Living Our Dying

LIVING OUR DYING – Invitation to our pre-sale launch10th to 16th May is Demystifying Death Week, so we’ve decided to launch our crowd funding appeal on 13th May at 7pm for an hour – an event on zoom: Living Our Dying – meet the editors and hear a few extracts read by the authors followed by Q&A.
Please circulate the zoom invitation – see below. – to folk who might like to attend – along with the attached cover. May you be well, Larry & Sheila

You are invited to a Zoom meeting ; Living Our DyingPre-sale launch event – meet the editors and hear a few extracts read by the authors followed by Q&A. Readers include Sheena Blackhall, Billy Bonar, Ted Bowman, Andy Jackson, Linda Jackson, Kim Stafford, Sheila Templeton and Mary Troup

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: May 13, 2021 07:00 PM London

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZApcOyuqTopEtTeUAJzJk6c6QQecm41YcxD

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
When: May 13, 2021 07:00 PM London

PlaySpace New January 2020

P L A Y S P A C E  N E W S JANUARY 2020

FAIL

         after William Stafford and Samuel Beckett

try then fail
try again
fail again
now lower your standards
then try again
fail better
try again harder
fail safer
try one more time
fail much better
now lower your standards
even further

 

APOLOGY

Some of you may have bought and read a faulty copy of Brushes with War. All the words are correct and in the correct order, but the formatting leaped ahead by a couple of lines on a few pages when we made a few final corrections before sending the manuscript to the printers.

Lesson: check, double check, and insist on a proof copy before the print run. Check again.

 Remember Tom Leonard

re-launch of out-of-print books with readings, songs, and film including Gerrie Fellows, Gerry Loose, Tam Dean Burn, Eddie Linden, Allan Tall, Gerry Mangan, Jane Goldman and others
25th April 5pm to 7pm at the CCA – 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow
Booking essential

L i v i n g  O u r   D y i n g 

This book demystifies death and dying, encouraging people to see this as an enriching dimension of our story, enabling them to talk and think more frankly and helpfully about what is often a taboo subject.

Living Our Dying offers a fuller engagement with death, both before and after the event: pain, fears and anxieties, loss of dreams, residential care, funerals, eulogies, epitaphs, poems and songs, memorials, hospice care. It is a practical approach to and philosophy of dying, expressed by twenty-three different writers.

We are looking for a publisher for Living Our Dying which offers a fuller engagement with death, both before and after the event: pain, fears and anxieties, loss of dreams, residential care, funerals, eulogies, epitaphs, poems and songs, memorials, hospice care. It is a practical approach to and philosophy of dying, expressed by twenty-three different writers.

This book will give the readers greater mental control of their own dying, enable them to cope with it a bit better, and perhaps be more helpful both to friends and loved ones who are dying and to those who will survive them. Dying is part of life and it is fundamentally important how we live it and what we do when someone we know has died.

Dying is part of life and it is fundamentally important how we live it and what we do when someone we know has died.

We die. That may be the meaning of our lives.of life.

But we do language. That may be the measure
Toni Morrison

If we don’t find a publisher within the next six months – by June 2020 – PlaySpace will publish a limited edition by subscription and with crowd funding.

Autumn VoicesSplitting Apart & The Delusion of Retirement

by Max Mackay-James, Larry Butler, James King, and Kim Stafford

. . . .Is this you splitting apart, dividing yourself into little pieces ready to be scattered after you die? Is there another way, a gradual decline, a positive de-motion? Or can we raise our game when we reach a certain age? Let’s leap into left field beyond all ideas or right or wrong ways of being in the world, of getting older. Let’s play . . . .

 StAnza Poetry Market

PlaySpace will have a bookstall at the Poetry Market
Saturday 7th March from 12noon until 4pm.

Scribble in the Kibble

Writing for Health & Wellbeing
in the Kibble Palace
Glasgow Botanic Gardens
Many people find using journals, poems and words helps them to understand and find new ways of coping with stress and illness. Lapidus Scotland offers writing workshops which are open to all abilities. They are mostly about ‘getting things down on paper’ and not worrying too much about spelling and grammar. No previous experience needed.
A useful way into writing can be through keeping a journal, as it can provide a private place to express thoughts and feelings. In Writing for Health and Wellbeing we explore the ways in which words and writing can inspire and help us through difficult times and beyond.

Winter to Spring workshops on Wednesdays
5th, 12th,26th Feb,4th, 11trh, and 25th March 2020
12:30 to 2:30pm
Further information and to book a place
email: lapidus.scotland.1@gmail

Writing at Maggie’s

Many people find using journals, poems and words helps them to understand and find new ways of coping with cancer. The Glasgow Maggie’s Centre offers writing workshops which are open to all abilities. They are mostly about ‘getting things down on paper’ and not worrying too much about spelling and grammar.

A useful way into writing can be through keeping a journal, as it can provide a private place to express thoughts and feelings.
In Writing for Health and Wellbeing we explore the ways in which words and writing can inspire and help us through difficult times and beyond.

Writing for Health & Wellbeing Workshops
Beginning Thursday 27th February 2020 for six sessions
Thursdays 11:45am to 1:45pm

Please contact the Maggie’s Centre to reserve a place
Tel: 0141 357 2269 email: glasgow@maggiescentres.org

Dhanakosa Anthology

If you’ve been to Dhanakosa by Loch Voil, this is an Invitation to contribute to a book of poems, stories and anecdotes inspired by this place and the surrounding area. Sales of the book will be donated to the Dhanakosa charity.
Please send your contribution by the 30th June 2020 by email to playspacepublications@gmail.com
Guideline:
1. Up to three poems
2. short stories or anecdotes up to 300 words
3. send both a word doc and a pdf

B E   A F R A I D   B E   V E R Y   A F R A I D

FEARS ARE GREAT motivators, especially for writers. Much of our strongest material comes from what we are afraid of. When you call up your fears in ritual or prayer you also call up protective forces. It is the same with writing. In fact, the act of writing is what protects you. It’s like homeopathic medicine. You take small doses of your fears in combination with written words and they create a kind of antibody: a cathartic human experience that authenticates your strength and fragility.

TRY making a list of all the things you fear. Pick one and describe it in concrete and specific detail.

What I fear in writing is the safe decision.

Anne Rice

Review of TodayTodayToday

today today today

by Alec Finlay

PlaySpace Publications

We all have different predilections, different experiences and different perspectives on life. So the words gathered in today today today will touch you differently from how they touch me. That said, I’d find it difficult to believe many people could read these poems without being moved.

A product of Alec Finlay’s residency at the Beatson Centre, the poems were gifted to patients undergoing treatment for cancer. Such work deserves preoccupations. In this case, the preoccupations are today, sickness, mortality and words.

Words are so important and so difficult during times of illness and the end of life. Ever felt you didn’t know what to say, to someone facing terminal illness or their loved ones? I know I have. I know I will. Reading these poems won’t change that, but it affirms their power –

all I can do today
 is write
 these few words

The words are treated with due respect, by both poet and publisher in these pages. Like the days, the pages go by without number, each with their own highlights, their own atmosphere.

One reality of any project around cancer care is that people die. It may be tempting for an author to duck this, to adjust his focus elsewhere, to direct the reader to feeling better, to take their mind away from the ubiquitous taboo. Finlay’s gift is to offer the pill as bitter as it is, with compassion to help it down

it’s the way she
 holds me that
 tells me

there’s one sleep
 for each of us
 with a dream
 and no dawn

The death which is so unambiguously faced is of course the result of illness. The condition of illness, its treatment and the impact on sufferers and those around them will come to most of us in one way or another. In the environment of today today today, that illness can be intense and prolonged. As with its conclusion, illness in today today today is not maltreated by understatement, by ignorance or by the flimsy wallpaper which I know I’ve been guilty of applying to a crack so visceral as to become part of the wall

you go on
 for me

today I can go
 no further

the thing about weakness is
 how strong it is

Which brings us to the first and last, to the only theme there is, the truth which gives the pamphlet its title. Today is all we ever have. Yesterday will never come back, and Finlay does not allude to it. Tomorrow is a dream, and it does crop up from time to time, but from the beginning

each of us
 has only
 today

to the end

today
 there are
 no words

the words, the poems are set entirely in the present – in the today which is all we ever have, all we can ever truly rely on.

Alec Finlay’s gifts help those in need of succour, who’s worlds have been turned upside down. Thanks to Playspace Publications, you can receive them today today today

Christie Williamson

here is the review in Chrisite’s blog.