THE EDWIN MORGAN CENTENARY COLLECTION
In collaboration with The Edwin Morgan Trust & Glasgow University, Speculative Books are proud to announce ‘The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection’ guest edited by Colin Herd.
Before he published his first collection of poetry, Edwin Morgan made a series of visually arresting, playful, dynamic scrapbooks. A queer visual diary, a catalogue of images, and a surreal bricolage, the scrapbooks were a resource and a testing ground as Morgan developed his distinctively experimental and anti-orthodox poetics.
‘The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection’ will be filled with poetry and short fiction, written by YOU, inspired by Edwin Morgan’s scrap books which he donated to Glasgow University Library.
For our submissions, some themes you might want to tune into are Scottishness, Queerness, Collaboration, Intergalactic Space - but one of the exciting things about the scrapbooks is they take you in unexpected directions!
You can access the Edwin Morgan scrap books at Glasgow University Library during regular opening times or by attending Colin Herd’s creative workshop ‘Getting Sticky With It’ on the 6th of Feb at 1PM.
‘Getting Sticky With It’ Facebook event here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2537277169890367
If you are unable to attend the workshop or visit the library you can see some pages from Edwin’s scrap books below or click this link!
Flicker: https://tinyurl.com/sgrv3jz
Please email your submissions to
[email protected]
Use your name as the subject of the email. Please attach poems to the body of the email, there is no limit for the number of submissions and short fiction must be 3000 words max.
Submission deadline:
Mid-Day, Monday the 24th of February
All images sourced from: Archives & Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.
A note from Robyn Marsack of The Edwin Morgan Trust:
Perhaps you kept a scrapbook when you were younger, or still keep one. What does it mean to you? For Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), one of Scotland’s most inventive and curious poets, his scrapbooks were a repository for the interests, the questions, even the humour that were sometimes difficult to share with others. They were a private, crowded space of text and images, carefully composed by a boy - then a man - living at home with his parents, with his passion for architecture and design, for all things Russian, for space travel, for odd headlines, for other men… They represent a hidden life that ranged, like his poetry, from Glasgow to Saturn.
The Edwin Morgan Trust is delighted to have this opportunity to partner with Speculative Books in opening up some pages of this endlessly fascinating collection to writers who would like to use them as springboards for their own speculations, in prose or poetry. While the actual scrapbooks can be accessed at Glasgow University Library’s Special Collections, there is a limit to what can be shown online because of copyright restrictions. Besides the sample sheets here, there is a set of pages with illuminating commentary available on Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/uofglibrary/5366846190/in/album-72157623915217656/lightbox/
Also some are shown here: https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/edwin-morgan-scrapbooks-project/
We look forward to seeing in what unexpected ways the pages work on your imagination.