Bucket of frogs

Whether it's gulls, lichen or magpies, ice cream, brick yards or playgrounds, or perhaps, art, death, or war, this vibrant new collection of prose and poetry is indeed just like a bucket of frogs. As Editors we scooped into the brimming mix of manuscripts, a more than healthy number of submissions once again, there's no fear of a drought from Scotland's writers. And, like wee weans collecting tadpoles in those non-PC days when you could get up to all sorts of activities and parents actually encouraged you, it's been a fascinating pursuit. And here we have not merely tadpoles but fully developed frogs. The range of content is wide and sometimes astonishing. And locations? We shift from Seville to Connecticut, flit from Dufton to Mexico. While submission guidelines require writers to be Scottish based, their imaginative landscapes can be without/outwith boundaries. The submitting writers' anonymity has continued, we're delighted to say. It means we're never sure who to avoid because we've rejected a weel kent author; it also means an occasional bear hug from a brand new first time writer. And that's a great moment for us, for them, for the world of Scottish writing - the ASLS anthology is still often the first important point of publication for a new writer. The moment the tadpole becomes a frog. Kiss the frog and we might have a Booker or a Costa prizewinner one day. The three year remit of one of the editors has come to an end. The rotating process lets a fresh perspective arrive, like a draught blowing in through an opening door. New preferences, subjectivity take a new direction. There's an inevitabillty that personal preferences of subject matter or voice might inform an editor's selection but the main thing is that the poem or story has been carefully crafted. And whether the subject matter is rural or urban, Scots or English language, exotic or local location, the work selected must be well written. Carefully constructed. It's also important, at a very basic level, and to give your work its best start in life, that New Writing Scotland receives pristine sheets of non-crumpled, non-folded, non-put-in-a-drawer-for-years manuscripts. After all, there's a wheen o competition out there waiting to fight for its right to life in print. As Fleur Adcock states, in the humorous but perceptive 'The Prize Winning Poem', 'dawn will not herald another bright new day, nor dew sparkle like diamonds in a dell'. In this year's anthology, cliches do not clutter and croak from the works, a fresh originality and vitality kept the editors riveted as we followed imaginations through experiences of death and war, love and voyaging both literal and metaphysical. We hope readers will enjoy scooping out handfuls of stories and poems from this hopping good New Writing Scotland 26.