Climate | Writing | Action | Scotland

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.

Issue Seven: Edens

Guest Editors: Laura Fyfe & Chris Powici

Snowdrops materialise, as they always do, with a keek of surprise that Spring is finally on the horizon. This year, perhaps more than ever before, they have brought with them a much-needed sense of hope. The editors of Issue Seven have weathered this dreich auld winter by reading through flurries of submissions on the theme of Eden.

Reflecting on Eden, it seemed fitting to ask a poet who hails from the verdant, sunny, lushness of Jamaica to contribute a poem. Poet, author, Professor of English at Penn State, and Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds, Shara McCallum sent us ‘Land that has neither beginning nor end’. Her spellbinding poem moves us to reflect on important questions. What do we regret having lost? What do we aspire to create?

Eden, as an ideal, is redolent with the vulnerabilities of childhood: innocence, beauty – and absence of conflict. It provides for us not only an origin but a destination we long to return to. If it ever truly existed in the first place.

In such worrying times, it can be tempting to find refuge in the nostalgic, the imaginary and the fantastical. Reading the submissions for this edition of Paperboats has, however, become a lesson on grounding ourselves in the real. We’ve learned how writers thole the challenges of modern life: with full-hearted appreciation of the best of our past and our present: with reflections on what we hope to preserve, to save, to nurture.

Read on. Consider what we might each do to bring a little more Eden to our own tiny corners of this changing planet. With the inevitability of snowdrops, the future arises, moment upon moment.

Issue Six: Nature's Voice

Guest Editors: Ian Grosz and Alex Nye

In this issue of the Paperboats Zine, we tune in and try to hear Nature’s voice. What follows is testament to the many different ways Nature can speak to us. In poetry and prose, a diverse range of writers bear witness to the vulnerability of birds and other animals; the human impacts on climate and environment; hear the imagined song of trees; give voice to glaciers and storms, mosses and lichen. We learn of grass-roots efforts to respond to the threat of extinction, and we recognise the need to pause and to listen, to take note and act before it is too late.

The urgency of this message vibrates through all of the wonderful contributions included in this issue, and we are hugely proud to bring you the work of each of the writers featured. We are particularly delighted to include a specially commissioned poem by international poet, artist and curator, Madhu Raghavendra. Madhu was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship by the University of Stirling in 2024. His opening poem ‘Orbit’ sets the scene and encapsulates the themes of this issue perfectly.

Issue Five: Our Power - Our Planet

Guest Editors: Polly Pullar & Linda Cracknell

To mark Earth Day 2025, the writers in this issue of the Paper Boats zine bring us prose and poetry on the theme, ‘Our Power – Our Planet’. Their words resonate with ecological, human, technological and earthy questions. Power is addressed in the repercussions of our energy choices, but also in humans working together for common good and in sometimes relinquishing control so other species and habitats can flourish. We’re introduced to the quiet authority of a watching bird-man; how winter or true dark humbles us to literal proportion on the planet; our entanglement with trees and the triumph of resilient natural growth. Above all every piece foregrounds its own emotional viewpoint, helping reveal what we stand to lose if we don’t put the needs of our astonishing planet before all else.

Issue Four: The Roar O The Sea

Guest Editors: Leonie Charlton & Karen Lloyd

The coming of winter reminds us of the change of light, the dimming down of the season. Everything is in flux; the last few swallows and martins have jinked their last until next spring, the energy of wildflowers retreats back down into the soil. In Issue Four of the Paperboats zine, we celebrate the many ways that writers notice the world around them – hedgehogs as ‘Spanish chestnuts in their brown prickly cases,’ but importantly, hedgehogs also as barometers of climate change. As well, we celebrate noticing in language and how the shifting world and the inner world of writers find some kind of equilibrium through the practice of poetry and prose.

Issue Three: A Turn of the Sun

Guest Editors: Chris Powici & Leonie Charlton

‘Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.’ writes US Poet Laureate Ada Limón in her poem Instructions on Not Giving Up. Now, more than ever, at the end of this storm-and-war-wracked winter, we welcome the greening of the trees as a reminder to keep going, and not only to keep going but to attend to personal and planetary ecologies, to do whatever small acts can be done to make positive indentations on climate, biodiversity and relational collapse. Love, and not giving up, is what it takes to keep a body, a planet, going. The poems and essays in Issue Three of the Paperboats Zine include clear sighted, loving and courageous testimonies of what is happening – and of what is coming – to this planet, and its dazzling ecology of beings.

Issue Two: By Stone. By Wood. By Water

Guest Editors: Kathleen Jamie & Chris Powici

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.

Issue One: This is What the World Was Like

Guest Editors: Elaine Morrison & Sandy Winterbottom

As nature writers, we are more comfortable in the wild, semi-feral, immersed in the rich diversity of life that has – incredibly – evolved on this planet. Where else in the entire universe might exist gannets or whales or echoes of wolves? It is a rare place indeed, and you will see from these vivid accounts, that this Earth is extraordinary. But you will sense the undertow of fear too. It is the opening line of Chris Powici’s lingering poem, Loch Striven, titling this issue, that is most haunting of all: ‘This is what the world was like.’ As you read these pieces, remember this phrase; it is time stamped like a watermark through its digital pages.

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.

We accept up to 1500 words of prose (short fiction or creative nonfiction) and/or up to 60 lines of poetry.

Check our submission page for further details. Sign up to our mailing list below to be kept up to date.

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 campaigning for climate justice.