Origin Stories: A Night of Small Press Poetry & Stories

Origin Stories is a book of beginnings. This anthology released by Forest Publishing includes poems and short stories from writers worldwide. As Harry Josephine Giles writes in the introduction:

Each story and poem takes as its beginning the idea of beginning itself: the beginning of a life, a love, a death, a pain, a hope, a fear, a story. These searching writers hold you, the reader, in that breath in which all stories are possible, in which any rhyme might be written. Each piece takes the shape of the question, the question with which everything begins: what might happen next? We're looking here not for that moment of resolution, that comedy or tragedy, that happily ever after or final revenge, but the place where the seed of story is sewn. The rest is up to you.

We hope you will join us in the launching of this anthology, to share in readings from the collection, to celebrate the start of another year and all the possibility that comes with it.

Our performers:

Tessa Berring is the author of Bitten Hair and Folded Purse (Blue Diode Press) Putty (If A Leaf Falls Press) and Cut Glass and No Flowers (Dancing Girl Press) She also works in visual art, translation, and collaboration.

Elizabeth DeKok received her MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Born and raised in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she currently lives in the North East of England. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in the Tahoma Literary Review, The Baltimore Review, So to Speak, and others. She can be found on Twitter @lizdekok

Liam-Lucille Wright (they/them, iel) is a poet originally from Strasbourg, France, currently studying a Creative Writing PhD on queer ecopoetry at the University of Edinburgh. They enjoy writing in experimental forms about queerness, ecology, cats, crows and dreamscape environments, sometimes all at once. Liam-Lucille has been published in From Arthur’s Seat, orangepeel literary magazine, Ouch! Collective and Beyond the Veil Press. They can occasionally be spotted reading at different poetry open mic events across Edinburgh, and browsing the poetry sections at Lighthouse Books and Typewronger.

Moira McPartlin has been writing for over twenty-five years. Her debut novel The Incomers, published by Fledgling Press in 2012, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award. Over the next seven years Moira wrote her speculative fiction Sun Song Trilogy novels (also published by Fledgling Press). The novels, set in 2089, reflect many issues we face today. Moira’s latest novel, Before Now: Memoir of a Toerag, is written entirely in the Fife dialect and was published by her own imprint, Trilleachan Press, in May 2021. Moira has been a member of Scottish Pen’s Writers’ in Exile Committee since 2015 and is one of the editors of PENing, their online journal. In 2021 she became a writing fellow at Hawthornden Castle. In 2022 she was appointed the Scriever for The Federation of Writers (Scotland). She has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. Moira is currently working with her husband on A Things So Delicate, a hybrid project about the social history surrounding the building of Scotland’s Victorian mass concrete viaducts. This includes creative nonfiction, prose, poetry, and photography. She lives in Stirling.

Alice Eaves is an artist and writer based in Edinburgh. She has been published with Moonflake Press, The Alchemy Spoon, The Lit Platform and with Forest Publications. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Ukraine Poetry Project and a Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Writer in Residence.

Kinslee Sikes is a writer originally from Salmon, Idaho. She has a bachelor’s in History of Art and Visual Culture and recently graduated with an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. She currently resides in Edinburgh.