Write Outdoors with Harry Giles

LGBTQ+ people are invited to join performer, poet and ‘general doer of things’ Harry Giles for an outdoor writing session in Galashiels.

Get your ideas flowing and explore the Galashiels countryside with a short walk followed by some creative writing.

Harry says: ‘Sometimes it’s hard to be visibly different and queer in rural places, and LGBTQ+ folk often feel like they can only be themselves in the city. So let’s take up some outdoor space together, and have a think and a write about what it means to be queer in a landscape.’

We’ll be meeting outside TD1 Youth Hub before heading out for a short walk.

About Harry

Harry Josephine Giles is from Orkney, Scotland, and is a writer and performer. They have lived on four islands, each larger than the last. They trained in Theatre Directing (MA with Merit, East 15 Acting School, 2010) and Sustainable Development (MA 1st Class, University of St Andrews, 2009) and their work generally happens in the crunchy places where performance and politics get muddled up.

As a performer, Harry has been featured in the SPILL National Platform, and programmed by festivals and venues including the Ovalhouse, Forest Fringe and Sprint. Their performance lecture This is not a riot toured to Italy in 2012, and their one-to-one show What We Owe has toured European festivals 2013-17, including in Slovenia, Latvia and Romania. What We Owe was also listed in the Guardian’s “Best of the Edinburgh Fringe” 2014 round-up — in the “But is it art?” section. Their current touring show is Drone, a poetry, video and sound show about technology, gender and anxiety.

As a poet, Harry has toured North America, given feature performances at venues from the Bowery Poetry Club to the Soho Theatre; hosted events at festivals from StAnza to Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, won multiple slams including the UK Student Slam (2008), the BBC Scotland Slam (2009), the Glasgow Slam (2010); and been published in journals including Magma, Gutter, PANK and New Writing Scotland. They won the IdeasTap National Poetry Competition in 2012, and their first collection Tonguit (Freight Books) was shortlisted for both the Edward Morgan Poetry Award (2014) and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2016). Other publications include the pamphlets Visa Wedding (2012) and Oam (Stewed Rhubarb), and text art oddities including a box of postcards (Farmform, 2014), a map of games (Casual Games for Casual Hikers, 2015), and a hypertext multimedia mash-up (Trump/Pattinson, 2017).

As a game-maker, Harry has designed games for Now Play This, Book Week Scotland, the Nevis Land Partnership, the BBC, and more. Their game The Chinese Room, co-written with Joey Jones, came 5th in the 2007 international Interactive Fiction Competition, and their twine game Raik was featured in PC World, Rock Paper Shotgun and IndieGames.com.

Often the theatre, poetry and games get muddle together into hybrid forms.

In Edinburgh, Harry founded Inky Fingers, a nationally-funded spoken word events organisation, co-directs the quarterly performance art platform ANATOMY at Summerhall, and is part of the collective behind the Forest Café, Edinburgh’s open access arts space.

Sometimes other things happen. They occasionally write interactive fiction and sometimes appears as a rebel clown. They tweet too much. They get enthusiastic about half the world and furious about the other half. Their emails have too many exclamation marks in.