IAN STEPHEN’S planned voyage from Stornoway to St Andrews for the Stanza Poetry Festival last month turned into something of a gale-lashed epic, and the nautical part of the venture eventually had to be terminated in Orkney, while the intrepid mariner/artists made their way to Fife on dry land. Nonetheless, Ian and his collaborators were able to supply the Arts Journal with a fascinating blow-by-blow log of the event, complete with new poems created on board. Our thanks to Ian and all concerned, and we look forward to future collaborations of this kind.

THE ARTS JOURNAL will have something of a nautical theme this month, including the most exciting project yet to appear on these pages. We will bring you daily reports and new work as it is created from Lewis artist Ian Stephen’s voyage from Lewis to St Andrews. The project, which will unfold later this month, is part of the work he is doing for the Stanza poetry festival.

THE FIRST EDITORIAL of the new year should be forward-looking, and there is plenty to be enthusiastic about in the Highlands and Islands arts scene, nowhere more so than in the field of traditional music. Celtic Connections has drawn to a close in Glasgow with another strong representation of Highland talent, from 12 year old Graham MacKenzie of Inverness taking solo roles in Donald Shaw’s Harvest, through to world famous names like Aly Bain and Flora McNeill.

THE ARTS JOURNAL will be borrowing another tradition from the world of the printed page with the on-line equivalent of a Christmas double issue. In practice, that will mean that regular features like this editorial, our Venue Profile or A Month in the Life will not change again until the ‘new’ issue at the start of February, but (with the exception of the holiday period itself, when the HI-Arts team will be off doing seasonal things for a couple of weeks) we will continue to post new material throughout the two month period, so do keep checking out the site.

THE PUBLICATION of a major new novel by Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul (Angus Peter Campbell) is an event of note in Highland culture, even if the language gap means that it will remain inaccessible to the majority of its potential readership within the Highlands, far less beyond.

RECOGNITION is always rewarding, and the winning of the UK Broadband Challenge Award for the HI-Arts web site, accepted on behalf of the team by Fiona Fisher and Ken Porter in London last month, has been a source of great satisfaction in the HI-Arts camp.

LAST YEAR, in the middle of the InvernessHighland 2008 bid, one of the Highland’s major arts festival quietly died. The Northlands Festival had survived for well over a decade in Caithness, but eventually collapsed over the issue of funding.

THE FOCUS SHIFTS from Celtic music to jazz on the festival circuit this month, with the annual Nairn Jazz Festival kicking off in the first weekend of August. Ken Ramage, the founder and director of this successful festival (and the subject of our July ‘Artsfolk’ feature), swears that next year will be his last in charge.

THE ENCOURAGING RESPONSE we have received to the launch of this Arts Journal has been very gratifying, but this is only a start. Our aim is to build the site into the first-stop forum for news, views and discussion on the arts in the Highlands and Islands, and that requires the participation of not only the artistic community, but all of you who visit and use the site.

A WARM WELCOME to HI-Arts’ new internet Arts Journal. Plans to launch a web-based journal covering arts and culture in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland have been maturing for some time, and come to fruition this month with our launch “issue”.