I arrived in Scotland one year ago yesterday—exhausted, excited, and emotionally drained after leaving my entire life behind me. I’d left behind the organization I co-founded with a friend. I’d left behind a relationship of over a decade. I’d left my parents behind at the airport. I’d left behind my family, my country, and everything that felt safe, for a complete unknown. A family friend picked me up at the airport (a beacon of security in an extremely unsure world) and dropped me off in my room, and I was immediately adrift.

In the year to come, of course, my home country would rapidly destabilize, my new country would do its best to follow suit, and a global pandemic would shake the human population as a whole to its core. Somehow, impossibly, this has still been one of the best years of my life.

The Journal: Commonplace Books

As a kid, I took all my notes in my diary: I always had it on me, it was a journal I loved, and I always knew where to find my school notes, my maps, my keys to secret languages… Everything I scribbled down.

At the beginning of term last year, a friend of mine mentioned she was going to try and write in a single notebook for the duration of the program, and I decided to return to my roots.

I’m glad I did, because the pandemic hit in the second term.

The Journal, The Writing BlogAlex PenlandJuly 21, 2020slice of life, journal

3, 2, 1...

This has been a week for launches.

I’m re-launching the website, of course. Minor redesign, a little streamlining, and the new blog. (Don’t be too worried that The Letter Mage seems to have vanished—there are long-term re-launching plans there too!) But the big, exciting launch was the launch of From Arthur’s Seat: Volume V, the anthology put out by my cohort at the University of Edinburgh.

Streaming and purchase links are available in the full entry.