Blog

On Sunday 30 October, 6pm til late, The Golden Hour presents … BONE DIGGER, in which we don our masks & give ourselves a fright.

Poetic Haunted House & Music from:

www.thegoldenhourevent.com

(Please note, unfortunately the Dissection Room is not an accessible venue for those using wheelchairs.)

Tickets are £7 advance, £9 on the door, and 5 for £25 advance.

My poem ‘Western Town’ has been published in the upcoming anthology Umbrellas of Edinburgh, a collection of poetry and prose from over 70 writers and published by Freight Books. It is edited by Claire Askew and Russell Jones.

A word from the editors, Claire Askew and Russell Jones…

Scotland’s capital is a vibrant, diverse and modern city, cultivated by people from around the world. It’s filled with cutting edge art, international cuisines, theatres and pubs, bright minds and masonry, dark side streets and sinister stories. Edinburgh is a hub for literary inspiration and ambition, hosting the world’s largest literary festival, and it’s the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature. But pick up a collection of writing about Edinburgh, and you’re often faced with the same list of names: dead white men.

As editors, we were keen to reflect the diversity of Edinburgh and its people, and to shift the existing (dead white men) focus through a more contemporary lens. This anthology includes work from writers of colour, writers who identify as LGBTQIA+, who live with disabilities, writers who have lived in countries other than Scotland, and its contributors predominantly identify as women.

Our brief to the writers was simple: choose a location in Edinburgh and write about it. Between these pages you’ll find explorations of architecture, fragments of memories, views of potential futures, romps in hedgerows, summer picnics, hard winters, love, loss and the moments in between. These poems and short stories show us that the city is inseparable from its people, and it’s the voices of our times which add colour and meaning to the brickwork. But it also shows us that Edinburgh is still a great source of inspiration for its inhabitants and those who pass through it; it takes them on journeys, through which the people and the city are forever altered.

At 7pm, Monday 17 October, I’ll be at the Glasgow Science Centre for Elemental, a night of poems, music and cinema about science, art and the universe. I’ll be reading alongside Sean M Whelan, Emilie Zoey Baker and Alicia Sometimes, tickets are £5. Hope to see you there.

Elemental is a unique exploration of science, art and the universe showcased under the spectacular dome theatre of the planetarium. Poets, musicians, sound and video artists – and world-renowned science writer John Gribbin – have collaborated to present the world of the most literary, dazzling and passionate stars.

For centuries, poets have looked to the skies and attempted to scribble meaning into the galaxies. The novelist Peter de Vries once wrote, ‘The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the safe.’ What if we had a key, even if only for a moment? What if we could measure, in words, what we have only imagined? Einstein took the view, ‘the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’ What if he is right?

The artists involved in this show explore four different theories of the beginnings of the universe: The Big Bang, The Theory of Everything, Dark Matter and M Theory. Are these the lost poetic lectures of the beginning of time?

The show has many exciting components: Legendary UK experimental musicians Nurse with Wound’s work is based on the theory that the resonant frequency of the Big Bang was F#. Sean M Whelan, Emilie Zoey Baker, Alicia Sometimes and Edinburgh based Ryan Van Winkle are writing for the stars. Science, poetry and music all under the one roof.

My poems ‘mother/bird’ and ‘Fishing with Birds’ have been published in Sidekick Books’ Birdbook IV: Saltwater and Shore. It’s the fourth and final anthology in the series.

You can purchase the anthology direct from Sidekick Books, from Inpress Books, or in your usual book dispensary.

Saltwater and Shore is the final volume of Sidekick’s wildly ambitious Birdbook series – a collaborative alternative ornothopedia where every species gets equal billing. This time we find ourselves flung beyond the limits of the island, before being gathered in again at its outcrops, outposts, briny mouths and sandy fringes, where well-established stars like the puffin jostle with the lesser-known knot, scaup and razorbill, the whimbrel, spoonbill and turnstone. It’s a bustling, polyphonic cliffside colony of a book, a multitude of individual voices and dynamic images poised to spill into the air and take flight in the willing imagination.

At 8pm, Thursday 28 and Friday 29 September, I’ll be hosting Three Simmer, another night of food and poetry at Edinburgh Food Studio. The chefs will be matching four poets and dishes in a unique collaboration.

We’ll be joined by Miriam Gamble, Andrew Greig, Alan Jamieson and Jane McKie, it is £42 for the meal and poems. Hope to see you there.

This unique collaboration series between food & poetry will use flavour, scent, and colour in response to some of Scotland’s most distinct voices. A delicious evening which will touch all of your senses.

Hosted by Salitre award winning poet  Ryan Van Winkle, ‘Simmer’ pairs four poets with dishes carefully selected & prepared to illuminate and echo their work. Readings will be from Andrew Greig, Jane McKie , Miriam Gamble, and Robert Alan Jamieson.

Next Wednesday 28 September at 7pm I’ll be reading at Underground City, alongside JL Williams, Atzi Muramatsu, Janette Ayachi and Kaite Welsh. We’re on in The Old Town Bookshop, 8 Victoria Street, Edinburgh, it’s a night of poetry and music hosted by MacGillivray and AR Thompson, it’s by candlelight and booze will be served, all for £5. The loose theme is love-macabre, anatomisation of space, all things underground. Hope to see you there.

Poetry Spotlight has published an interview with me, alongside a new poem, “Putina”, about Lyudmila Putina, wife of the Russian premier. You can read both here.

At 3.30pm, Sunday 28 August a film of my interview with Clive James will be broadcast at the Queensland Poetry Festival, at the Judith Butler Centre of Contemporary Arts.

#QPF2016 #LOSTLANGUAGEFOUND presents a very special filmed sesssion with Clive James.

Clive James: an exclusive in-depth interview and moving reading of new (and some unreleased) work QPF filmed in his Cambridge home in March of this year. Clive discusses his life, his poetry, his view of Australian poetry past & present, plus his mortality and the Japanese maple that keeps living. The interview was conducted by award-winning Scottish poet Ryan Van Winkle.

This is the premiere screening, complimented by The Viola Cloning Project performing a few of Clive’s favourite Desert Island Disc tracks. Hosted by the Courier Mail’s Arts Editor Phil Brown, who will also read his favourite James poem.

Clive James was born in Sydney in 1939 and was educated at the University of Sydney and Pembroke College, Cambridge. A memoirist, poet, translator, critic, novelist, travel writer, lyricist and broadcaster, he has written more than thirty books, the two most recently published being Collected Poems and Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature. He holds honorary doctorates from Sydney University and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013 an Officer of the Order of Australia. He lives in Cambridge.

Tickets only $15 – on sale now via tickets link.

Presented by Queensland Poetry Festival in association with McCullough Robertson

QPF also acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, as well as the financial support of Australia Council for the Arts and Brisbane City Council for this event.

My second collection, The Good Dark, has been reviewed by Donald Marshall on the Scottish Writers’ Centre website. Here’s a couple of quotes from the review:

‘Reading Ryan Van Winkle’s collection The Good Dark (2015) I began to feel as though I had entered into a new world. The poems within are self-standing and distinctive, but together they create a harmonious vision of melancholia and reflectiveness that is so self-aware that the work presents an electric shock to the staid trends of lyric poetry’

‘This is a sorrowful but cathartic collection. The Good Dark is painted with subtle hues of emotion that lead you, unprotesting and mesmerised, into the world within.’