“If Cosmos is a book about man imposing meaning upon the chaotic otherness of the world, it is also obliquely aware that it is woman who most bears the burden of that imposition, a focal point for the desires and disgusts of whole cultures.”
Outlandia
This summer I spent two weeks in the trees of Glen Nevis, reading and writing at Outlandia. You can read my… Read more Outlandia
Mother Tongue
A new short story published at 3:AM Magazine.
Glasgow Short Film Festival Awards
The winners of the 2016 awards all told the kind of story that seems uniquely suited to the short film format: a single solitary figure, a glimpse into a neglected life.
The Rise of the Woman-Child
“Maybe the woman-child is a symptom of women’s dissatisfaction and disappointment after empty promises of power and ‘having it all’; maybe she’s a symptom of general millennial discontent and disaffection. Or maybe she’s a symptom of nothing at all but the gradual realisation that women, too, are full and multifaceted human beings who can sometimes be irresponsible dickheads.”
TYCI Takeover at Declaration Festival
“The voices onstage were neither frank nor direct, but evasive and uncertain, exploring the ways in which speech is curtailed and constrained, and always full of gaps.”
Submissions open: Letters to Barnacle
A new zine seeking great writing and art that explores the boundaries between public and private, between performance and intimacy, between art and pornography.
The Internet Effect
“The targeted outrage at this one particular person and her one particular £15,000, at its wastefulness or its pointlessness or its unfairness, is underpinned by a logic of austerity that isn’t good for artists or workers. It takes the anger generated by exploitation and alienation, and redirects it into anger at the undeserving, the frauds.”
Wild
“The thing about a film like Into the Wild is that it doesn’t even really notice it’s a film about a man, about maleness, about the kind of self-mythologising adventures men have always written about; it regards itself, to an extent, as a universal story about timeless struggles between Man and Nature and Society. A film like Wild, though, cannot evade its own specificity.”
Millennial spectres
Space, time and the haunting of modernity in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Ali Smith’s Hotel World.
Shona McCombes 