Books and Maps: two of my favourite things
Despite dabbling in social networking, I’m not really that much of a high-tech gadget or app fan. The one exception is digital maps, the more interactive they are the better, throw in books and I’m hooked. So when I recently stumbled upon “Edinburgh Reads“, I lost a good hour or more of writing time. Edinburgh [...]
Edinburgh Transition Tales in Reforesting Scotland
The Autumn/Winter issue of Reforesting Scotland’s magazine (of the same name) focussed on the Transition movement in Scotland. The article “Deep into soul soil” written by Transition Edinburgh member Jude Dunn discusses the importance of addressing heart and soul matters in our attempts to bring about positive changes in our selves and our communities in [...]
Painting Edinburgh Green With Stories
Transition Edinburgh hosted its first (hopefully annual) fair of environmentally-friendly options for re-localizing life in Scotland’s capital. As I have argued (probably ad nauseum) when it comes to environmentally-friendly ways to entertain and inform people (especially the younger ones) storytelling is probably as low-carbon as it gets (though I have to own up to the [...]
Being Inspired by Contemporary Oral Storytelling at Newbattle Abbey College
Two weeks after I moved to Edinburgh last September, I found myself down at Newbattle Abbey College, attending the first weekend of their Contemporary Oral Storytelling professional development programme. I signed up because I wanted to hone my storytelling skills and because I thought it would be a great way to find out how storytelling [...]
Bringing Storytelling to the Edinburgh Transition Initiative
Within the model of the Transition Movement, as much attention is given to the psycho-spiritual and cultural aspects of social change as is given to more standard aspects of sustainable living like alternative transportation and renewable energy. Each transition initiative is encouraged to have a “Heart and Soul” working group that meets regularly to explore [...]
Re-storying Cities: the Glasgow 2020 Project
What can be learned by inviting citizens to re-story their cities? This was a question posed by Demos, a British think tank for “everyday democracy.” From my perspective, the most interesting finding to come out of the experiment was the utility of the re-storying process itself. By engaging citizens in creative ways, a diversity of [...]
