Queen of the sheep

Forty-eight contributors this year, slightly down on Issue 21, but with about the same number of pieces. Twenty-seven men, twenty-one women: the gender balance is improving. And a good mixture of well-known, up-and-coming and new names. As ever, it's all new writing and the usual wide range of topics and styles that never fails to amaze. We have country and city (source of much humour, gallus and gallows); weather (rain, of course) and seasons; Frank O'Hara in Gaelic and Jock Steinbeck in Canada; a few birds (eider, chicken, wren and Brent Millar's lovebirds); food (regularly on the NWS menu); sheep (not least Jim Carruth's title poem, the latest in his ongoing series of agriverse) and much more. Both of us have been involved with New Writing Scotland since it began and are sorry to be standing down as editors (Hamish this year, Val next year), but we will continue to submit poems and stories as potential contributors (anonymously, of course!). As editors we have thoroughly enjoyed the process - the discovery of exciting new talent is particularly rewarding. Someone once wrote that an editor is 'nothing more than a highly sensitised reader, the first link in what may be a chain of proliferating impacts.' We're not sure how highly sensitised we are, but we're happy to be that first link. The previous issue, Number 22, was a compendium of the first twenty issues (and well-received, we may say) and marked a watershed. Number 23 is the start of the next generation of New Writing Scotland and we hope it will keep going, reinvigorated -- by its publishers, by its editors, by wonderful new work by writers old and new and by you, its readers, the most important link in the chain.