While everyone else seems to be obsessed with chocolate eggs and fluffy bunnies, PIG takes you down a different type of rabbit hole today. Or is it a worm hole? We are talking about poetry and science, microbes and black holes, x-dimensional space and curious theories. That's after the usual update on local events and the latest opportunities.

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Events (30 March to 12 April 2026)

It may be a short week, but it's one jam-packed with poetry. It feels like everything is happening all at once on Tuesday (31 March). The Midnight Verse has invited 2025 Howl Poetry Slam Winner Eve Mumford as the March headline act. Her performance will go alongside the usual open mic slots and all of it will, as always, be released as a podcast. Meanwhile, at Strange Studio at the Barras, you can join the Kelvingrove Writers and the Scottish Working Class Network for the launch event of 'Moving the Coin' - a collaborative publication written by the network's members over a six-month period. A special kind of writing workshop is on offer at the Garnethill Multicultural Centre. Poet Sean Wai Keung is running a free workshop on the topic of hospitable space in the context of migration and place. The event is free but ticketed, so make sure to book ahead of time if you are keen to attend. If you'd rather get a bit of poetic inspiration from the comfort of your home, I have three different events on offer as well. The Poetry Society is hosting an online reading event to celebrate the 2025 National Poetry Competition, Cheltenham Poetry Festival is hosting Zoe Brooks who is launching their new book 'Something in Nothing', and the National Centre for Writing is presenting an online writing workshop on themes of grief, nature, and evolution chaired by Linda Frances and featuring ecopoets Jemma Borg and Esther Vincent Xueming.

By comparison, Wednesday, 1 April, is pretty quiet. The team behind the weekly Poet's Corner open mic night at Hillhead Bookclub is ready for you to share your latest writing. Alternatively, you can tag along to the launch event of Black Skulls by Iphgenia Baal, organised by Spam Press. The book makes up Season 1 of Glitches, a new series of hybrid publications. It is a giant book that can be torn apart as posters, reassembled, reinvented and remixed. Count on Spam Press to come up with wonderfully magical and weird formats!

A reading I am personally super excited about is happening at Good Press on Thursday (2 April). Nicky Melville and Tessa Berring are both launching their new collections from Edinburgh’s Blue Diode Press: Get Tae and Burnt Snow. The two will be joined by Glasgow-based poets Sophia Archontis and Endija Lukstina, for a night of playful, political, hybrid, decadent, concrete, and excitingly experimental poetry. The hybrid writing group Dove Cottage Poets is back online and in person at Wordsworth Grasmere that same afternoon.

The post-Easter week kicks off on Monday, 6 April, with two of Glasgow's long-running open mic nights: Candlelight Poetry at the Old Toll Bar on the Southside, and Poetry at Inn Deep on Great Western Road. Go on, sign-up for a reading slot. I know you want to...

The monthly Open Book Creative Writing Group at Glasgow Women's Library is back in session on Tuesday, 7 April. The free two-hour session is run by poet Kathrine Sowerby and targeted at women.

Wednesday, 8 April is another great night for open mic delights. You can have your pick: Poet's Corner at Hillhead Bookclub, the Poetry Open Mic at Glasgow Zine Library on the Southside, or Speakeasy at Adrian's Bar. The Speakeasy team have still to confirm this month's headline performer, so keep an eye out for the announcement. They are always a brilliant pick!

The last poetic event of the week is happening online on Thursday, 9 April. You are invited to join The Poetry Society as it celebrates the launch of the spring issue of The Poetry Review. Readers will include Shane McCrae, Will Harris, Ruby Robinson and Mark Waldron, and the event is free!

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Opportunities

Today's pick from among the long list of opportunities currently on the PIG website:

You have two more days to submit to Art Riot Press, a brand new Scottish independent press dedicated to bold poetry, short prose and visual art. The first issue has the theme 'beginnings'. The deadline for submissions is 31 March.

Also closing on 31 March is the submission window for Magma 96, which will be edited by Cheryl Moskowitz, Elizabeth Lewis Williams and Branwell Roberts, and focuses on the topic of the Antarctic. Think of it as a paradox, a blank space, a white continent that harbours a dark subglacial world hidden from sunlight for millions of years, a place where all time zones converge, a place of connection, a natural laboratory, an archive in the ice.

If you are someone who has experience with leading writing groups, you currently have the opportunity to become a Lead Reader for Open Book. Group leaders are sought for creative writing sessions in Paisley and at MILK in Glasgow. The MILK event has a particular focus on writers with English as an Additional Language. The deadline for applications for both positions is 1 April.

Are you a Gaelic writer? You might want to consider getting your application in for a special type of arts commission that is dedicated to an exchange between Scottish Gàidhlig and Irish Gaeilge. The commission comes with research exchange trips to Belfast and Taigh Chearsabhagh in Lochmaddy, and the selected practitioner receives a fee of £3,500 plus a £300 production budget. The deadline is 5 April.

The Scottish writers collective Paperboats is currently looking for entries for its 'Energy Stories' competition. You have until 15 April to submit work that reflects on energy, its creation and harvesting, its impact and future. Entries may be written in English, Scots or Scottish Gaelic and the winning entry will receive a prize sum of £250.

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PIG Spotlight

This section is designed to shine a spotlight on a particular website, organisation or feature. For each Update, I'll pick something new - either because it is plain awesome or because it's new or really topical.

Today's spotlight is on 'Points of Intersection', the short, digital anthology published by Edinburgh Napier University. The collection brings together the work by 79 writers and scientists who completed the Science Communication Through Poetry course in 2025. I love these kinds of cross-disciplinary projects and the poems that resulted from the course are brilliant in their diverse approaches and ideas. Included are poems on caddisflies and cancer cells, microbiomes, the Northern lights, nuclear isotopes and so much more. You can download the full anthology via the SPL website and if you fancy becoming part of the next cohort, check out the course information on the Napier website.

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PIG's Poetry Pick

Staying with the science theme, I picked a physics inspired poem for today's PIG Pick.

‘We used to think the universe was made…’

by J.O. Morgan

We used to think the universe was made
of tiny invisible pin-points of energy, jostling
and tumbling and buzzing together, and so,
by whatever particular arrangement they took,
and the way in which they bounced off one another,
all sorts of physical matter could be produced.
Later we found the universe, in actual fact, is made
of tiny invisible threads of incredible length, and,

in the same way a violin string changes pitch
when touched at points along its measured span,
so all these interweaving loops and knots,
this tangle of quantum spaghetti,
as it flexes and line crosses line,
so it resonates throughout the whole bundle
a complex vibratory code that defines
any outward appearance and characteristic.

After which we discovered the likely reality
was of tiny invisible sheets, many layers
of infinitesimal thinness, each film
undulating at tremendous speeds;
multiple parallel oceans, their rippling surfaces
folding and flattening, wave-crests on wave-crests,
nudged at and nosed at, their lingering kisses
collected, expressed as specific material forms.

We were young, we were anxious to clutch at
whatever proof fitted. Still, humility liberates;
when it comes to matters of truth we’re not picky.
Ironing our numbers presented the ideal
of tiny invisible shapeshifting blocks that squirm
and bulge, interlock and uncouple, that rub,
knock, wobble, split, and so make up
the whole gamut of substances we take for granted.

All this was long ago. Our models had risen
to eleven-dimensional-space when
our application for further funding was rejected
and we were asked to vacate the premises.
We took it well, were optimistic for the future,
though that was hardly the crux of the issue:
just try transporting eleven-dimensional furniture
in an incontrovertibly three-dimensional van.

Available via the Scottish Poetry Library.

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That's it from me today. See you in two weeks!

Love,
Annie

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