Waypoints: Seascapes and Stories of Scotland's West Coast

by Ian Stephen

Adventure, memoir, storytelling and celebration of all things maritime meet in Waypoints, a beautifully written account of sea journeys from Scotland's west coast. In the book Ian Stephen reveals a lifetime's love affair with sailing; each voyage honors a seagoing vessel, and each adventure is accompanied by a spell-binding retelling of a traditional tale about the sea. His writing is enchanting and lyrical, gentle but searching, and is accompanied by beautiful illustrations of each vessel, drawn by his wife, artist Christine Morrison.

Ian Stephen is a Scottish writer, artist and storyteller from the remote and bewitching Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He fell in love with boats and sailing as a boy, pairing this love affair with a passion for the beautiful but merciless Scottish coastline, an inspiration and motivating force behind his poems, stories, plays, radio broadcasts and visual arts projects for many years.

This book will be a delightful and absorbing read for anyone with a passion for sailing and the seas, Scotland's landscape and coastlines, stories and the origins of language and literature.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 23, 2017

About the author

Ian Stephen is a writer, storyteller, artist and sailor from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He studied English, Drama and Education at the University of Aberdeen. His prose, poetry and drama has been published around the world and garnered several awards, including the Robert Louis Stevenson Award. He was the first artist-in-residence at StAnza, Scotland’s annual poetry festival. He is the author of Living at the Edge (1982), a book of short stories, and Malin, Hebrides, Minches (1983), a collection of poems.

Reviews

[Vera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, and especially appealing if one is interested in boats, sailing or Scottish lore. All three of those strands meet in your humble reader here - I found this very enjoyable as well as educational.

[Andrew Whelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to describe really. Part travelling and sailing memoire, part folklore and part poetry. I’m not a sailor and didn’t understand lots of the technical aspects of the expeditions but Ian writes incredibly well and I could almost feel the wind and taste the salt.
I’ve been lucky to visit some of the places he mentions, visits and sails past and it was really interesting to get a perspective on them from both someone who is local and from the water. A chain of islands that feel much more connected to someone who can sail between.