“Scatterlings is about holding up the corner of the earth that has claimed you. It’s messy, opinionated, and asks more of you than you will likely want to give. It’s the tale of a myth teller making a circle round their den and bedding in. No tales of flapping Tibetan prayer flags, no wandering the deserts of North Africa. Over five years I’ve worked the crooked lanes of local story until I could go no further. Till I walked straight out of this century altogether. 

It comes with a price attached. It’s recklessly insistent on the urge to kick your boots off, get down on your knees and kiss rough soil, crawl under barbed wire fences and touch the bark of holy trees, hoot and strut and weep and let the wild darkness get its beautiful paws on you once again. Hurl whisky on the grave of Joe Strummer, kiss the wounded, spend a night in a hollow tree. Taste the golden milk from the teat of a rain bear. Un-refine yourself. Un-civilise yourself. It’s about the hundred secret things. For all its bookishness, for all its insistence on study, make no mistake, what it desires most is to get you out where the buses don’t park. What it calls for is a kind of elegant disintegration. What follows is a different kind of activism, a different kind of thinking.”

Scatterlings by Martin Shaw, available from Cista Mystica Press (White Cloud Press, 2016; Cista Mystica Press, 2019).