Tag: Royal Mile

Madeira Mondays: Sights from Edinburgh’s Past and Present

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I have seen a ghost.

Well, not literally – but I’ve come pretty close!

Recently I’ve been teaching a creative writing course I designed at the University of Glasgow which is all about ‘time travel’. We looked at a few straightforwardly sci-fi books about characters actually traveling backwards and forwards in time, as well as poetry, memoir, and historical fiction books that invited us to think about memory and imagination as forms of time travel too.

Teaching this class made me think of a walk I took a few months ago with a dear friend of mine, Alan, who I met while volunteering at The Georgian House. We walked around the Canongate area of Edinburgh (near Holyrood Palace) and he showed me some photographs of how the streets looked in times past. It was almost spooky to see the black and white images of the chaotic shop fronts, the women in their wide-brimmed hats full of flowers, and then look up at the very same street today.

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Madeira Mondays: A Visit to Greyfriars graveyard in Edinburgh

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Some of you may recall the walk that I took with Alan, my friend and fellow Georgian House volunteer, back in December. He very generously led me on a walk through The Royal Mile – the famous street that cuts through the city of Edinburgh – from the Castle down to Holyrood palace. During our walk, he shared with me tales of forgotten Edinburgh residents, catastrophic fires and years upon years of fascinating history.

A couple of weeks ago, my partner and I joined Alan for another walk, this time around Grassmarket which, locals will know, is a lively area of the city’s ‘old town’ that is full of pubs and cafes. We saw a lot on our walk, but instead of trying to cram everything into one post, I thought I’d focus instead on one of my favorite elements of the walk: our exploration of Greyfriars Kirkyard! (A ‘kirk’ is a Scottish word for church, by the way!)

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Friday Finds: My three favorite novellas

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‘One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.’

– The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

I wrote a ‘Writing Reflections’ post recently about why my recently-published book, All the Orphans in the Galaxy, was a novella and not a novel. There’s a lot more in that post about what exactly a novella is (essentially, longer than a short story, shorter than a novel!) and why I think it’s such a good form for experimentation. You don’t have to ‘commit’ to one thing for too long and you can really focus and zoom in on just a couple of characters (or a really unique premise!).

In that post, I also mentioned that lots of my favorite books are actually novellas. I thought I’d recommend a few of them here!

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