Newsletter

LAST QUARTER OF THE FIRST HARVEST MOON

on disability, trespass and a standing stone.

Allyson Shaw

08 Aug 2023 — 4 min read

A field of ripening grain in St. Margaret’s Hope, South Ronaldsay, Orkney

This will be a busy few months for me, and I’m gearing up to travel to events and signings around Scotland and in London. At the end of this newsletter, you can find a list of these in-person and hybrid events as well as information about my early zine and video poetry to be exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum.

This is a harvest of some kind, but I have yet to fully embrace it. Maybe when the boxes of UK paperbacks and the North American edition of Ashes and Stones arrive at my door I will start to let it sink in.

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I am not nervous about public speaking—but being out in the world when I am immunocompromised, masked, and potentially less mobile will be challenging physically and emotionally. This is a first for me since the easing of restrictions around the pandemic, which has seemingly ended for many, but not for me.

This weekend, I ventured to the Sorquoy Stone in what locals call "Hope”—short for St. Margaret’s Hope, the largest village in South Ronaldsay. Though this site was 1/3 of a mile from the road, it took me an hour to walk to it. The path was an uneven ditch, covered by tall grasses and thistle. Walking it was like traversing a prickly tightrope sideways—I used a kind of crab-walking grape-vine, testing the ground with both my sticks for each step—I could have easily fallen into the barbed wire on each side of the path. Right to roam in Scotland doesn’t always mean ease to roam!

In a recent post on Instagram, Sally Huband wrote a post about the the activism that won the right to roam in the Dartmoor that was so recently under attack. She asks why access does not also equal accessibility in the minds and imaginations of environmental activists and our fellow nature writers.

”it still feels like a trespass to write about chronic illness in a genre (nature writing) in which disabled voices remain a rarity. I wrote my bodymind in with deliberate intent. I feel like I have, for this brief moment, a seat at the table.” —Sally Huband, Author of Sea Bean, writing on Instagram.

I trespass in a genre and an industry where I have not yet been given right to roam. I go anyway, journeying loudly and, as Sally so eloquently states, with deliberate intent. I am waiting to see what my own seat at the table looks like.

On my recent outing to the island of South Ronaldsay, I find the Sorquoy Standing Stone, a massive Neolithic standing stone gazing out over ripening fields of grain. Each step is a meditation on presence—mine and the stone’s. A pair of lithe footed joggers breeze past and glance my way. For a moment I choke down a flurry of feelings—that I’m a fool to think I can hike and be intrepid as a once was, that I have no right to be doing this at all—a kind of embarrassment that I look like a tourist kitted out with too much equipment for the simple walk I’m on, and a poison jealously at their able bodies easily traversing long distances—I’d seen they were camping up bedside the poly tunnels of the nearby farm.

The stone offers no encouragement but instead waits with steadfast expectation. Oh, it’s you, it seems to say when I finally reach it. I lean on its hirsute back thick with pale green lichen fronds, scales of other lichen in differing shades of yellow and blue. Places where this crustose-raiment has fallen away reveal the stone’s true colour—pink as wind-burned flesh. I could initially find nothing about the stone in the archeological record, so I must look harder. This tall, farseeing presence has a face, as these stones often do. It’s something beyond mere pareidolia, hinting instead at the vision of those who chose the stone millennia ago, placing it here. A strong chin points east over the north sea, toward Stavanger, Norway.

Upcoming in-person events:

⛯ 16th of August. Edinburgh International Book Festival, 16th August, 13:45-14:45, Spark Theatre. This event is now SOLD OUT. Waiting list info here.

⛯ 24th of September, In conversation with Rebecca Wall of Night Owl Books in East Linton. 7:30pm.

⛯ 25th of September, In Conversation with Interpretation Designer Carolyn Sutton at the Edinburgh Central Library, 6:30-7:30 pm. Tickets available here.

⛯ 27th of September, Wigtown Book Festival, 3-4 pm. This event will also be streamed live. Tickets available here.

⛯ 14th of October. Signing at the Orcadian Bookshop, Kirkwall, Orkney.

⛯ 18th of November. Speaking at the Haunted Landscape Event at Conway Hall, London. This is a hybrid event--in person and livecast on Youtube.

⛯ Brooklyn Museum's Copy Machine Manifesto: artists make zines, running from 17th November 2023 to 31 March, 2024 will include a video poem and my zines from the 1990s made in collaboration with artist Laura Splan. They will be in the Feminist, Queer 80s-90s section of the exhibit.