I’ve award a grant to Elspeth Wilson. She writes:
For me, writing is a way of exploring and understanding the world around me and how myself and others move through it. I am interested in how we live in our bodies and how we make them homes, and also exploring joy from a marginalised perspectiive. For the past year, I’ve been exploring Scottish mythology in my poems – these were the stories I was brought up on and it’s been both joyful and revealing to return to them as an adult and see how creatively rich they are for expansion and retellings.
Recently, I’ve been increasingly drawn to the selkie mythology – the selkie is a seal who can turn into a human – and I plan to write a series of poems using this mythology as a jumping off point to explore neurodiversity. Then Do Better will help me focus on these poems – which I hope will become a new collection – through dedicated time to write. The grant will also help me develop a new method of working; exploring climate crisis and living in a traumatised body both at a personal level and a global one is crucial to my work and I will be developing a site-specific way of writing. Through visiting places associated with selkie mythology, I hope to bring the body and place into my writing in a very literal way.
The grant will also enable me to have some mentoring sessions with an experienced poet so that I can make sure the poems are the best they can be and develop my craft with guidance. I’m really keen to bring these poems to a wider audience through publication, and hope that the grant will enable me to have a solid first draft that I can edit myself before submitting to publishers.
Her website is here.