Words in the Landscape with Linda Cracknell
Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 March 2019
Tickets: cost £110, and include 2 night’s shared accommodation plus breakfast and a collectively cooked meal on Saturday night. Book tickets now.
Join fiction and non-fiction writer Linda Cracknell, for a residential weekend’s walking and creative writing explorations in the beautiful surroundings of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Forming part of Into The Mountain, a place sensitive performance project by artist Simone Kenyon, this workshop draws on the legacy and lyrical prose of Nan Shepherd’s 1974 book, The Living Mountain, to explore and celebrate women’s relationship with high and wild places (for clarity this includes cis women, trans women and intersex women).
Over two days, Linda will lead activities in both the outdoors and indoors to help you generate words from your experience of landscape, movement and nature. The workshops will include gentle forays in the immediate area, activities to stimulate words and writing, and discussion of potential outputs with attention on how to hone your writing for a reader. This is an opportunity to concentrate on your own creativity for a weekend in a supportive environment with other people of similar interests. It will be suitable for both complete beginners and those already on a pathway and wanting to develop and concentrate on their work.
Accommodation and Catering: Self catering accommodation is included in the ticket cost for the evenings of Friday 22 April and Saturday 23 March. There is an equipped, shared kitchen on site and two shared bathrooms. We also have two family rooms available. We will provide tea and coffee throughout the days, a simple breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings and a collective meal on Saturday evening. Please bring food for other meals and any snacks you may need.
Access: If there is anything that we can do to make it easier for you to attend this event, or if you have any questions around accessing SSW, please contact Jenny Salmean on jenny[at]ssw.org.uk. General site access information can be found on Euan’s Guide.
Linda Cracknell is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and occasional radio drama as well as a self-employed teacher and facilitator of creative writing in various settings. Landscape (cultural and physical), place and memory are key themes in her work. Following two collections of short stories, her novel ‘Call of the Undertow’ was published in 2013 and concerns a cartographer working in isolation in Caithness, and her unusual relationship with a local boy who begins a process of revelation through his own maps. ‘Doubling Back: Ten paths trodden in memory’, published in 2014, is an account of a series of walks, each of which follow a story from the past – personal, biographical or relating to the past journeys of groups such as drovers. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week on publication. Linda lives in Highland Perthshire and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Stirling University.