Mandy Haggith

My novel, The Last Bear won the Robin Jenkins Literary Award in 2009.

Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - the True Cost of Paper, Virgin Books/Random House, 2008 is available as an ebook.

Assynt Mountains was first published in Northwords then included in my first poetry collection, letting light in, Essencepress, 2005 (now out of print). It was also used as part of an educational video-based learning pack and is due to be included in the Edexcel GCSE English anthology.

Low water was first published in Rialto, and was included in my collection Castings, Two Ravens Press, 2007.

The photopoem Senses was produced as part of my portfolio that won me a distinction for the MPhil in Creative Writing at Glasgow University in 2005.

Around the lost was published in Pulled by the Tide, a pamphlet produced in 2009 by the North West Highland Writers, of which I'm a founding member.

My current project, Assynt: Fire, Ice and Stone, is funded through a Scottish Arts Council writer's bursary. I am visiting stone remnants of human habitation in Assynt all the way back to the last ice age and pondering how people have adapted to the changing climate, particularly through our use of fire. My musings on stones, ice and fire are the triggers for writing. It's an organic and unstructured process and so far has resulted in a mixture of poems, stories and other texts. I have distilled out some of the short texts into four hand-made pamphlets, called Earth Wonderings.

Here are some wonderings:

We are fire -- incendiary devices consuming carbon sequestered by plants and fuming it back out into the atmosphere. Our cells are little ovens. A gut is a furnace. Veins, rivers of fire. Breath, flames, billowed by lungs. Head, a flicker of sparks and embers. Life is burning.

A cormorant surfaces with a fish in its beak, and the mirror-calm loch rolls into a spiral of ripples, widening until the water is a huge vinyl disc, ready to play cormorant waltzes. A tern dips, a diamond-tipped needle -- let the music begin.

We live on a sphere. What a beautiful idea.

The first terns are back from their epic journey all the way to Antarctica and back. What must it feel like to them to be back in Loch Roe, circling and squealing? Paradise! Paradise! Paradise! Tormentils, louseworts, marsh orchids, bird's eye speedwells - have they all been down-under as well?

For a selection of poetry created during previous Glencanisp Weeks, please view our gallery.