This will be the last PlaySpace Newsletter until March 24 – because I will be away on retreat in January and February. Once a week the PSP administrator – Robin Adair – will be checking emails and processing order for publications.

Sheila Templeton 1941 to 2023

I first met Sheila in 1992 at a writing for wellbeing workshop in Salisbury Centre with Graham Hartill. Graham and I had recently started the Poetry Healing Project which morphed into Survivors’ Poetry Scotland which morphed again into Lapidus Scotland. Sheila confessed to me later that at that workshop it was the first time she’d read her poetry aloud to anyone. What a transformation over the subsequent thirty years! Here is Sheila reading her prize-winning poem A Bonnie Fechter. Over the years Sheila became a close friend, an older sister, a creative collaborator and co-editor. We edited the anthology of prose and poetry Living Our Dying. Her funeral will take place next Wednesday 13th December 10am in the Hurlet crematorium.

STEADFAST TRICKSTER

PSP Publication: Steadfast Trickster tributes to the life and times of Robin Lloyd Jones. NOW AVAILABLE. All profit from sale of this book will be donated equally to Scottish PEN and Autumn Voices

Robin couldn’t attend the launch at the Mitchell Library because he was in hospital recovering from a heart attack – here’s what he would have said at the launch:

Hi everyone,
Sorry I missed the launch of Steadfast Trickster. I bet some of you thought I’d popped my clogs. Well, as Mark Twain said, ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated!’ According to the predictive text on my smart phone, I was in hospital having a baby. My house master at school was nearer the mark with his prediction: ‘Lloyd-Jones, you’ll be late for your own funeral!’

When I read the generous comments friends and family had made about me, I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve got away with it! Somehow I haven’t been found out!’ Several of you said I was modest and humble. Well, not any more! Not after this!

Perhaps I should beef up my Trickster credentials with two incidents:

When I worked in Strathclyde Region’s Education Department, we were on the top floor of the county building and the Youth Service Department was directly below us. One day, taking a short-cut to my office, I passed a meeting room with four people at a long table, imminently expecting the arrival of an interviewee. I slipped into the hot seat. ‘I am the best person for this job!’ I declared to the startled interviewers. ‘Hire me and you won’t regret it!’ Whereupon I rose and left.

On another occasion, in the days when Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts had a restaurant attached, I had arranged to meet Larry there for morning coffee. He bounded into the room in his usual puppyish manner – ‘I’ve made a resolution not to say anything bad about anyone for the whole of today!’
‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘What do you think of Donald Trump?’

Through Steadfast Trickster I am now aware of the sort of things that would normally only be said after my death. It feels incredibly life-affirming and reassuring that maybe I’m on the right track after all. I’m grateful to have known this before I die and to have touched a level of intimacy with fellow human-beings which might have otherwise escaped me.

That excellent publication Living Our Dying (Edited Larry Butler & Sheila Templeton) urges us to do just that – make death more a part of our lives. I am hoping that this is what Steadfast Trickster and the launch event will achieve. That the boundaries between life and death can be more porous, and some things usually said or written for a person once they are dead can be available for the person while still alive – for them to enjoy and realise the extent to which friends and family have appreciated them.

There is a rather neat symmetry in the fact that Sukhema has put together this booklet about me and I’m in the process of writing I Am Because We Are: A rather weird and unreliable biography of Larry Butler seen through the eyes of others.

And that’s something else I’d take a bet on – that the launch of Steadfast Trickster had its weird moments too!

I would like to end by thanking Sukhema for his considerable effort in putting the booklet together and in organising the launch event; all those who wrote such kind words for it and everyone who turned up on 25th November, either to the Mitchell Library or on Zoom.

If you missed the launch, it was recorded by Mark Cunningham for the Scottish Writer’s Centre: https://youtu.be/99SZbZNjCpI

Adore & Endure – rengas by Ratnadevi & Sukhema

December / January Sales

PlaySpace Publications – all prices reduced

TITLE	PRICE
13 Ways of Making Poetry a Spiritual Practice	£2.00
Autumn Leaves by Tom Leonard	£1.50
Bringing Mindfulness to Life	£12.00
Brushes With War	£1.00
bundles of bog cotton	£5.00##
Burning Words	£3.00
Bute Poems	£2.00
Butterfly Bones	£5.00
C – Sense Greetings	£1.50
Circuito Sanxet	£3.50 Ψ
Covid Comfort	£2.00
Earth Water Fire Air	£3.00
Embrace the Whole card	£1.00
Heartwork by Linda France	£5.00 ΩΩ
How Ripples Happen	£3.00
It Takes You a Lifetime to Become Yourself	£2.00
Living on the Edge of Uncertainty	£2.00
Living Our Dying	£12.00 Ω
Requiem	£5.00*
The Art of Doing Nothing	£1.50
The Earth Is Our Home	£5.00
The Earth Says	£1.50
The Path that Leads to the Whole Wide World	£2.00
The Unfinished Hut	£4.00
Today Today Today	£4.00
Tributes to Tom Leonard	£3.00

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