New Publication: Glacier by Garry MacKenzie

Our headline news this month is that we have launched the latest in our series of Wind&Bones Shorts. Glacier: An Icebound View of the Firth of Forth is a tremendous long poem-essay by Scottish poet Garry MacKenzie. It’s a thing of considerable beauty. Here’s the cover:

Imagine when the Firth of Forth—the estuary at the heart of Scotland—is all glacier, the country around it frozen solid. Imagine, as the ice melts, the shores gradually repopulated by plants, animals, and people, until the Forth is the main conduit between a society with imperial ambitions and the rest of the world.

Garry MacKenzie’s poem-essay about the Firth of Forth flows implacably forward in time, from the Last Ice Age to the present. In its relentless movement, it sweeps along in its path the sedimented layers of history and literature—stories, texts, and fragments that bear witness to the ecological and human histories of Scotland. As the glacier-scoured land takes its modern shape, the poem reflects on what is carried from the past into the present, and asks how poetry can address the complexity—the accumulated guilt and glory—of the past.

About Garry

Garry MacKenzie’s book-length poem Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain was shortlisted for a Scottish National Book Award and long-listed for the Highland Book Prize. He has published two pamphlets with Clutag Press, and his next collection Firth, a portrait of the human and ecological histories of the Firth of Forth, will be published by The Irish Pages Press in 2026.

The poem is available in a beautifully crafted digital-only PDF edition, for £3.50—the price of a cup of coffee!

We’ve got more Wind&Bones Shorts in the works, so we’ll keep you posted.

In Other News

Wind&Bones in the Media

We’ve recently been interviewed by Taiwan Plus, Taiwan’s premier English language news channel, about our book Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese & Gaelic. You can watch the video here.

The book is available now from the Wind&Bones website, or from your favourite online bookshop, in both paperback and EPub editions.

We’ve also just been interviewed by RTi, Radio Taiwan International, chatting about the book with Oleksandyr Shyn for the show In Taiwan We Speak, and exchanging stories with Amanda Stephens on Tales of Our Time. Broadcasts coming soon.

Tâigael Sounds

Gaelic and Taiwanese are both languages with strong oral traditions. If you want to listen to the stories in Tâigael free of charge, go to https://taigael.com/stories to hear our writers, translators and editors—Elissa Hunter-Dorans, Lisa MacDonald, Kiú-kiong, Naomi Sím, Shengchi Hsu, Will Buckingham & Hannah Stevens—read the stories in all versions (Scottish Gaelic, English, Taiwanese and Mandarin).

Creative Writing Unleashed at NCKU

In September, we’re at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, to run an intensive multilingual week-long creative writing course in the department of Chinese Literature in collaboration with Dr. Lin-chin Tsai.

Philosophy, Fate and Divination in Tainan

Our philosophy salon at the Wansha Performing Arts Centre is now in its second year, and is all kinds of fun. Most recently, we ran a session on ideas of fate, luck and chance. The salon is free to attend, and runs every month.

A Website Refresh

Finally, we’ve been working on giving our own websites a much-needed refresh. There have been a look of tweaks under the bonnet to make willbuckingham.com work more smoothly. Meanwhile, we’ve given hannahstevenswriter.com a total redesign, and it’s looking lovely!

That’s all for this time! On Wednesday this week, we are heading back to Scotland, and we’ll be dividing ourselves between the UK and Taiwan until the New Year, so we’re planning lots of fun projects in both places! More soon.

With warmest wishes,

Hannah & Will