Fifebuilt

Elaine Newton

Elaine Newton is a poet based in Newport-on-Tay, Fife who works as an acting, improvisation, and speaking with confidence coach. Her poems have been published in Poetry Scotland, New Writing Dundee, and in anthologies from local publisher Salty Press.

Elaine has attended several poetry retreats at Moniack Mhor in the Highlands, valuing the fresh insight, deep work, and camaraderie they offer alongside excellent tutors. For the past decade she has been a regular at StAnza Poetry Festival and its masterclasses, drawn each year to the thrill of discovering new poetry and voices.

She is delighted to have been selected as a mentee on the Fifebuilt mentorship programme as part of StAnza's 30th anniversary celebrations. Having historically written mostly for the drawer, she is excited to be stepping further into the world of poetry!

Artist intro

I enjoy poems that are honest about difficult things, and that trust the reader to sit with them.

I'm drawn to what's tender and what's dark, often in the same poem, and to childhood, mothers and daughters, cold water and the unspoken. I like to write about transformation and to blur the lines between the real and the imagined.

By day I teach acting, improv and speaking with confidence, so breath, voice, the physical life of language and words that catch in the throat are never far from my writing. Cinema and theatre feed my work - I like poems you can picture and almost step inside.

My Fife is...

My Fife is Newport-on-Tay and the East Neuk: fresh, vibrant, and quietly full of beauty and art. I live across the water from my birthplace of Dundee, close enough to watch the light change and to slip into the chill sea whenever the mood (and courage) takes me. My daily walks help clear my mind and give me the stillness to really notice and consider the small things.

I write in a corner of my living room, at an upcycled lime-green kitchen unit that shouldn't work but somehow does. From there I can glance to the window and see the continual changes in the tide, the weather and the gorgeous rhubarb-and-custard sweep of the sunset.

The poems that shaped me

Years ago, I came across "Staying Alive", the Bloodaxe anthology edited by Neil Astley, and I was genuinely stunned. I didn't know poetry could be like this - alive and unafraid of the messiness of being human. Some that caught my attention were Sylvia Plath's Mirror, Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke with You and Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish.

These days, I love Caroline Bird: the rawness, intensity, mischievous humour and the way she can gut you and make you laugh in the same breath. Joelle Taylor's work floors me too: the emotional force, physicality, and sheer rhythm of words you feel pounding in your chest before you've finished reading. Their performances are also extraordinary - they change the air in the room. I've worked with both and they are exceptionally generous and transformative teachers.

Larissa Reid

A freelance scientific journalist by trade, Larissa Reid has written poetry and prose regularly since 2016. Notable publications include Northwords Now, several Black Bough Poetry Anthologies, and the Beyond the Swelkie Anthology. One of her poems was shortlisted for the Janet Coats Memorial Prize 2020.

Larissa is intrigued by visible and invisible boundary lines in landscapes - geological faultlines, myth and reality, edge-lines of land and sea. She has self-published three pamphlets: In February (2019), Caesura (2022) and rock|salt (2022), and is a founder member of the Edinburgh-based writing group, Twisted::Colon. Her short collection, rock|salt, stemmed from a collaborative visual art and poetry project celebrating Fife's coastal heritage.

In May 2026, she was selected for a 3-week local arts programme, as part of the multi-university Resilience of Anthropocene Coasts and Communities (RACC) project, during which she wrote poetry related to the ongoing legacies around Kirkcaldy's coal industry. Larissa is originally from St Andrews but is now based on the south Fife coast, where she balances her writing life with bringing up her daughters.

Artist intro

I grew up in St. Andrews, reading furiously and believing that I should find a career and stick to it. I never have! After 14 years working in education, I moved into scientific journalism, a fascinating source of incredible stories and 'food' for my poetry, which I've been writing since 2016. I'm intrigued by landscapes and their visible and invisible boundary lines - geological faultlines, myth and reality, and the heritage that binds people to this county. I now live on the South Fife coast with my family, and much of my recent writing celebrates Fife in its many guises.

My Fife is...

... sandstone and sea-light. The sandstone of Fife is my base layer. I grew up surrounded by it, scrambled over and under it, and hurled chunks of it into the sea in joy, worry, fury and sorrow. I love the way light shifts on our coastline, and how towns and villages drift in and out on the sea haar. The Fife landscape built so much of the people's heritage, too: soil, coal, salt. These heritage themes appear repeatedly in my writing, together with explorations of mental health and women's health. Deep Time is another key theme, both in terms of the land beneath our feet and the sky above. Deep Time is not something to be afraid of, it's a brilliant sparkling fact that can give you courage - that child-like amazement that you're alive and a part of a tiny moment in history is something to hold onto.

The poems that shaped me

My grandmother would walk around her house at dusk muttering "and then the lighting of the lamps" (Preludes, T.S. Eliot) as she switched on lights and the electric fire. Her habit of randomly reciting poetry shaped me: I didn't know what half the words meant, but that didn't matter - the sounds and patterns of poetry caught me early on.

At university, I discovered many of Scotland's poets, especially those who write passionately of the land, sea and people enmeshed. I'm drawn to writing that pivots around simple truths and explores how the natural world feeds us: Iain Crichton Smith's The Departing Island, George Mackay Brown's December Day, Hoy Sound and Jen Hadfield's beautiful collection 'Byssus' with her love poetry to Lichen and Ceps.

Equally, I admire poems like Cáit O'Neill McCullagh's Little Stabs, which tackle life's brutal moments head on and bring an unexpected resonant beauty to them. Pádraig Ó Tuama's There is Time for Time grabs your hand as you swirl in grief. And finally, John McCullough's recent poem Woodlice takes a mundane observation and flips it like a magic trick - who else could turn 'every claggy mash' in the kitchen bin into 'layer on layer of fallen sunsets'?

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Tina Norris

Tina Norris is a photographer and writer based in West Fife. She has freelanced for most of her career apart from three years as a contract photographer for The Sunday Times Scotland.

Her published features range from a ten-day trawler fishing trip in the North Sea, camel trekking in the Thar Desert to wing walking over East Lothian. She was an expedition photographer for Raleigh International in Alaska. Her photo documentary projects include working with the Tibetan community hospital in Dharamsala and with the British Council in Indonesia. She was one of five photographers commissioned to produce work for the photographic book on Scotland presented to leaders at the G8 summit at Gleneagles. She continues to photograph for corporate and charity clients.

Her poetry has been published in London Grip and she was shortlisted in the Sunday Post short story competition 2025.

Artist intro

As a linguist at uni I loved the puzzle of translation, the satisfaction when a word dropped cleanly into its place. I love the turning and savouring of words. I frequently read poems aloud. My own writing needs time to settle overnight so I can knock it back in the morning. I work from phrases overheard, interactions observed, quirky moments; from landscape and wildlife and season. From anything really. I'm interested in work that uses form to layer sound and feeling and meaning and bring us to an end that casts us beyond the poem.

My Fife is...

I grew up between the South Downs and the marshes of Chichester Harbour in West Sussex. For ten years I lived in Edinburgh before settling near Limekilns. The rhythms of the sea, the life and calls of its shores and the way light changes as weather gathers feel essential to my well-being.

As a swimmer, I appreciate the restoration of the tidal pools of Fife. I am hopeful our beaches will be returned to clean health. One of my favourite edges is Kingsbarns with its scouring wind-blown sand and sea greens.

I relish the contrast of pools stringing down Dollar Glen, looping into shade while the tops of the Ochils bake; the seams run through Fife by the coal and lime industries, leaving silence. Data centres watch at the back of volunteers opening the woodland pathways of West Fife but for now the curlew, the great crested newt are here.

The poems that shaped me

The Butterfly House by Kathryn Bevis is full of astounding imagery and poetic exploration. It is a collection perfectly bookended by Everyone will be there and Flamingo. The first, a poem so rich in colour and movement that it has a cinematic quality. It is an opening poem that describes an ending. The second, a poem so full of love that it gifts a stepping forward to the partner left behind as the book and the poet's life are closed.

My Cancer as a Ring-Tailed Lemur is compassionate, even to the cancer; its imagery arresting: 'Now, on MRI, / they spot her kindly spaniel's face / crammed into the lettuce of my breast.'

The collection is beautifully arranged. My Cancer as a Ring-Tailed Lemur is followed by the Butterfly House which in its gentle mourning for a dying friend, gives the poet the viewpoint of the reader, as one observing and mourning a death. For a moment we are side by side.

This is one of my favourite poems.

Others: Morag Anderson, Claire Askew, Fiona Benson, Malika Booker, Elizabeth Burns, Gillian Clark, Jonathan Edwards, Jen Hadfield, Kathleen Jamie, Sunnah Khan, Marjorie Lotfi, Kim Moore, Alice Oswald, Pascale Petit, Clare Shaw, Roseanne Watt.

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