ENCOUNTERS: an Equinox Response & Reflection in Words & Music
Sunday 22nd March / 2.30pm - 5pm
£12 *
Join award-winning Highland writers Cáit O’Neill McCullagh; Leonie Charlton, Jon Miller, and renowned Argyll harpist Breagha Charlton for an afternoon that honours the between-ness of shade and lucence — Equinox’s balancing of dark and light — and the emergence of Spring; the Voar, an t-earrach.
Sharing poems and prose, selections from their own works (including previously published and fresh writing), rippled with a spate of traditional and original tunes, each artist will engage with, interpret, and explore the potential suggested by the idea of encountering transitions and transformative experiences.
Encounters celebrates and considers the seasonal and daily; our regular activities and routines, and the realms of the surreal and magical; met with friends, neighbours, lovers, colleagues, and with our more-than-human companions throughout nature
Encounters also ventures into more expansive territory; sharing poems of encounter as a lens for exploring contemporary and urgent themes, including:
poetry that imagines transgressions between and across commonplace boundaries and borders; occasions of encounter that inform and challenge ideas of identity, welcome, prejudice, and belonging
offering a Highland poetics for exploring the clashes and debates around ecological challenges, and how these are experienced, at home and in our wider world.
Encounters offers poetry and music as opportunities to reflect upon the effects of our environmental and social choices on place and culture, and also to consider the more possible futures we might assemble for this world.
Through words, sounds, rhythms, and sensations that reflect the cadences, concerns, languages, and imaginations of contemporary Highlanders — all rooted in the tradition of ‘ceilidhing’; ‘visiting with’ (ourselves and each other) — Encounters is an opportunity for everyone gathered to participate in creating a gesture towards change.
Through thoughtful noticing and humorous observations — captured in poems that share lived and imagined experiences — and through music, silence, and celebration, Encounters invites each of us to experience our own transformative encounters in this ‘Ceilidh of the Moment’.
The afternoon will include an opportunity to share your own thoughts and questions in discussion with the artists, as well as a book signing.
* suggested price - pay what you can
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Cáit O’Neill McCullagh’s poems reflect her Irish and Highland upbringings; her research as an archaeologist and ethnologist, and her engagement with experiences of migration, seeking belonging, illness, and care. She is commended for crafting ‘the heartwood of language into luminous work that sings with life’.
Her debut pamphlet The songs I sing are sisters was Dreich’s ‘Classic Chapbook, 2022’, and a Saboteur Award winner, 2023. Her debut collection The Bone Folder (Drunk Muse Press, 2024), was shortlisted for The Saltires: Scotland’s Book Awards, 2025. Also in 2025, Cáit was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and won the McLellan Poetry Prize. She is honorary Poet in Residence for UHI Institute of Northern Studies.
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Leonie Charlton lives in Glen Lonan, Argyll. Her Publications include her poetry pamphlet Ten Minutes of Weather Away published by Cinnamon Press, and her travel-memoir Marram, published by Sandstone Press.
Leonie is fascinated by our emotional, cultural, and environmental connection with place and more-than-human worlds and is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD with University of Highlands and Islands looking at Scotland’s wild deer debate. Leonie’s poetry has been published widely including in New Writing Scotland, Gutter Magazine, The Blue Nib, Envoi, Bella Caledonia, Anti-Heroin Chic, Northwords Now, Dreich, and Dark Mountain.
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Jon Miller lives near Ullapool and has had poetry, articles and reviews published in a range of literary magazines. He has also worked with artists and musicians on various collaborative projects and exhibitions. He was formerly co-editor of Northwords Now.
Jon was a winner of the Neil Gunn Poetry Competition, and has been long-listed for the Bridport Poetry Prize; shortlisted for the Wigtown Poetry Prize and also for the National Poetry Competition in 2024. He was winner of the prestigious International Book & Pamphlet Competition in 2022.
His pamphlet….still life… was published by Sandstone Press. His latest pamphlet Past Tense Future Imperfect (2023) is published by Smith/Doorstop, an imprint of the Poetry Business.
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Brèagha Charlton is a lever harpist from Argyll currently living and working in Glasgow.
Her work is inspired by the west coast of Scotland and connection to each other and to the landscape. Her roots are in traditional music, and she has a First-Class Honours degree from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Brèagha’s sensitive and improvisational styles combine to create a sound which is textural and immersive.
A co-director of Anam Creative, Brèagha facilitates paid opportunities for emerging artists and musicians, and curates creative collaborations.