan had fond memories of his childhood. Driving in the autumn, always late at night, with his father …
Prose Telling the tale of one man and his terminally ill wife, alone in the Aberdeenshire countryside, ‘Chestnuts’ is a car journey, an exploration of the landscape and its bitter memories. This short story delves into a life once lived and lost, a community dragged into the 21st century, and a marriage surrendered to time …
Prose From the seaside village of Collieston, an eerie light glints on the horizon. This entrancing short story captures the intensity of the dark North-East winters – bobbing boats and flashing lights in the wintry darkness. Light. No light. Quick light. Slow light. Slow light… and so this went on. This message coming from the …
Prose A leisurely visit to a contemporary arts exhibition turns into an unexpected encounter. The Businessman’s Bluetooth cut out just as he was passing the glass door. His study, adjacent to John Lewis, was a minute away, but objects and materials glinted behind the wall-as-window. The art took the Businessman’s gaze, suspended it, stopped the …
Prose A tender love story, The Red Door plays with representations of memory and sensations to tell a story of enduring connection and affection. Taking a trip through the past of individual lives reveals more about a relationship – but is everything as it seems? One, crick, two, crick, three, crick. I feel the frosty blades of …
Prose A sharp snapshot of a seemingly mundane moment suffused with delicate poetry brings this simple act of delivery to life. I remember the flowers, mainly. Whatever else was in the van blurs back to the junction end of Bedford Road. Its back doors had gaped open, wound-like. The man standing inside seemed hell-bent on …
Prose A destabilising short story set in medieval Aberdeen.ì, The Spill examines the painful, manipulative, yet disconcertingly tender relationships between two generations of mothers and daughters. A fleeting insight into transgenerational trauma and complex grief. My mother forced the bread into her mouth. She devoured the tip of each loaf as I pulled them out …
Prose With his unmistakeable bite, Ian Macartney imagines Aberdeen as a dystopian abyss and in turn reflects upon the nature of the place. Aberdeen City Council are delighted to announce our next endeavour. After the unprecedented success of Development, our efforts will be bolstered two-fold, into the avenues of perpetuation and negation. We must continue ascension, while …
