One Year

Elizabeth Reeder

Being within intense times of illness and death is an experience many of us share, and the essays in one year give entrance to a time of living grief when we are completely, almost obsessively within the smaller world of illness, family and crisis, and yet, also, functioning as individuals, friends, and lovers in the wider world. one year is taken from the manuscript of Reeder’s full collection of hybrid/lyric essays, direction is the moment you choose, and presents a year of living in the places that flourish between life and death, where living is elegy: half poetry, half inevitable narrative.

“On some hills, where rocks balance on inclines, there is a point geologists call the angle of no strain. Rocks repose despite steepness because all conditions allow for rest. I sleep lying down, pace upright, and when I lean I need a wall or a chair or a person to lean against.”

ELIZABETH REEDER, originally from Chicago, lives in Scotland and is the author of two critically acclaimed novels: Ramshackle and Fremont. Ramshackle was shortlisted for the 2013 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Best First Book of the Year Award, the 2012 Saltire First Book of the Year, and long-listed for the Authors’ Club Best First Book Award (2013). Her short stories, dramas, and abridgements have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and her stories, poems, and essays are widely published. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and is co-convenor of that program. She is on twitter.
 
AMANDA THOMSON is a visual artist who graduated from The Glasgow School of Art and gained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her doctorate in interdisciplinary arts practice, based around the landscapes and the forests of the North of Scotland, in 2013. Thomson’s writing has been published in academic journals, and she exhibits her artwork internationally. She currently works as a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art.