paperboats

climate | Scotland | action | writing

Writings

Paperboats Zine

The urge to explore and celebrate all the kinds of lives of Planet Earth is stronger than ever, but the environmental and ecological crisis demands we also lift our eyes, and our voices, to species extinction and habitat loss, to what is happening to the forests and hills, the rivers and seas, our streets and gardens. The writer’s instinct to pay attention has never been more vital. Literature can help us to see the natural world – and our place in it – differently.

November 2023

ISSUE TWO: BY STONE, BY WOOD, BY WATER

Issue Two: Introduction

The poems and essays in Issue Two of Paperboats show why we need to keep speaking about how beautiful, necessary, how lump-in-the-throat astonishing the lives on this planet can be, and how vulnerable they are – including human lives – to climate change and other perils. But there is hope on offer as well, in our capacity to re-imagine our place on earth, and in the too often-overlooked truth that we are neighbours not just to one another, but to the other lives with whom we share the earth. In their different ways, the writers throw these questions into the finest relief, with passion and compassion, with quiet (and unquiet) rage and humour, and with imagination and the keenest eye (and ear) for the world about them.

This is urgent writing for an urgent time. From 9.30am, on the morning of 23rd November we’ll be gathering outside the Scottish Parliament Building to make our politicians feel this urgency. We’ll have plenty of words to say, and indeed, plenty of paper boats to float, carrying messages of change and hope. If you can make it, join us.

– Kathleen Jamie & Chris Powici

Kentigern and the Madman

James Robertson

A voice came through the wet, aching wood where the madman lay − not of burn, bird or fox nor the cry of taken prey

Imagine a world without ice

Kathleen Jones

Imagine endless blue, imagine an absence dumb with extinction – polar bear, penguin, walrus, whale – unfrozen oceans where once you could walk

Dinosaur Valley

Craig Aitchison

Sic a drouth, watters recede tae kythe fitdunts lang hidden, merks left bi the clauts o muckle craiturs plowterin in a shallae sea, een tae

Sly Bold Reynardine

Elizabeth Rimmer

It was four o’clock in the late summer morning, still full dark now that the nights were stretching again but greying a little towards dawn.

We Didn’t Stop Being Wild in the First Place

Jane Murray Bird

If your garden grew a plant that won you fat glossy rosettes, coffee, wine, drugs, and chic bistro salads nine months a year between the

Royal Funeral, 2022

Morag Smith

I want a protocol for the end of Eurasian Starlings – clipped tones, pronouncements and on the grouse moors well-cured skins should hang at half

Fieldfares at rest

Lydia Harris

Hurtled from high Blamanen by Bergen to this resting-field at my door, where they catch breath for the next flight. I see them not

The Black Burn

David McVey

The Black Burn’s origins were dark and mysterious. It emerged ten feet broad and several inches deep from between two hedges of scruffy hawthorn near

Revisiting the Forest Walk

A C Clarke

Years since we walked this way. We’ve forgotten the landmarks; loggers have cleared much of the woodland. Bald slopes are littered with tree-trash. We

I dreamt a wood

Mandy Macdonald

in which I was lost, carrying a colourless cloud of grief in a close half-dark. Roots grasped at me; moss underfoot was radioactive green.

Sycamore

Ian Grosz

Each autumn our small suburban garden is filled with sycamore seeds. They helicopter down from a mature tree on the green space backing the row of

the unna rules, made over again after chuang tzu

Alec Finlay

wild nature means a place being no less wild than things are by their nature the crofter may graze beasts but the deer-stalker must

Limits of Language

Sophia Argyris

The coca-cola water of this river pours and pools in sudden calm between the rocky arms of land, and here an otter coils, coils,

Navigation

Sarah Wallis

We heard them long before we saw the squabblers hove into view one night, white bellied geese, lit from below, and flying tired –

Riverine – In Search of Sand Martins

Elaine Morrison

It’s been a while since I’ve been out, between work and the weather. Today the sun has emerged. A warm breeze blows down the glen.

August 2023

ISSUE ONE: THIS IS WHAT THE WORLD WAS LIKE

Introduction

Elaine Morrison and Sandy Winterbottom

In early 2023, an informal gathering of nature writers with some loose connection to Stirling University, took place. We talked of the ways in which

Loch Striven

Chris Powici

This is what the world was like. The Atlantic narrowed to a slither of sea between long, gorse-yellowed hills. A gannet flew close to

The Forth Whales

Kathleen Jamie

It’s a sky-blue afternoon, with combed out clouds and an onshore breeze. From your bench high on grassy bluff, the view is of twin coastlines

Solan Goose Summer

Polly Pullar

Troup Head – Scotland’s only mainland gannet colony: a pungent aroma of guano fills the air as I walk closer to life on the

Diary: Fragments on Walking, Writing, Mythology, Rowans, Dogs, Deer and Trains.

Leonie Charlton

Day 12, 1.6.23: walking from camp at Tigh na Cruaiche, by Loch Laidon, to Rannoch. Train from Rannoch to Corrour. The train slows, stops,

Run! Run! Towards the Flames!

Karen Lloyd

A Provocation for Writing about Nature and the Environment I have never glued my fingers to a train nor brought motorway traffic to a

WRITE FOR US

We publish essays, short fiction and poetry that reflect our commitment, and which focus on Scotland as home ground – writing that shows honesty, care, curiosity and skill. Submissions in English, Scots or Scottish Gaelic, are welcome from writers within and outwith Scotland and we particularly welcome submissions from under-represented groups.

Submissions for Issue Two have now closed. Find out more here.

DEAR SCOTLAND

The climate crisis is global. While our nature in Scotland is only beginning to suffer the impacts of an increasingly unstable climate, we recognise the majority world has been on the frontline of this crisis for more than thirty years.

We welcome contributions on the climate and ecological crisis from further afield in our Dear Scotland section of the zine. Please get in touch if you would like to share your stories

Message us at: hello@paperboats.org

a wee note about payment

We would love to pay our writers – we really would, but we’d love to pay our admin staff too. As it is, paperboats has been put together using our own time and funds in solidarity with activists worldwide who dedicate their time and energies to the climate movement without recompense. That said, if anyone would like to contribute to paperboats, then that might change. However, our first priority for funding is to pay our Dear Scotland writers who stand on the frontline of the climate emergency, yet have done so little to cause it. Their stories need to be told.

If you are interested in making a financial contribution to paperboats, please say hello@paperboats.org

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