Earlier I wrote about the Jura Malt Whisky Writer Retreat. The Scottish Book Trust and Isle of Jura malt whisky are working together to offer writers the opportunity to spend a month living and writing on the Isle of Jura. Each selected writer receives a month’s exclusive use of the luxurious distillery lodge, a bursary and travel expenses. In the first article I quoted an article of John Burnside for the Scotsman and a couple of weeks ago I found another article from his hand in the Times Online. John has a way of writing about the island which makes you think you see if happen before your eyes and I loved reading his second article, from which I quoted a good part:
Donald Ewan Darroch looks up at me from the haunch of venison he’s in the process of quartering. I’m a slow butcher, he says, with a wry smile and, though I have no way of knowing if he is slow or not, I agree, mostly because it’s such a pleasure to watch him work – as I have done all morning,
ever since I left my car by the ferry and walked half a mile along the shore to his house, passing the big, wind-thrawn rowan tree on the beach by the
sailors’ graves and stopping now and then to pick a citrus-coloured shell from the white sand, the solitary, elm-green deer larder always in view as I
negotiated a path through the rocks and the dark, brown trickles of water and peat spilling on to the sand from the slopes above.
I am on the Isle of Jura. I came here to write poems and stories, beneficiary of one of those invaluable retreats that contemporary writers, like the
monks and mystics of old, can hardly do without. Here, I can sit all night over a paragraph and not worry about the morning. Here, I can walk all day, crossing the fairy-haunted hills, with the place-names ringing in my head – Cróm Dhoire, Beinn Shiantaidh, Leac Fhola – and waiting for the image that will capture the local and specific now, of which, according to Emily Dickinson, forever
is composed.
That different time is everywhere on Jura. In the walled garden of Jura House, where one of the gardeners wraps a slice of elm wood in a sack and fastens
it to the sluice for a month, so the water will flow through and season the wood. In the way people here think about the dead, not letting them slip
forgotten into the past, but talking about them, always, as if they were still present. People here characterise the mainland as a buzz of noise and
impatience, a place they visit reluctantly, and from which they are glad to return…..
John ends his article with a nice poem:
The old days were better for mourning;
better for tongue-tacked girls in ruined plaid
climbing a hillside to gather the rainwashed bones
of what they had lost that winter to the cold;
and men in the prime of their lives, with dwindled sight,
gathering rowans to lay on an empty grave
and thinking of the dead, away at sea,
who dream of nothing more than Leac Fhola
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