Reading: The Raven’s Nest

Tuesday evenings until 13th December, 7pm weekly.

As the nights draw in, you are invited to join New Galloway based author, Sarah Thomas, for a special series of readings following in the Icelandic tradition of kvöldvaka (‘evening wake’). Sarah will read from her ecological memoir ‘The Ravens Nest’, with the audience invited to listen and, if you’d like, bring something to make or mend while listening.

The kvöldvaka tradition was born of winter nights on farms when the days were short, work still needed to be done indoors, there was limited oil for the lamp, and yet there was a thirst for literature and imaginative transportation. People would gather in a single warm room, and someone would read aloud as they knitted, darned and mended items of clothing.

Written in beautifully vivid prose The Raven’s Nest is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption, set in Iceland’s otherworldly Westfjords. Based on Sarah’s experience of visiting Iceland as an anthropologist and filmmaker in 2008, Sarah is spellbound by its otherworldly landscape. An immediate love for this country and for Bjarni, a man she meets there, turns a week-long stay into a transformative half-decade, one which radically alters Sarah’s understanding of herself and of the living world. In the midst of crisis both personal and planetary, as her marriage falls apart, Sarah finds inspiration in the artistry of a raven’s nest: a home which persists through breaking and reweaving – over and over.

Readings take place on Tuesday evenings between 18 Oct and 13 Dec at the CatStrand, New Galloway & Smiddy Balmaclellan. The story unfolds such that you can join at any point or follow it through. All welcome.