New Writing

Welcome to Scottish PEN's New Writing section. As well as a selection of writing on a set theme by refugees, exiles and Scottish PEN members, we will feature a different writer each quarter.

18/05/10

An Island In A Sea of Snow by Chiew-Siah Tei

Featured Writer
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Chiew-Siah Tei, a member of Scottish PEN, is a Malaysian born writer. Her first collection of prose, It's Snowing (Chinese) was published in 1998. This was followed by a collection of arts and film reviews in 2000, Secrets and Lies (Chinese). She has won awards for her Chinese prose, including the Hua Zong International Chinese Fiction Award and the National Prose Writing Competition. In 2002, she enrolled on the PhD in Creative Writing and Film Studies at Glasgow University. Her play Three Thousand Troubled Threads was staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005. Her first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes (Picador, 2008), was long-listed for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007 and short-listed for the 2008 Best Scottish Fiction Prize.

An Island in a Sea of Snow

My appointment as Jessie Kesson Writer-in-residence, a position created in honour of the Inverness-born author (1916-94), at the Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre commenced on 1 March. The car that picked me up from Inverness Train Station stopped at the top of where the driveway was supposed to be, now covered in knee-deep snow. In fact, snow was all I could see.
 

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18/05/10

Decision by Rizwan Akhtar

Rizwan Akhtar divides his time between Aberdeen and Essex. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Essex. His poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry NZ, Wasafiri, Postcolonial Text, decanto, Poesia, PAK, tinfoildresses, and have been anthologised in Poetry Forward Press, UK.

Decision

I have seen half of Britain
from a rain pattered window.
The nearest tree is stripped,
pavements settle for a mossy outfit,
winter deposits a rusty stanza
on the kitchen's sink

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17/05/10

Emigrant Journey by Margaret Gillies Brown

Margaret Gillies Brown has had eight collections of poetry published {Outposts, Akros, Poetry Scotland, Argyll, Blind Serpent} and three books of prose {Argyll}. She emigrated to Canada in the late 1950s but returned to a Scottish farm where she still lives. She has been a member of Scottish PEN for over 25 years.'Emigrant Journey' was first published in her third collection of poetry Hares On The Horizon (Outposts).

Emigrant Journey

There was the comfort and the all mod-con of home
with its recognisable dangers:
there was the journey,
the endless coming on of the same wave,
the no land time of ocean and high hopes

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14/05/10

New world by Jenni Daiches

Jenni Daiches' published poetry includes Mediterranean (1995), Smoke (2005), and contributions to many Scottish magazines. Her fiction includes Letters from the Great Wall (Luath, 2006). She writes on literary and historical subjects as Jenni Calder. Her most recent book is Frontier Scots: The Scots Who Won the West (Luath, 2009). She is currently president of Scottish PEN.

New world

I know nothing of the voyage he makes
as he sleeps in the chair that never moves.
Through the window there is no change, the trees,
the pattern of people on the street.

I cannot enter that new world,

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14/05/10

Migration by Alan Gay

Alan Gay, a PEN member, is a retired lecturer who lives in East Lothian. He is currently the Convener of Tyne & Esk Writers. His latest collection, The Boy Who Came Ashore (Dreadful Night Press), now in its second edition, commemorates East Coast fishermen caught at sea in the great storm of 1881.

Migration

If I let go I will be lifted
and thrown into the breakers
that roll north across the Forth.

Such a wind.

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14/05/10

Don't Answer Your Name In Vain by Liu Hong

Liu Hong came to study in Britain in 1989. Since then she has published four novels: Startling Moon, The Touch, The Magpie Bridge, and Wives of the East Wind. She has also written short stories and is the English translator of the Chinese novel The Lord of Shanghai.

Don't Answer Your Name In Vain
Tommy, Ortis, Lesley, Bashabi, Ping, Ying, Jun, Yee And Hong? Yes, that's me.

Don't answer your name in vain. Souls have been known to be taken by unscrupulous, wandering ghosts - hunger for identity.

But take it, I say, take it. I don't like my name

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14/05/10

Journey To Tir Nan Og, Land Of The Ever Young by Robin Lloyd Jones

Robin Lloyd Jones, a former president of Scottish PEN and recently-retired chair of its Writers in Prison Committee, writes fiction and non-fiction. Much of the latter stems from his mountaineering and sea-kayaking and love of wild places. Robin is working on a biography of mountaineer, writer and conservationist, W H Murray.

robinlloyd-jones.com

Journey To Tir Nan Og, Land Of The Ever Young
At 4 a.m. the sun filters through my tent. I listen to the ocean lapping at the shore and the seabirds calling. I slide my kayak over dewy grass into pink dawn water. It glides across the glassy surface.
 

fish splash
profound reflections
vanish

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14/05/10

Dust Angels by Wang Ping

Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1986. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is published by Hanging Loose. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. In 2002, Random House published its paperback. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College.

Dust Angels

stars, diamonds, tears of hearts
sand and cut, cut and sand
shrouded in silicon fog
we string beauty with corn husking hands
 

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14/05/10

A Place To Live by Abdul Muqadus

Abdul Muqadus is from Pakistan and has been seeking asylum in the UK for the past ten years. He is a member of the Knightswood-based Framework for Dialogue group. He was assisted in writing this story by Sue Reid Sexton.

Sue Reid Sexton lives and works in Glasgow. She worked as a counsellor specialising in trauma for over a decade and spent another decade working with homelessness. She is the author of four novels including two examining the effects of war on ordinary people and another about complicated grief. She has been published in a variety of forms, most recently in the Glasgow Voices edition of the International Literary Quarterly.

A place to live

When I arrive in a continent, they refuse to have me based on one of three reasons, race, religion, or human law.

It is like God threw me here, as if he threw me on top of a mountain. On three sides of the mountain there are three continents and in each one I am refused for a different reason.

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09/02/10

The Americas Campaign: Perils and Potential by Tony Cohan

Featured Writer

Tony Cohan is the Chair of San Miguel PEN's Freedom to Write Committee. We are delighted to welcome him to our featured writer spot for this issue of New Writing, as a contribution to International PEN's Americas campaign. A parallel article by Lucy Popescu on the dangers to journalists in Mexico is featured on the Writers in Prison home page.

The Americas Campaign: Perils and Potential

In 2008, at a PEN conference in Bogota, Colombia, a campaign was planned and launched, focusing on the difficult situation many writers face in the Latin American countries. For those of us in Mexico, the situation bore great urgency, as drug wars, alongside endemic corruption and lawlessness in some quarters, has turned Mexico into one of the most dangerous countries in the world to work as a journalist.

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09/02/10

Jökulsárlón by Ian Crockatt

Ian Crockatt, a member of Scottish PEN, lives in North Aberdeenshire, and has published a number of collections of poetry.

Jökulsárlón

They wake and uncurl
in the yellow yolk
of their tent. Lazily she unzips
its shuddering brown shell.

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09/02/10

Deforestation by Bashabi Fraser

Bashabi Fraser, a PEN member, is a poet, children's writer, editor, translator and academic. Her recent books include From the Ganga to the Tay, an epic poem ( Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2009), Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter, A Meeting of Two Minds: the Geddes Tagore Letters and Tartan & Turban (a collection of poems). Bashabi is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University.

Deforestation

If you enter my depths, and open your senses like petals to the sun, you will hear my voice, calling out to you to listen and be compelled!

When you walk beneath my boughs
They make a canopy above your gaze -
So intricate that the sky appears in glimpses

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09/02/10

Memories of Snow by Alan Gay

Alan Gay: Identification Large and angular with ferocious expression. Tends to be a solitary bird. Voice Still searching. Sometimes heard uttering crow-like guttural calls rather like laughter. Breeding All year round. Mates for life. Average of three offspring. Habitat East coast, forests, cliffs and open country. Migratory. In summer often seen far out at sea. In winter perches in bars and haunts poetry readings with notebook. Food Irony.

Memories of Snow

The heat in Bearsden drove us north
in a stolen TESCO juggernaut
complete with walk-in, diesel-driven fridge:

chasing memories of glens
that danced at the slightest shift of light;

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08/02/10

Where Is The Warming? by Tendai Huchu

Tendai Huchu was born in Bindura a small mining town north of Harare and came to Scotland in 2005 to study.

Where Is The Warming?

Leaders in Copenhagen
trying to save Eden
Gas guzzling Texans

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08/02/10

Arazeel Rains by Kusay Hussein with Sue Reid Sexton

Kusay Hussein is from Baghdad, Iraq. As a fully qualified civil engineer he worked for the American and British authorities building hospitals and schools for the Iraqi people until the security situation became such that he had to seek asylum in Britain where he has recently been given leave to stay indefinitely. He has published many short stories in Iraqi magazines.

'Arazeel Rains' is a collaboration between Kusay Hussein and Sue Reid Sexton. Kusay writes his stories in the best English he can and Sue edits and polishes them up.

Sue Reid Sexton lives and works in Glasgow. She worked as a counsellor specialising in trauma for over a decade and spent another decade working with homelessness. She is the author of four novels including two examining the effects of war on ordinary people and another about complicated grief. She has been published in a variety of forms.

Arazeel Rains

This is absolute hell, shouted Hajj Salem, the foreman, as he glanced over the half wall, that ran round the roof, and out along the road.
I looked at the heavy black smoke rising from the little old concrete mixer we had placed on the roof of the house, then the first floor, in the midst of sand, cement and heaps of gravel. Its sound was deafening.
 

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08/02/10

Tightrope Walker by Mary McCabe

Mary McCabe, a PEN member, has published Everwinding Times (novel), Streets Schemes and Stages (book on cultural projects), Die zauberhafte Reise (children's storybook in translation) and has had radio plays broadcast in Germany and Switzerland, stories, poems and articles in Scots, English and Gaelic. Through the Scottish Book Trust scheme she runs occasional writers' workshops.

Tightrope Walker

Witchy, pitchy, inky black, icy sable
Death. Death. Death.
Eris, infinitesimal, eerie
Pluto, planetesimal, bleary
Gloomy goblin Neptune,

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08/02/10

The Tree That Died by Manjula Parekh

Manjula Parekh was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1940 and came to Edinburgh in 1968 to work as a radiographer. She has received the Millennium Fellowship Award and attended the creative writing course at Edinburgh University. She writes in Gujarati, Hindi and English. In recent years, she has developed her interest in watercolour, acrylic, silk and oil painting. She has arranged exhibitions of her work to raise funds for Alzheimer Scotland, Buddhist monastery, Equality Choice Action Group and Tsunami. Her first book of stories with illustrations of many of her paintings and drawings called Edinburgh Fables was published in 2001. 'The Tree That Died' has been edited by Fiona Graham.

The Tree That Died

This is the picture of a tree that looks like a winter tree. It is a beautiful tree. What do you see in this tree? It has calmness, serenity, winter and beauty. But will this tree flourish when the spring comes? Will it start giving flowers and fruits in the summer? Will it be beautiful when it has no greenery? Will the birds start nesting in it and will the tree become lively again? Will animals and human beings take shelter under this tree?

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08/02/10

Carbon Trading by Tessa Ransford

Tessa Ransford is past president and committee member of Scottish PEN. She is an established poet, translator, editor and cultural activist on many fronts over the last thirty years and the initiator of www.scottish-pamphlet-poetry.com and the Callum Macdonald Memorial award for poetry pamphlets. She has recently been Royal Literary Fund fellow at Queen Margaret University. Her latest book is Not Just Moonshine, New and Selected Poems, from Luath Press, Edinburgh. 'Carbon Trading' was first published in Shades of Green, Akros 2005 and has also appeared in Not Just Moonshine.

Carbon Trading

I pollute you pollute he/she/it pollutes
we pollute you all pollute they pollute
in the present tense day after day
and in the past I have polluted
you have he/she/it has you all have and
they have polluted

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08/02/10

S2 Environmental Studies by Valerie Thornton

Valerie Thornton writes poetry, short stories and creative writing textbooks. She has held two Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowships at Glasgow University. Her tutoring embraces mainstream and specialist groups, school teachers and the OU. Her latest creative-writing textbooks are The Writer's Craft, and The Young Writer's Craft (Hodder Gibson). Her poetry collection is Catacoustics (Mariscat Press).

S2 Environmental Studies


We're talking puffins and terns
and the Braer and the oil
and the sandeels, but that threat
was then, when they were two:

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14/10/09

PEN Kenya – where we are in 2009 by Philo Ikonya

Featured Writer
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Philo Ikonya is an author, human rights activist and President of Kenyan PEN. She was recently arrested and subsequently released for taking part in a peaceful protest about hyperinflation. To read an extract from her piece 'Ringing On My Mind' go to our New Writing page.

PEN Kenya – where we are in 2009

In April 2008, we got working vigorously on the re-birth of a vibrant PEN. Kenya had gone through an election fiasco in 2007 and the country was burning. Many writers in Kenya realised that they did not have a common voice and they needed one. Some of us had been writing but also participating in public life with faith that we could help our country grow. Suddenly, as it happens with politics here and in other parts of the world, we found ourselves helpless and voiceless as the media, churches and other platforms of self-expression had been swept into the confusion.

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