Elizabeth K Reeder

The Cairngorms Kist, a commonplace book of the Cairngorms in 2023.
The idea for this project is a simple one: this incredible area is one that so many individuals experience and see in different ways. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get a snapshot of this place to share that with others in future years? The pieces in this Kist are created by people who live, work or visit here and want to share what they see and know.

Commonplace Books, historically, are more like collages than bound books. They usually hold different documents and items together: maps, land registries, folk tales, music scores, records of flora and fauna and medicinal uses or folklore around them. Sometimes they contain recipes, and we like to think that they would have also include knitting patterns or guides about how best to sharpen an axe. By bringing together all these observations, records, documents, and images made by people who know a place deeply, Commonplace Books express a place both intimately and broadly. The idea is evocative: that a whole can be created of disparate parts.

This Kist is a glimpse of this place at this point in time, but it is also an open invitation for people of the Cairngorms to create future Commonplace Books too. We set one rule: each submission is a maximum of two sides of A4. Other than that, participants had carte blanche to format their submission in any way they saw fit. We received a wonderfully diverse, heartfelt and beautifully-made set of contributions, from across the generations.

This Kist also serves as an invitation to people in the future, who might want to return to these locations, as well as including new ones, helping to mark changes in ecologies, people, communities and hopes.

This project - conceived by Elizabeth Reeder and Amanda Thomson - was born from an Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Artists residency with Cairngorms Connect, between 2021 and 2024. This is a project we hope can be ongoing and replicated in 2, 5, 10, 20 year’s time. If you live here, you might be inspired to start to gather images and notes and think: what will I submit to the next Cairngorms Kist?
Part of our inspiration is the hope inherent within Cairngorm Connect’s 200-year vision. 200 years is longer period of time than most future planning scales, but it is small in ecological terms. We won’t be so bold to think that this book or project will still be here in 200 years or be replicated in 200 years - as this planet and this place might change beyond what we can concretely imagine now. However, we want to believe that this place and the creatures who make it home will still be inscribing the landscape with life, and we’ll still be recording it in fieldnotes, diary entries, poems and songs, words and images. The Cairngorms Kist 2023, this Commonplace Book, is a record of here and now and it is partial and it is beautiful. This glimpse of where we are now is also a question and prompt for those in the future: ‘What do you see and hear and experience of the Cairngorms and what does this place mean to you?’

–Elizabeth Reeder & Amanda Thomson

Acknowledgements:

Elizabeth and Amanda would like to thank the brilliant, creative and seemingly tireless team at Cairngorms Connect: Sydney, Lizzie, Sarah and Chiara. They have supported us in the residency in too many ways to name and it is the open, curious, practical and so very skilled ways they approach everything that has meant this residency and this project have run so smoothly. Particular thanks goes to Lizzie Brotherston who designed and formatted the digital versions of the book. Thank you to Helen Jackson who helped us make the woven willow container for our Cairngorms Kist 2023.

We also give a shout out to Robbie Synge who was the third ELASR artist in residence during this time who ran workshops throughout the community and made films of these inspiring collaborations.

Thank you, of course, to the Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Programme and Cairngorms Connect for supporting this residency and project. And the biggest thank you goes to everyone who attended our workshops and events and who crafted a piece and contributed to the Cairngorms Kist 2023.

[Images are from the launch at Speybank Studios on 23.03.24 & from various workshops Amanda and Elizabeth ran during the residency. Most photos of the launch are courtesy of © Catriona Parmenter Photography. Other photos are via Elizabeth’s phone and the photos of the workshops are by Lizzie Brotherston and Chiara Alagia.]

“Ramshackle deserves a place in the bestseller charts: a novel that deals with the primal fear of abandonment and portrays it through a vividly realised 15-year-old girl we can’t help but identify with.”  April 22nd 2012, Alastair Abbott, The Herald.

‘Original, moving and insightful…A beautiful book’ – Anne Donovan

‘Ramshackle is knowing, wry and affectionate, using packed and punchy sentences which illuminate and delight.’ Alan Warner

‘Elizabeth Reeder’s Ramshackle has the narrative drive of a mystery and the sharpness of a poem.  The fear of abandonment is one of the most powerful human emotions, and Reeder sustains and explores it brilliantly.’ Elaine Feinstein

Ramshackle was shortlisted for the 2012 Saltire First Book of the Year, the 2013 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Best First Book of the Year Award, the Anobii book prize, and long-listed for the Authors’ Club Best First Book Award (2013).

I am represented by Laura Macdougall at United Agents. LMacdougall@unitedagents.co.uk.

You can get your copies of Ramshackle from Category Is Books

When Rachel Roanoke sees Hal Fremont across a diner counter, she claims him as her own. Their first date takes place in the registry office, and they set out for the small, suspicious town Hal calls home.

There, in the crumbling hallway of that mock-antebellum house, Rachel and Hal consummate their marriage and start to build their rambunctious brood.

Against their parents’ ill-starred fairytale romance, the Fremont children fight for their territory within the shifting, bitter bonds of family. In this tale of prejudice, identity and survival, Fremont becomes a map of survival.

‘Reeder's prose is stunning. She lays down the land in front of the reader, makes them feel safe, then snatches it all away in cruel twists of reality. No matter what Reeder is describing, it is coloured with lyrical attention. Fremont is such a bittersweet book in this way - the story might hurt in places, but the reading is soothed by the beauty of the language.’ Subtle Melodrama

Digressions: On Essaying in the U.K.

Digressions: On Essaying in the UK published by The Essay Press
explores the expanded form of essay via interviews between Elizabeth Reeder and Jacques Testard (Fitzcarraldo Editions), Max Porter, and Carol Mavor. Afterword, by Kristen Kreider. Afterword by Kristen Kreider. These conversations grew out of a curiosity about the possibilities of the hybridity of the essay and from a shared interest in how the essay and essay-publishing are working in the U.K.  In this Listening Tour, relative strangers utilize the opportunity of an unexpected conversation to attempt to capture the fleeting, often excessive and heightened movement of experimental essays - considering a wide range of topics, from triptychs and pretention to Barthes and post-partum art.  Here essayists, poets, editors and publishers think out loud about form and context and try to handle this slippery, digressive, cunning, non-genre genre.

‘microbursts’ in Prototype 2

Reeder, E. (2017), ‘What a thirst it was: Longing, excess and the genre-bending essay’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 10:1, pp. 27–47, doi: 10.1386/jwcp.10.1.27_1

‘microbursts’, a lyrical essay, in LUNE 01

Do Not Make The, Essay Catalyst and MAP Magazine (edited by Elizabeth Reeder, Laura Edbrook and Alice Bain)

For Now / Six Propositions in MAP Magazine July 2017

Digressions: On Essaying in the UK December 2016, Essay Press. Conversations with Max Porter, Jacques Testard (Fitzcarraldo Editions) and Carol Mavor with an afterword by Kristen Kreider.

On Women and Essaying: To Be Genre-Bending is to Be Dangerous - 03 October 2016 - published by The Dangerous Women Project (IASH at University of Edinburgh)

One Year The Essay Press, May 2016

attendance Kenyon Review online

bent The List

between places, if then essay PN Review 196

Elizabeth K Reeder writes novels, essays, and stories. She also writes for the radio. Her first novel, Ramshackle was shortlisted for a number of awards including a Saltire Literary award (2013). Her second novel, Fremont, a story of ill-starred fairytale romance is full of prejudice and desire, garnered great reviews, and re-jigs notions of home, identity and citizenship. An Archive of Happiness, a novel, will be published by Penned in the Margins in September 2020. microbursts, a collection of lyric and intermedial essays about the places between life and death, memoir and poetry - a collaborative work between herself and the artist Amanda Thomson - will be published in spring 2021 as part of Prototype’s interdisciplinary strand. Her interest in the essay (in particular in experimental, hybrid forms) has developed from a desire to write so that language, form and structure embed knowledge in a way that can be ‘read’ like poetry and art with a high level of complexity and intentional ambiguity. She holds a doctorate in English Literature/Creative Writing and is a senior lecturer Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. She organises and is invited to run workshops, seminars and talks on a range of subjects, including her own books and processes; the essay; exuberant creative failure; giving and receiving feedback, and on subjects she explores in her texts such as: illness, grief, Chicago and its architecture, archives (especially difficult, elusive archives), family, narrative structure and many others. In 2019-20 she co-runs Arts Lab Lab on Reading and writing Death and Dying with Dr Naomi Richards and Amy Shea. She is a MacDowell Fellow. twitter: @ekreeder / instagram: @ekreeder26

 Books: An Archive of Happiness (novel); microbursts (intermedial essays); Ramshackle (novel); Fremont (novel); Do Not Make The (co-editor, experimental essays)

Creative Awards / Writing Residences (recent)

2015    MacDowell Artists Fellow, with a residency April and May 2015

2014    PAL Labs Residential Residency, Cove Park, September 2014

2014    Invited Artist, Animating the Archive, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada, July (supported by Ontario Arts Council, Carnegie Trust, & University of Glasgow)

2013    Residency at An Tobar, Mull, December linked to the production of a response to the Zembla exhibition, and including a public reading and talk on hybrid and  experimental  writing.

Performances/Readings/Events (excerpted, recent)

I am a regular contributor to numerous book festivals as an author and as a chair. These have included: Edinburgh International Book Festival, Aye Write (Glasgow), Ullapool Book Festival, Shetland Book Festival, Imprint Book Festival, Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. I also do readings and workshops for reading and writing groups.

In 2017 I hosted a number of catalyst conversations, workshops and events on Genre-Defying: Experimental and Hybrid writing as Catalysts for Change.  There will be events at Scottish Poetry Library, the CCA, and at Edinburgh International Book Festival including writers like Max Porter, Karine Polwart, Ruth Little, the women of 404 ink (Laura and Heather), and Richard Price.  It will culminate in a call for experimental/hybrid essay submissions, and we will produce a beautiful book, in collaboration with MAP magazine.  This project is generously funding by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

ACADEMIC Invited Seminars/Workshops / Lectures

Ongoing (member since May 2015)  From 15 October 2016, Chair of Scottish PEN’s Women’s Committee. Responsible for organising and running PEN’s International Women’s Day event, in collaboration with IASH at the University of Edinburgh, this includes championing the Dangerous Women’s Project, as well as running other events and campaigns.

September 2016  Tutor, Fiction Retreat, Moniack Mhor, with Ian Stephen and Andrew O’Hagan as Guest Writer

July 2016  Tutor, Facilitator, Young Writer’s Writing Course, Moniack Mhor, Invernesshire with Kevin MacNeill and AL Kennedy as Guest Writer

May 2016  Scottish Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities Summer School, invited session on the Arts of Failure, with Chris Fremantle, 23 June 2016

March 2016  Guest Editor for Scottish PEN’s magazine PENning,

February 2016  Invited facilitator, ‘Essay, Hybridity and the Workshop’. A Day long seminar on close reading and writing of experimental and cross-discipline essaying for Workshop on essaying for "Knowing From the Inside - Art, Anthropology, Architecture and Design" Research Group at University of Aberdeen

Invited facilitator, ‘Workshop on Giving and Receiving Feedback to Ceramicists’, for Applied Arts Scotland, a national organisation based in Glasgow

November 2015  "All in A Fankle: Workshopping Exuberant Failure". Part of the Being Human Festival, funded by AHRC and the British Council.  In collaboration with Rachel McCrum, we ran three days of workshops on creative, exuberant failure with fifteen practitioners across art forms. These culminated in a sold-out performance at the CCA in Glasgow. Comments included: 'Incredible testament, each and every one.' 'Mesmerizing poignant funny' 'Deliciously human and full of colour'

September 2015  ‘The Uncertainty Paradox: Failure, Risk and an Interrogative Process of Coming to Know’ Workshop at Making Research | Research Making, ADAPT-r conference, Aarhus School of Arhitecture, Aarhus, Denmark

June 2015  Invited facilitator, Seminar and workshop for ARENA (AHRC), a collaborative residential weekend (Royal Holloway and University of Brighton) exploring situating the self in research, writing for and reaching multiple communities of readers and researchers.

May 2015  Keynote Speech: And I Love Her for That: Exuberance and Failure and Being Human as We Make”, for the postgraduate conference on Method and Madness at University of Glasgow

February 2015  Tutor, Fiction Writing Course, Moniack Mhor, Invernesshire with Kapka Kassabova

 February 2015  Invited facilitator, workshop on the essay at Gray’s School of Art / Robert Gordon University to art, design and engineer students, with outside artists/practitioners invited along.

Academic Funding (recent)

2017/18  Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop funding to run conversations, workshops and performances on essaying and essays (a set for adults and a set for young writers) culminating in a competition and publications of amazing, thought and emotion provoking essays.  "On Genre-Bending Essaying: Catalyst Conversations and Workshops on the Potential Impact of Experimental and Hybrid Writing in Scotland". Extremely excited about this.   

2016/17    Scottish Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) Performance and Writing – (Co-investigator). Facilitator for two days of workshop organized with Carl Lavery, Theatre Studies, University of Glasgow, Maria Fusco, University of Edinburgh Edinburgh College of Art & Ross Birrell, GSA [amount]

2016   SGSAH Art Writing –  Co-Investigator. Four days of workshopping with colleagues from ECA (Neil Mullholland), GSA (Laura Edbrook) and Strathclyde (David Kinloch) [amount]

2015-2017 Sited +.  Voices and Languages Study - Study Lead. Funded by Creative Scotland. I was brought on as an independent adviser, because of my work with giving and receiving feedback and my reputation for working across artforms effectively. I wrote the Voices and Languages Study part of the Sited + report that was informed by a series of workshops held across Scotland makers of Sited Work and also a symposium. The final report and study go to Creative Scotland and other key bodies, while the Voices and Languages Study is also printed and distributed more widely to artists, organizations and people interested in sited work.  The intention of both the report and the study is to impact the policy and funding around sited working in Scotland and beyond.

2015  

“All in A Fankle: A Workshopping of Exuberant Failure”, part of the Being Human Festival funding by AHRC and the British Council, November 2015

Animating the Archive, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada, July (supported by Ontario Arts Council, Carnegie Trust and GU), which led to robust collaborations, an exhibition and exhibition catalogue.

In 2018/18 I organised a number of catalyst conversations and workshops around Experimental and Genre-Bending Essays.  We've gathered together people who are interested in looking at experimental, cross-discipline forms as a way to finding the best way to say complex things.  The workshops were free, and open to writers, artists and thinkers across disciplines and mediums.  

We’re still on twitter @EssayCatalyst.  Please do follow as there may well be future events on experimental and hybrid essaying.

Events 2017/18

27th of April 10-5 & 18:00-19:30, Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh:

A day-long conversation and workshop where writers talked about and experimenting with genre-defying and hybrid writing  - including working with images and other mediums as we explore important, essential and difficult subjects and themes. The day included contributions from: Elizabeth Reeder, Karine Polwart and Amanda Thomson. To conclude the day there was an evening event with Max Porter, author of Grief is a Thing with Feathers, and the singer, songwriter and commentator Karine Polwart. This symposium, run in partnership with Scottish Poetry Library, was be the first of two days of workshops and will focus on generative processes of essaying.

11 June, 11-5 & 6-8, CCA in Glasgow

Genre-Bending Essaying: Hybrid Writing as a Catalyst for Change.  This symposium, run in conjunction with MAP Magazine, will be the second workshop and will focus on generative editorial processes. The day will include contributions from: Ruth Little (dramaturg), and Laura Edbrook & Alice Bain of MAP Magazine. There will be an FREE evening event that is open to the public featuring Richard Price with readings and contributions from writers participating in the workshops. Tickets for the Free event can be found here: 

There are also two workshops for young/new writers 16-25, on 04 June and 09 July at Out of the Blue in Edinburgh.  Contributors include Nadine Aisha (poet, activist), Amanda Thomson (artist), the women of 404 Ink/Nasty Women; Claire Heuchan (writer, activist), and Johnny Gailey (artist) of Out of the Blue.

These workshops are organised by Elizabeth Reeder of the Creative Writing Programme at University of Glasgow and are generously supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

‘On Genre-Bending Essaying: Catalyst Conversations and Workshops on the Potential Impact of Experimental and Hybrid Writing in Scotland’

In times of sudden political shifts, violent acts, and considerable cultural change (as exemplified by Brexit, the US elections, events in Calais, the Black Lives Matter movement, discussions around Scottish Independence, and ongoing explorations of issues pertaining to gender, race, equality and migration), we often turn to writers to help us question and understand situations that trouble us. Cross-genre writing (e.g. Rankine’s Citizen; Solnit’s Hope in the Dark) has the potential to bring complicated, difficult subjects to the attention of wider audiences in complex, thought-provoking ways. Towards this end, we will run a series of writing workshops and public events bringing writers, artists, academics, and readers together to think about how and why we write and read between and beyond genres, forms and disciplines. These conversations will encourage new writing and collaborations underpinned by the idea that the experimental essay is a powerful form where essential ideas are hashed out and communicated. 

We’re on twitter @EssayCatalyst.  Please do follow us as there may be future events.

 2017/18

27th of April 18:00-19:30, Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh:

After a day of workshopping and conversation (participants chosen via an application process), there will be an evening event with Max Porter, author of Grief is a Thing with Feathers, and the singer, songwriter and commentator Karine Polwart.

Karine Polwart and Max Porter, two inspiring writers and performers, who both explore life and death with a bold beauty, will share their work and be in conversation about writing, art, song and working across-genres and mediums.  This should be a fantastic, unscripted event of listening to two generous artists talking about how they do what they do.

11 June, 11-5 & 6-8, CCA in Glasgow

Genre-Bending Essaying: Hybrid Writing as a Catalyst for Change.  The second workshop focusing on generative editorial processes (participants chosen via an application process), will conclude in an evening event that is open to the public with readings and discussion including a reading by the poet Richard Price.

These workshops are organised by Elizabeth Reeder of the Creative Writing Programme at University of Glasgow and are generously supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Original Work:

‘Mapmakers’ Keywords Podcast with Zoe Comyns, 08. Maps, Summer 2020

‘Everyday Wintergreen’, podcast as part of Glasgow Women’s Library 21 Revolutions project, also includes publication, performances and exhibition, 2012

‘Attendance’ a story commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and broadcast on Thursday the 6th of August 2009; rebroadcast June 2011, published Kenyon Review online Summer 2010, Gutter 03, September 2010ISBN:978-0-9544024-9-5

‘Standing Still, Running’ a five-part BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour Serial, Broadcast July 2006; rebroadcast May 2011

‘What is Chosen’, a story commissioned by the BBC, broadcast on Radio 4, in May 2005.

Abridgments:

Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night, for BBC Radio 4 (commissioned Jan 2016; broadcast tbc)

Jonathon Lethem’s Dissident Gardens for BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, January 2014. Pick of the Week.

The Real Jane Austen for BBC Radio 4 Books at Bedtime, broadcast 14th-18th January 2013.  Selected for BBC Radio 4’s Pick of the Week, 20th Jan 2013

Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx for BBC Radio 4, broadcast March 2011

Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler for BBC Radio 4 (Book of the Week); broadcast in Nov 2009

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for BBC Radio Four’s Book at Bedtime.  Broadcast week of the 14th of August 2006.  BBC’s ‘Pick of the Week’