"Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic," ed. Will Buckingham and Hannah Stevens (Wind&Bones)

About Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic 
Four writers, four stories, and four languages, Tâigael is a first-of-its-kind collaborative writing and translation project, bringing together the cultures of Scotland and Taiwan to find new and surprising connections. From elderly prophets on the Taipei subway to sheep tangled in brambles by the roadside in rural Scotland, and from a goddess of saliva who disappears without trace to an unexpected guest at a Hogmanay party, these stories cross between languages and cultures to reimagine the past, present and future. For the project, Wind&Bones worked with writers Elissa Hunter-Dorans (Scotland), Kiú-kiong 玖芎 (Taiwan), Lisa MacDonald (Scotland) and Naomi Sím (Taiwan) to write and collaboratively translate between Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), via Mandarin and English. These are stories that weave together myth, dream and everyday life, as they reveal unexpected parallels between these two languages, their historical marginalisation, and their revival.

Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic will be published by Wind&Bones Books on 15th June 2025. You can pre-order the book here. If you pre-order by 1st May, 2025, your name will be listed in the final edition, in appreciation of your support.

About Wind&Bones
Wind&Bones Books is a small, non-profit indie press founded by University of Leicester PhD graduate Dr Hannah Stevens, and former De Montfort University Reader in Writing and Creativity, Dr Will Buckingham. Wind&Bones also run projects exploring writing, storytelling and philosophy for social change. Hannah and Will currently split their time between Scotland, Taiwan and sometimes Leicester. You can head to their website to find out more here.   

Tina Cole & Michael W. Thomas, "Nothing Louche or Bohemian"

Tina Cole was born in the Black Country and now lives in rural Herefordshire near Ludlow. She has three published pamphlets, I Almost Knew You (2018), Forged (Yaffle Press, 2021) and What it Was (Mark Time Books, 2023). As a poet and reviewer, she has led workshops with both adults and children and judged a number of U.K. and international competitions. Her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines and collections, including in The Guardian newspaper. She is a past winner of a number of national poetry competitions, 2010-2023, and completed an M.A. in Creative Writing / Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2023.

Michael W. Thomas has published ten collections of poetry, three novels and two collections of short fiction. His most recent poetry collection, prior to this, is A Time for Such a Word (Black Pear Press); his most recent short fiction collection is Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories (Black Pear Press); his most recent novel is The Erkeley Shadows (KDP / Swan Village Reporter). With Simon Fletcher, he edited The Poetry of Worcestershire (Offa's Press). His work has appeared in Acumen, The Antigonish Review (Canada), The Antioch Review (US), The Cannon's Mouth, Critical Survey, Crossroads (Poland), Dream Catcher, Etchings (Australia), Irish Studies Review, Irish University Review, Magazine Six (US), Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Times Literary Supplement and Under the Radar, among others. He has reviewed for The London Magazine, Other Poetry and The Times Literary Supplement, and is on the editorial board of Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies (University of Bialystok, Poland). He was long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, 2020 and 2022, and long-listed and short-listed for the Indigo Dreams Spring Poetry Prize, 2023. Michael's website is here. He blogs here. @thomasmichaelw

About Nothing Louche or Bohemian, by Tina Cole and Michael W. Thomas
A miscellany box of memories, intense and disconcerting; a gently encouraging piano teacher; teddy bears that knew better days; tinkling bottle-tags; classroom faces happy, wistful, preoccupied; a district nurse’s long-ago phone call; an assignation beneath a canal bridge; a father’s jokes worn down to the metal. These and so many other scenes find their places in the landscape of Nothing Louche or Bohemian. As the collection unfolds, threads are caught, drawn out, found to be markers on the map of what once was—and what, in these pages, lives again … enthralling, troubling, never less than vivid. Tina and Michael have known each other for several years but discovered that they’d grown up in the same area of the Black Country – and gone to the same secondary school. Those coincidences prompted Tina to suggest that they collaborate on a project. This is it.  

From Nothing Louche or Bohemian

Intoxication

It's all in the way you look at things 

or so they say. I remember them being purchased 

in a junk shop just behind The Miners Arms.

My hand went out instinctively to three silver

bottle tags, fingers tracing the engraving, whisky, 

gin, vermouth, how they glinted in the forty-watt 

light amongst tarnished soup tureens and discarded 

cutlery, but oh, that word    vermouth! 

                          It was evenings in cerise silk pyjamas, 

something louche, bohemian, a life away from corseted 

cares. Listening to Rachmaninov, nights at the Royal Opera 

not the sixpenny stalls at the Sedgley Clifton. No, the life 

I deserved sitting in a green Lloyd-loom chair, wafting 

about a Hampstead flat thin and mysterious, smoking

something sweetly scented. I would have written 

a clutch of acclaimed collections, beautiful poetry

not the usual tat that is continually rejected. 

                          It's all in the way you look at things, 

in the way one's hand reaches out for beauty,

a rose, a baby's hand, a moment of success, 

and that word vermouth    is still    intoxicating. 

- Tina Cole

Jacqueline Burnett

           Holy Trinity Roman Catholic School, Oxford Street, Bilston, 1958-1965

We were in the same class

at primary school. Shared 

the same birthday. One year

were told to stand up

so the room could sing

and toast the nothing we'd done.

Slight, she was, freckled:

tawny keeps coming to mind.

Already bringing on a bit of a stoop

to oblige the future.

You'd glimpse her 

slipping out to play,

edging the shadows

of the manager's son

and the town-clerk's daughter.

She answered each question perfectly

then retrieved her stillness,

putting the world away from her

till called upon again.

She rarely smiled,

perhaps never,

certainly not the day she and I

held an end apiece of coincidence,

like a pageant-flag

golden from a brush of sun

fluttered in a pocket of wind.

- Michael W. Thomas

Ailsa Cox, "Precipitation," with images by Patricia Farrell

Ailsa Cox is Professor Emerita in Short Fiction at Edge Hill University. Her stories have been widely published and collected as The Real Louise (Headland Press). Other books include Writing Short Stories (Routledge) and Alice Munro (Liverpool University Press, Writers and Their Work). She is also the editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Press). Born in Walsall, she is now based in West Yorkshire.  

Patricia Farrell is a poet and visual artist. She has collaborated with other writers, artists and musicians on a range of projects and publications. Her work is published in magazines and collections, as well as individual pamphlets: most recently, High Cut (Leafe Press). 

About Precipitation, by Ailsa Cox
Precipitation is a collection of three stories by Ailsa Cox, two of which are published for the first time. It also features images created by the artist Patricia Farrell in response to the stories. The book is the fifth in a series of collaborations between writers and artists - the first, Interpolated Stories by David Rose and Leah Leaf, was published by Confingo Publishing in 2022.

Set mostly in North-West England, with excursions to Wales, Paris and the Arabian desert, these stories map the inner and outer world of their characters, excavating layers of time and memory. Two of the stories take place on the fictional street of Bethel Brow, where a grandmother nurses a long-held grievance, while two young incomers live the dream of a house in the country. In the third, the thwarted ambitions of a disappointed novelist take him on an imaginary journey. Sharply observed and often darkly comic, they hinge upon those small moments that can change your life for ever – a missed train, a turn in the weather, or a puzzling encounter with a neighbour.

You can read more about Precipitation on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the opening of one of the stories. 

From Precipitation

Heavy Showers and Thunder

He stops for a minute to take in the view – the hills unfolding, wave upon wave, the village hidden deep inside the valley – the faint susurration of traffic only accentuating the stillness and the silence here at the edge of the moor. Above the ruined house where the farmer feeds his cattle, the clouds are rolling in like enormous grey whales, but they’ve been that way all day, with no more than the briefest scattering of rain. Pale from lack of water, the paths are hard as concrete; the stony tracks that turn into streams in wintertime have run dry. He swigs a mouthful of water, cycles on. This is where he comes to get away.

Soon the rain’s falling sheer as a curtain – the noise Barbara thought might be a plane was definitely thunder. The view from the window is quickly erased, the dingy outlines of buildings dissolving into the landscape. The culvert will be rushing with the force of cannon fire, rain boiling up against the manholes on the towpath, and the waterfall surging like dark beer. Tonight’s a night to stay indoors, listening for the warlike wail of flood sirens. George and Barbara are safe up on the hillside. They don’t mind the rain; they’re glad of it. The ground could do with a soaking. All the same, Barbara wishes George would pay some mind to the flashing on the chimney.

‘Luke’s rung,’ George says, coming back from closing up the greenhouse.

‘Luke?’ Barbara’s salvaging some bendy carrots, the tips disintegrating when she tries to peel them. 

‘He’s been on a bike ride.’

‘Oh, that Luke.’

‘The line’s flooded. He can’t get home.’

‘So he wants to stay the night?’

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘I’ve no choice, have I?’

Ruth Stacey, "The Dark Room: Letters to Krista"

 

Ruth Stacey is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Worcester, England. Her first poetry collection Queen, Jewel, Mistress was published by Eyewear Publishing, 2015, and her second full collection, I, Ursula, was published in January 2020 by V. Press Poetry. Her pamphlets include Inheritance, published by Mothers Milk Books in 2017. A duet with another poet, Katy Wareham Morris, the collection explores 19th century experience of motherhood, contrasted with a 21st century mother's voice. Inheritance won Best Collaborative Work at the 2018 Saboteur Awards. Three books have been published with the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. A poetic memoir, How to Wear Grunge, was published in 2018. An experimental pamphlet, Viola the Virgin Queen, illustrated by Desdemona McCannon, was published in 2020, and Ruth's latest work, The Dark Room: Letters to Krista, a collaboration with Krista Kay, was published in 2021. Stacey is currently writing an imagined memoir in poetry of the tarot artist Pamela Colman Smith, as part of her PhD study. 

Ruth's website is here. You can read more about her collection I, Ursula on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

About The Dark Room: Letters to Krista

By Ruth Stacey

I contacted Krista (a Portland, USA, based photographer, who photographed some of the people from the 90s Seattle scene) about using a photograph of her friend Demri Parrott for the cover of my poetry memoir, How to Wear Grunge, but due to a message being missed that didn't happen and I commissioned a painted portrait of Demri instead. Following the publication of the HTWG book, Krista saw the message and contacted me in early summer of 2020, during the pandemic. What followed was a correspondence that revealed many common interests and enabled conversations around the themes of loss, nostalgia for youth, memory, vibrant life and tragic death, preserving memories, whilst sharing our photography and poetry. Those conversations become prose poem letters in The Dark Room, which Krista answered with her enigmatic and compelling photographs. I really enjoy working collaboratively with a visual artist. Creating a sequence with text and image to tell a narrative allows different pathways through the stories that are told. Being able to meet another artist and create a new artefact, and a friendship, was an uplifting experience during a difficult year of lockdown, and these poems reflect the light that is found through art and friendship.

By Krista Kay

This book, The Dark Room, is a collaboration between Ruth Stacey, a sensitive, lovely, deeply talented writer, and myself. We have built a friendship and exchanged letters over the past year or so and many topics we have discussed revolve around memory, nostalgia, regret, love, loss. Ruth has written about Demri before (How to Wear Grunge) and I was struck by her profound ability to think deeply and encapsulate with words the importance of understanding complicated lives. Demri has often come up in our conversations. Demri inspired everyone she touched and made the people around her feel beautiful. I have wanted to share her in a way that honored her bright energy and this book is one way to begin to do that. Ruth and I honor others in our lives that we have lost and together we seek to make sense of their absence and our lives forever changed. https://www.instagram.com/kristakayphoto/

Below, you can read an excerpt from The Dark Room.

From The Dark Room: Letters to Krista