Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue Four, available in late November / early December 2009
It’s three years and three issues since ARCHIPELAGO’s keel was laid, her plot hatched. That our crews and their hauls have been stellar is indisputable. I wave a grateful hanky to them from the dark depths of the engine room. We’ve met much praise from reception committees ashore. Subscriptions have increased in number quite remarkably, and our catchment of postcodes is truly archipelagic, at all points of the compass. You, our subscribers, are our part-owners and agents in the venture, like stakeholders in the Pequod. Each issue is a report to you and we try to do our utmost for you out on the high seas of luck and serendipity, to please you in your passions, your islomania especially.
Issue 4 more than maintains the standard set. Among those landed this time: Norman Ackroyd (and some fourteen images, ten devoted to St Kilda), Ronald Blythe (‘Family Circles’), John Burnside (‘Amnesia’), Douglas Dunn (‘Instructions to a Saintly Poet’), Robert Macfarlane (on Eric Ravilious), Robin Robertson (a long poem on ‘Leaving St Kilda’) with much more besides, including work by new young writers on: Jura, and Cornwall; and in Gaelic (St Kildan dialect) with en face translation.
Please place your orders early, and remember: ARCHIPELAGO makes an excellent solution to the Xmas gift problem. What’s more, at £10.00, including P&P for Britain and Ireland (£15.00 elsewhere), it’s a bargain without equal. Click here to download the order form, and return it by post, complete with payment (sterling cheques only made out to CLUTAG PRESS), to the address shown: Clutag Press, PO Box 154, Thame, OX9 3RQ.
ARCHIPELAGO 4 will be launched on 26 November 2009 by Robert Macfarlane at the University of Exeter’s campus in Cornwall, as part of Exeter University’s ‘Writing, Nature and Place’ MA. It will be re-launched on 4 December in Convocation House, Bodleian Library, Oxford – with readings and contributions from, among others: Norman Ackroyd, Ronald Blythe, Tim Dee, Douglas Dunn, Robert Macfarlane, Robin Roberston . . . Philip Lancaster will read work by Ivor Gurney and sing from Gurney’s repertoire too. Douglas Dunn will conclude the occasion with a wider reading from his work. Dates for your diaries.
The Editor: Andrew McNeillie, 21 October 2009
ARCHIPELAGO News
NATURE, WRITING AND PLACE - a new MA programme at Tremough
‘Nature, Writing and Place’ is a unique new premium MA at Tremough beginning this September. It is devoted to literature and imaginative writing, and publishing, in three strands of study: ‘Thinking Place’, ‘Writing Place’ – including a ten-day field trip to Connemara – and ‘Publishing Place’. You will study the literary and cultural history of the concepts concerned – ‘nature’, ‘place’, ‘picturesque’, ‘landscape’, ‘habitation’, ‘heritage’ and many others – from Early Modern times to the present across a wide range of texts, both literary and visual.
You will develop your imaginative writing skills with a practical view to producing work of professional and creative quality for publication in a variety of possible journalistic and other outlets, including a new course magazine PENINSULA, in the context of writing about place, as exemplified by the literary magazine ARCHIPELAGO. The course will be run by Professor Nick Groom and Professor Andrew McNeillie, founding editor of ARCHIPELAGO, in collaboration with other colleagues in the humanities and sciences. There will be masterclasses by visiting writers and artists and other practitioners involved in the fields of wilderness, landscape and nature at this environmentally critical period in the history of human interaction with the planet.
This is a course for our times, like no other, designed to take literary study out of the library and into the world. It will equip its students with marketable skills as writers, and in the fields of heritage and conservation, or equally enable them to embark on doctoral work.
To learn more in the immediate short term, contact Professor Nick Groom on or Professor Andrew McNeillie direct on . For full course information visit the University of Exeter website.
ARCHIPELAGO Issue Three
Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue Three, available in late February / early March 2009
The third issue of ARCHIPELAGO embarks on rough seas in a troubled world. It does so once again in the spirit of Herman Melville’s character Ishmael, who shipped aboard the doomed Pequod, metaphor for America and the western enterprise. Ishmael called his whaling voyage ‘a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances’ : namely a presidential election and a ‘Bloody Battle in Afghanistan’. So it is for ARCHIPELAGO. Our voyage is a brief interlude, a cry in the wilderness, across the waste of waters, in the wake of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the luxury yacht Climate Change. Undaunted we offer celebratory interactions with landscape and nature, history and remembrance, by both writers and visual artists, including: Norman Ackroyd, Niamh Clancy, Tim Dee, Ivor Gurney (represented by five hitherto unpublished works), Michael Longley, Peter McDonald, Robert Macfarlane, Osip Mandelshtam, John Montague, Les Murray, David Nash, Bernard O’Donoghue, Heather O’Donoghue, Patrick Parrinder.
‘Praise God for Poetry – it is a good thing and fills up spaces in landscape and life with human interest and memory,’ wrote Ivor Gurney. Praise what or whomsoever you will. Ishmael speaks of ‘the great flood-gates of the wonder-world’. This issue’s ‘wonder-world’ reaches from Shetland in the Northern Hemisphere as far as the Southern Seas, to the biggest island of them all, as figured in the work of Les Murray. Once again the defiant lyric voice is heard in our pages, and it speaks volumes more than its proportions suggest, like the wren or the Shetland blackbird, as described in Tim Dee’s brilliant midnight rhapsody ‘Darkless Night’.
At more than 114 pages this third ARCHIPELAGO remains the best of bargains: £10.00 (including p&p for UK and Ireland), plus £5.00 p&p (rest of the world). To reserve a copy, click here to download the order form, and return it by post, complete with payment (sterling cheques only made out to CLUTAG PRESS), to the address shown: Clutag Press, PO Box 154, Thame, OX9 3RQ.
