Creative Conversations: Liz MacWhirter

Liz MacWhirter is a writer, speaker and theologian. Her debut novel, ‘Black Snow Falling’ (Scotland Street Press, 2018), gained a Carnegie Medal nomination, and her poetry is published by Lucy Writers, Yale GCRE, Theology in Scotland and 4M Netlabel. Liz has spoken at the Edinburgh International Book Festival; at the Universities of Yale, Oxford, and St Andrews; and is a Scottish Book Trust Live Literature Author. As a creative copywriter Liz won 20 awards, and her PhD, 'When Hope Takes Flight,' explores theopoetics and trauma (University of Glasgow). Liz spends as much time as possible in nature, hiking around her home in the Border hills.

Blue: a lament for the sea

The poetry pamphlet Blue: a lament for the sea comprises one long poem in free verse, voicing the grief of a lone woman swimming off the Scottish Hebridean Isle of Iona.

Dusk falls. Oceans entangle birth with death. Unsettling lines keen across the space of the page. With the scope of a lyric epic, the univocal turns into the universal – even polytemporal, touching other dimensions of time and reality. Three concepts of arising merge and distil in the poetry: the rising seas of climate breakdown today; Iona arising above an apocalyptic sea flood drowning all else in a Gaelic medieval myth; and in deep time, colliding tectonic plates forced the Earth’s crust up to the surface, forming Iona.

The ecosystem of the poem encompasses the spiritual with three further themes of connectivity. The sense of everything as connected in contemporary relational ontology, or way of being. The iconic Celtic pattern of nature intertwining with the eternal. And the spirituality of the medieval anchoress, Julian of Norwich, for whom a hazelnut and all things homely become two-way gateways to the divine. The material-spiritual triad resonates with trauma-informed spirituality and its emphasis on wounded bodies, on hurting places, on collapsing ecosystems and the urgent collective need to bear witness to this trauma. Eyes-wide-open, heart full-thinking, taking in as much reality as possible. Blue: a lament for the sea holds us in loving solidarity.

All these elements infused the writing of the poetry and narrative arc and lead the poem to its own inexorable conclusion. This contemporary lyric epic bears witness to our shared grief, even reframing our response. Love is lament; hope is action.