Dear Jim I am in Malawi. It is 7.30 a.m. and I have just woken up. I suspect you died last night. Unable to get through to Eddie – the African bush is not known for rapid internet services – I can’t know for sure. And I have to leave my computer now to Read More
‘Great poets do not die; they are continuing presences’ (Virginia Woolf) Dr Jim Stewart is a continuing and steadfast poetic presence with me, both as friend and esteemed colleague in Woolf studies. He is very much present in the Cambridge University Press Edition of Woolf’s works, as superb textual collator, highly skilled proof reader, and Read More
Jim was passionate about the creativity of language, what it can do to expand our imaginations and empathies and deepen our most human interactions. He believed that access to cultural wealth and privilege, irrespective of background and income, was a democratic birth right. It was precisely because Jim had transformed himself so much through Higher Read More
While many remember Jim from Dundee, my most precious memories are of our times together in St Andrews, where I lived and he often visited. We talked, shared stories of children, loves, beliefs and literature while drinking coffee and, more often than not, wine. This pen and ink drawing is of the ruined cathedral in Read More
For Jim As I Slowly Circle You Twice Then out With A Smile, Dummy Out I Say HELLO BOY Tears From You Fall As You Cry Out To Mum “Rosalind’s Forgotten Me” Time Helped Me Remember You And Now Look At Us Out In The Garden Digging With Spoons We Smile For The Camera MY JIMMY And Read More
(Ed- Prior to publishing excerpts from the 2017 Notting Hill Editions Essay prize shortlist, we asked the marvellous essayist Chris Arthur to write a piece on the essay within the academy… Read & let us know what you think by leaving your comments below.) Students don’t believe me when I say they’ve never written an Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of the interview; to view the whole interview, please click image above) Stephen Carruthers: Good Afternoon. I’m Stephen Carruthers from the Dundee University Review of the Arts and I’m here with Joe Douglas, the Associate Artistic Director of Dundee Rep Theatre. Joe Douglas: Hello. SC: Joe, you joined the Read More
(This is a lightly edited transcript of a filmed interview that can be watched by clicking on the image above.) Vivien Williams: Hello, I’m Vivien Williams and I am a research assistant at the University of Glasgow where I also completed recently a Ph.D on the cultural history of the bagpipe in Britain. The bagpipe Read More
I sit in the hidden café of Bonar Hall (as a four-year undergrad student I had no idea it existed) waiting for Sandra Ireland. I hold her book in my hands and wonder what she’ll be like. The book is macabre and unsettling, dead gerbils as hand puppets and warm mugs of coffee in an Read More
What’s so great about simplicity? We’re always being told that the simple life is the right kind of life, uncluttered by unnecessary anxieties and the desires that fuel them. The simple message is the honest one, and the simple fact the thing that really happened. Now of course “simple” has got all complicated by terrifying Read More