An Afternoon with Drunk Muse Press + Open Mic

Details

A wildly good way to spend your Saturday

The wildly good Drunk Muse Press invites you to an afternoon showcasing its recent publications. Hosted by the Press’s editor Hugh McMillan and publisher Neil Young, the entertaining line-up features readings by Julie McNeill, George Gunn, Mark Vernon Thomas and Cait O’Neill McCullagh, as well as from the latest Drunk Muse publication by Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. The Press was founded in 2021 by poets for poets to champion writing from across Scotland-and internationally-that “insists on wider attention”. From football and feminism, politics, independence and war to sheep – it’s all here. Books, bar, and short open mic slots will be available.

To book an open mic slot, please email [email protected], but don't forget to book a ticket here as well.

About the poets

Julie McNeill’s latest book, Something Small, was published in February by Drunk Muse Press. Julie is the poet in residence for St Mirren FC Charitable Foundation and the makar for The Scottish Women’s National Football Team Poets Society. She specialises in delivering creative writing workshops and talks with a particular interest in writing for wellbeing & mental health and supporting children and adults with additional support needs.

Hugh McMillan is a poet from Penpont in south-west Scotland. His work has been published widely in Scotland and beyond, and he has won various prizes, most recently the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award in 2017 for Sheep Penned, published by Roncadora; he won the same award in 2009 for Postcards from the Hedge. He has been a winner in the Smith/Doorstop Prize and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, and has also been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award and the Basil Bunting Award.

Mark Vernon Thomas is a New Zealander embedded in the Marchars, parts of rural south-west Scotland. In spite or, perhaps, because of past careers as a classical musician, a jazz improviser, a singer of Georgian polyphony, as well as being a husband, father and cat lover, he turned to poetry to make sense of the world. Dancing with Shadows and Stones, published in February, was his first volume.

Cáit O’Neill McCullagh started writing poems at home in Easter Ross in December 2020. Since then, here poems have been published widely in print and online. With co-author Sinead McClure, she was a winner of Dreich’s ‘Classic Chapbook Competition 2022’. A new solo volume of her work will be published by Drunk Muse Press next spring.

George Gunn’s fifth poetry collection, Chronicles of the First Light, was published by Drunk Muse Press in early 2021 – it was also the Press’s debut poetry volume. George was born in 1956 in Thurso where he still lives. He has been a deep-sea fisherman, a driller for oil in the North Sea, journalist and playwright with more than fifty plays for state and radio to his name.

Dareen Tatour shot to worldwide attention when she was jailed in 2016 for the ‘crime’ of writing a poem titled ‘Resist, my people, resist them’. Her defiance, trial and release amidst an international outcry, was chronicled in her book, My Threatening Poem – the Memoir of a Poet in Occupation Prisons, published by Drunk Muse Press in 2021. Here latest book, I Sing From the Window of Exile, brings together her first collection of poems in English translation, alongside the original Arabic texts.

Neil Young hails from west Belfast and now lives in north-east Scotland. He worked as a labourer, kitchen-porter and stage-hand before becoming a journalist. Neil’s publications include Lagan Voices (Scryfa, 2011), The Parting Glass – 14 Sonnets (Tapsalteerie, 2016), Jimmy Cagney’s Long-Lost Kid Half-Brother (Black Light Engine Room, 2017); Shrapnel (Poetry Salzburg, 2019); and After the Riot (Nine Pens Press, 2021).

Event Host

Scottish Poetry Library