Navigating Home

The volume includes poetry, memoir and short fiction from new and established writers. There is Ron Ferguson’s account of his arrival in Kirkwall with his family on a snowy night in December 1990. They move into their new home and he takes up his post as minister of St Magnus Cathedral, wondering what he brings to the position and the place, reimagining the arrival and nature of the welcome of other strangers in the past, in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.

Visiting writer Kevin Cadwallander writes in his poem ‘Homecoming’ of the uneasy, indefinable ‘home’ a country and nationality give, saying, 

It’s not a question of boundaries . . .

It’s not a question of landscape

Shetland writer Christie Williamson imagines home as a point to return to, a ‘place’ seen through the storm giving the ‘seafarer’ glimpses of meads or navigation points to steer on.

Morag MacInnes reacts to the question of whether Orkney still has story-tellers with a response which suggests that people’s lives, here as elsewhere – contain the material which feeds their curiosity and imaginations and is irresistible in its demand to be transformed into stories.

Here writers young and old give insights into their stories of journey and home.