The Skinny Current Issue

In July we advise you to find some grass and touch it. Take a break from the city, get into nature, swim in the sea etc etc. We’re all about connecting with the environment: take a pause to breathe, lie on the ground, stare at the sky.

Books leads this theme, talking to Kate Zambreno about her memoir The Light Room, a collection of critical meditations on relationships, the cosmos, humans and nature. She shares her definition of environmental writing and an insight into the writing of what she describes as a series of ‘light boxes’. Then we meet Jen Hadfield, whose eco-memoir Storm Pegs explores movements of land, people and languages on the Shetland Islands.

Next, we’re advising you take a trip to the Cairngorms for a party. We talk to the promoter behind The Speyside Fantastic Party to find out more about taking the event up north. Clubs meets Aberdeenshire’s finest clubbing export Massie to hear about running Bothy Bass nights around the country, and the importance of preserving spoken Doric. Film talks to director Lina Soualem about generational longing and how her documentary Bye Bye Tiberias explores Palestinian dispossession from the land. Art looks back on last month’s Glasgow International festival of contemporary art and examines how artists are unearthing Scotland’s concealed colonial and environmental context.

In Intersections, a writer shares how queer community and climbing go hand in hand. And as the July election looms, we take a look at fatigue amongst young voters. Music looks forward to a summer of DIY festivals at a time when a lot of the big hitters seem to be vanishing before our very eyes. Grassroots to the rescue – which leads us conveniently on to the resurrection of Edinburgh’s Jazz Bar, which is being relaunched by a former staff team as a community interest group.

Comedy has one thing on its mind and that thing is the Fringe. We talk to a selection of Scotland-based comics about the economic realities of taking a show to stage in Edinburgh in August. Film meets Spanish philosopher turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado to hear how an overwhelming identification with Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel led to creating his difficult-to-define debut Orlando, My Political Biography. And, as A Family Affair hits Netflix, one writer passionately argues for a critical reappraisal of Zac Efron and his eclectic, decades-spanning oeuvre.

Art talks to Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas about her new Tramway exhibition, Delainia: 17071965 Unfolding, which explores the mythologisation and discrimination of Romani, Gypsy and Traveller communities. Looking to artists at the very beginning of their careers, we’ve got a degree show round-up from the Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow fine art displays.

Finally, we close with the keystone of the Touch Grass issue – roving reporter Jamie Dunn journeys to Pollok Park with a microphone to conduct an in-person interview with a Highland coo, finding out more about its favourite music, films and dinner party guests.