Nova Scotia Vol 2 anthology, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, is now available for pre-order! It celebrates the depth and breadth of Scotland's dazzling science fiction and fantasy landscape from its haunted islands to its transformed cities and everything in between. Jenni Coutts created the gorgeous cover art.
You can order the book on its own, or buy the bundle anthology deal - both from the Luna store.
Today we'd like to introduce you to Jeda Pearl and the story "To The Forest".
About the author:
Jeda Pearl is a Scottish Jamaican poet and speculative fiction writer. Her poems and stories appear in art installations and several anthologies and her debut poetry collection, Time Cleaves Itself, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2024. Find her online @JedaPearl.
Jeda on the story:
"To the Forest" began life as a performance piece and creative response as part of the Figures of Speech series in 2022 where I played the part of a BranchSibling, translating poems written by plants in an imagined Caledonian Forest Library promenade performance in the next millennium. While researching biotechnologies, I was inspired by Grow Your Own Cloud (a group of artists, scientists and technologists researching the idea of storing data using plant DNA) and artist Ayana Zaire Cotton who engages with language, technology and ecology to speculate and worldbuild centering a sankofa sensibility. Sue Burke's Semiosis duology and Biopolis - Tales of Urban Biology were also influential. These themes tied in with some of my own previous speculative ideas linked to silk cotton tree folklore of harbouring spirits, thinking about plants as memory-keepers, and imagining ways technology may empower plant sentience and communication and the hybrid species that could potentially exist. As I considered the plant residents of the library, the world began to build itself outward and the characters of Linn and Copi, and their voices, evolved into existence. It was also really fun to be able to bring together poetry and prose into a hybrid narrative.
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