Rowan

As a playwright, poet and theatre-maker, Rowan is inspired by the manifestations and metaphors of horror and science fiction. Their work uses humour and the unexpected to explore themes of childhood, gender, class and transformation.

werewolfmy eyes hole-punched
scrap-paper mouth gasping
let the moonlight inlet light flood fast as air, clear as breath, make milk-pools in the grain of my skinlet it coat me, sear me, let it make me with the pearl soul of a wild thinghowling, let me be the moon burning, a body brimming, light beatingsoft in ribbons, light of the second flank of Earthbitinginto shambles of purple leaves, waiting at the edges of water, lightlessand lulling, summer dark humming and clicking, white flowers turnednight-blue I move to whistles and flitting wings, a curlew silhouetted by starsand dragged, snared between grey pebble teeth and smashed grassadjudicate this sickness like the rest, there is sickness in the restthe turning just to sleep, all peace and bones, while daylight is a violent deedan upright thingI roll back when the sky slits open, horizons bend to glassy bows: daybreaka silver storm of photons, forepaws former palms formfists, grasp husks of canines crushed like seashells, fur peelsmy eyes drown, earthbound, forever skinned in moonbeamsbalanced on sprigs, a bird sings in hoops of steam, beak wideas if to eat the sun.

Eyeshadow PaletteLICORICE
MARZIPAN
MEPHISTOPHELESPOND NYMPH
SORBET
SWALLOWED BIRDALOPECIA
PENNY MIXTURE
ARTEMESIAPILLOW TALK
MISTER SPOCK
RICH KID
VIPERBODYBAG
MONOLITH
NOSEJOB
CHUNDEREGGPLANT
CALORIE
GHOST TRAIN
HPV
CHOCOLATE CHIP
ANGEL WINGS
CRYSTAL
CUPID
CHOKESKIN-GRAFT
DRESSED IN THE DARK
PUBLICLY BETROTHEDPOSTAGE STAMP
THIRST-TRAP
BLOCKCHAIN
ROSE

DOG SHAME FIGHTwhen you pick something up
when you pick anything up:
fruit flies, and moths on the doorframes
and bluebottles and carpet beetles
you can’t walk barefoot in the kitchen because of crumbs and grounds and pepper seeds
the washing machine today has flipped the fuse three times
you just want clean clothes and
it flips
the inside of the fridge goes dark
you can’t waste any food
manager at your second job still hasn’t sent you time sheets, contracts, forms for travel expenses
what’s the difference between eruption and rupture, one is the earth and
one is a person
dropping the ice cube tray feels like throwing a fistful of rocks
poured too much soy sauce on your rice, it comes out so fast
slammed a wet glass down
slammed a door
the wind drags through the flat
and you don’t have an eating disorder but your hands are shaking
there isn’t enough desk space for poems
there isn’t enough brain space for POEMS
phone keeps pinging chirping buzzing and
it flips
missed calls from unknown numbers and known numbers
the sofa is sinking in the middle and your hip hurts
you email letting agency for the third time about the black mould
automated reply “I am no longer working at Tay Letting”
you email letting agency for the fourth time about the black mould
the neighbours footsteps make your desk chair rumble like a hungry stomach
it’s too hot
the traffic keeps sighing
and breathing all day, the gulls cry
I’ll cry if I have to spend the rest of my life doing dishes
something rattles, something roars, something spits
but you can’t
you’re too controlled
managers at your first job want to increase capacity
motorbike shrieks feel like toothache or a haemorrhage
other people are allowed to lose control but you’re not
devices beep when they connect and beep when they disconnect
you don’t want them to talk
you keep walking into things that make noise
you block porn bots
your face is breaking out and burning
there’s no room for me here
there’s no room for me here but I pay rent
there’s no room for me here but I pay rent
there’s no room for me here someone else owns the rooms
and the room and the white goods
I can’t drive
I’ll never learn because I don’t know what I’d do
I’ll never learn because a car is an expensive self-harm machine
if another person asks me what my plans are
if another person asks me what I’m doing I’ll get my hands on a seabird
empty it’s blood onto my face and say
“I’m getting a vegan sausage roll”

My Counsellor Said ‘Trauma Is Not What Happens To Us But What We Hold Inside In The Absence Of An Empathetic Witness’the fireplace is electric
and a palace for plastic animals
brought down from my bedroom in a plastic bag
everything small, everything alive
talking to myselfthe voices run out of room afraid to eat
someone else’s breath
some children breathe backwards
like ferns
alone in steaming bathwater like salamanders
the home is a vampire, roofless
a deadbeat full of stars
with the brightest and bruised at the heart of the ceiling
aflame in a halo of Smirnoff glass
unfortunatelysometimes two blazing eyes
sometimes dark cinder spots
sometimes looking awayinjuries glide like scissors and shift
and stick the body
into a collage
it does not qualify as repairan adult can be an adult or
a hundred ghosts of a child

PathologyThe camera takes her
as if she were a river,
legs downstream.
The slick crown of her skull and slackened chest
are the forefront of the frame,
cold and dewy and pale. Soaked flowers
in her patterned dress are drowned
in the bathtub of pink-hued water.
Before, at the party,
her body had been wrapped in seashell green, iridescent
as a snake.
Dress her up to put her out, dress her up to put her away, I think,
while men crowd around her floral shroud
forming a well-mapped city of black and beige and blue.
Afterwards, outside,
they are whimpering bruises in the dark.(The female vapourer moth gives up feeding; her body swells.
She gives up flight to lay several hundred eggs. You get up to make coffee.)
“It’s the women, always the women,” one man says,
“It’s what they do to us.”
Monday night programming; we are still the guilt of all humanity.
You cannot be free when you must tend to an omnipresent wound,
and she is soft and empty and dead in the water and we are all hiding the face of death
beneath our masks. We are the void, devoid, dealt out in your thoughts,
decaying always to be soft, soft.
My body swells.
Men were always concrete and women were always wild, but nature is full of bones.

Currently in development, 'WRAPPERS' is an eerie and comical semi-autobiographical play. Featuring three generations and a clown, the play investigates how we relate to food when our bodies turn against us.

"Of course I’m obsessed with my body, every time I look away it changes."

Shortlisted for 2024's The David MacLennan Award, a short excerpt of 'WRAPPERS' was first performed solo as part of Summerhall Surgeries during Edinburgh Fringe, 2023.

Feedback for 'WRAPPERS' at Summerhall Surgeries:

"I enjoyed the quick shifts between poetic text and clownish moments. Excellent piece."

"The truth was captivating - great sense of place and time. There was universality (Channel 4, pot noodles) that made it easy to empathise."

"... an honest and stark depiction of that shame that gets instilled in us all. A gorgeous and brutal telling of what failure feels like spoken aloud."

"The writing is so good. The details are gorgeous - laughs to relate to and sometimes painful poetry!"

'Counterparts' is a short play, and an angry, unemployed comedy about class and belonging that preys on the closely-held notion of "positive representation."

"Well, they can have a go. But there isn’t a living in it for everyone. It’s not sturdy enough. It’s flaky. It’s collapsing in on itself."

Currently in development, 'Counterparts' featured as part of Under The Rug Theatre's third scratch night, Cuttin' A Rug 3, at The Old Hairdressers in Glasgow, and was performed by Kirsty-May Hamilton (Kate) and Rowan Heggie (Catherine).

Excerpt of 'MY ASEXUALITY IS'

There’s this word I said sitting opposite her, the therapist – I said it once, there was no occasion to use it again because it was nothing, it withered, invisible, in the dry air of her office, doesn’t it always? Asexual has this habit of dying blistered when it is perceived by someone else.And yet, asexual is unsinkable; unsinkable like a soft, amphibious creature living so far undetected somewhere in the rainforest, with a secret history of feeding and evolving and touching the rest of its ecosystem, asexual has molecules intimate with the cosmos. If you can’t find it, is it not there? A physics disorder, of disordered science............Depression is a point in the process of grief, as well as an arena in which to grieve. When I am grieving, asexual feels like the coffin. Asexual feels like a planet with an unbreathable atmosphere, too risky for others to visit or even believe in. We are the stuff of science fiction, the robots and the extraterrestrials. Asexual is the space suit and people say, take off your helmet, isn’t it lonely in there?
Why are they obsessed with our apparent loneliness, and not our safety? Our isolation is viewed in terms of other people’s hearts and bodies and not in the critical way we are severed from ourselves.And this feels like living inside a host that has rejected me, a body with prescribed meaning that doesn’t fit. It’s a trick, a trap, a light show projected out from slashes in a screen like horror movie titles. The Thing. A parasite. I know how I am looked at, and how my body is stolen from me in the street, in coffee shops, in TV shows and films, relentlessly, in advertisements forever and I tell myself I am a hologram because I want it to be true, so I cannot be chewed up. In my depression I think, it’s not me anyone was attracted to, it’s a sexual fiction, and I have felt like a photograph, just a colourful shadow, a shimmer, a disorder of physics. I am a hologram. I am a hologram.

'FUCK: A Health Monologue'Holding a physical form requires constant, unrelenting maintenance. I was keeping a record of how many glasses of water I was drinking a day, and the most I could manage was five. I don’t have time, and I’m always pissing. Every half hour I’ve got to stop what I’m doing and go to the bathroom or sit in discomfort at work or on a bus, or waking up at 5am with an aching bladder. It’s much easier not to drink, it’s much easier to always be on the brink of dehydration. And food, food is just as much of a joke; buying food, cooking food, choosing food, using it before it wastes, and masticating and pushing pulp to the back of my throat is so repulsive, and having all these invisible processes inside and not knowing which ones are going right... I don’t know, you give your body all this stuff and it doesn’t know what to do with it and throws it away or turns it into cancer.This isn’t just a case of saying, okay, “I’m sick.” This has always been my worst fear, that’s what I’m facing. I’m up against something that someone else gave me with a terrifying expiration date: use it before it wastes. My body has conspired to kill me ten, fifteen years early. It’s just... why am I being wrecked from the inside, why the fuck! People get sick, I know this! But what am I gonna do? It’s just been getting worse and worse for months, the shaking, I can’t control my hands. I’ll get dizzy again and, probably I need to eat but I’m scared to, it just makes me feel nauseous, it’ll give me cramps in an hour. Maybe nothing’s moving in there. Maybe I’ve gone still.I know my nerves are eating themselves. The first doctor I saw could see how upset I was, I said, “it comes and goes” and she said “what do you think it is?” because I wouldn’t stop crying. I didn’t tell her that every time my arm tingles and I get weak I work myself into a panic because I can think of nothing else but I’m having a stroke and I won’t be able to use my phone or speak to call an ambulance. I can’t say, “I know what’s going to happen, I’m going to die on my bathroom floor and I don’t know when anyone will find me.” I say to the doctor, between quick breaths, “I don’t know, I just feel terrible.” She says it sounds like I’m thinking about it too much. Does that make you sick? Thinking about it too much? Remembering all the tubes inside that can clot or twist at any moment. Living inside my own body, and knowing it, what a fucking nightmare. This is the worst way to exist.Anyway she says, come back if it gets worse. They always say that. They always say that when I get ‘hysterical.’ Of course I’m concerned about my health, what else do I have? If this body has a big time fuck up then where will I go? Catch it early. Sending me away as if this is normal and I’ll calm down on my own, stop having panic attacks when it feels like the skin on my face is full of moths. I hope it’s serious just to spite you.I went back and the other doctor said, “it could be a vitamin D deficiency, or the early signs of MS.” Why is everything in my life zero or a-fucking-hundred? That one was on my list, next to diabetes, my brain tumour, the bowel cancer, below IBS, endometriosis, some kind of rare blood virus after finding those wide-set bite marks on my inner elbow. That patch of meat over my right shoulder blade that went numb about six months ago. Couple of weeks ago I thought, I’m gonna die of compact faeces, like a neglected rabbit, like Elvis Presley, I’m gonna die.The shaking has been really bad today, in my fingers and my wrists and legs. I try to clutch a pen and my muscles can’t even keep steady. I can’t stop thinking. There are thick, candycane-striped bundles of nerves in our shoulders and in ten years the slimy coatings on mine will have quivered and disintegrated... Happy Holidays.

ANNIE IS A COLLECTION OF CRIMES THAT HAVEN’T HAPPENED YET ANNIE IS A SIXTH SENSE ANNIE IS THE HARBINGER ANNIE IS UPSKIRTED IN STARBUCKS ANNIE IS SENT THROUGH EMAIL ANNIE IS EATEN BY CARPET BEETLES ANNIE IS TAKEN APART AND TAKEN THROUGH ANNIE IS A HOMEOWNER ANNIE IS TOLD TO OPEN ANNIE IS TOO OPEN ANNIE IS BREAKING AND ENTERING ANNIE IS OUT OF BOUNDS ANNIE IS AN ENGINE ANNIE IS THE BURNT REMAINS OF AN ECTOPIC PREGNANCY ANNIE IS A PILL TWO TIMES A DAY ANNIE IS FRIGID ANNIE IS MISSING ANNIE IS A CYCLE LIKE THE MOON ANNIE IS A HEART MURMUR ANNIE IS FORGETFUL ANNIE IS A FUGITIVE ANNIE IS BROKEN GLASS ANNIE IS BEHIND THE MICROPHONE ANNIE IS A PORNOGRAPHIC MOVIE STAR LIKE ALL WOMEN ARE

'Home Body' is a short story written for the spooky season.
Produced and aired by the Persistent & Nasty podcast, and performed by Amelia Donkor.

"I’ve been stitching ghost stories again, embellishing something that is just natural and has always been done. Children changing into adults. Eventually I sleep, thinking in half-consciousness that children are two-dimensional, cartoons, and that it is a freakish and impossible transformation, turning into a complex organism."

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Random Clown Generator, May 2023
Participatory clown performance for Generator Project's Joy Parade; a playful invitation to explore the joy and magic of the clown itself.

Rory & Julie, 2022 and 2023
Rehearsed readings and development of new comedy written by Luis Alçada. Excerpt performed as part of Icebreaker Comedy Scratch Night, Dundee Fringe 2022. A later performance of the full script-in-hand reading took place at Dock Street Studios, Dundee, March 2023.

Hysteria, September 2022
Research and Development with Vivid Roots Collective. A week of collaborating, devising and writing in response to the theme of Hysteria and gender bias in medicine, with creative direction from Keira Smith.

"I wish this weight could wander
I wish it could roam
go to sleep
build a nest for itself
hibernate behind my lungs
or underground
I wish it could wander
I wish for teeth
but offered instead
lip fillers and hymen reconstruction surgery
packing peanuts
sawdust"
- text written in response to research themes and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

DROP THIS, June 2022
Clown performance for Shaper/Caper's Fail Safe, an evening of short presentations celebrating failure, rejection, and being brave enough to give it a go.

Songs for Work, April 2022
Gallery performance devised, written and performed with Beth Dynowski, Dan Cox, and Saoirse Amira Anis.

The Golden Ratio
Devised and performed with Eve Thompson and Ashlyn Bourelle, 2021. Performed live online alongside filmed sequences.

Congregation of The Innocent
Slides from a presentation performed live online; a kitch "seminar" featuring fictional cult representatives. 2021.

Performance of 'MY ASEXUALITY IS', written for 2019's UK Asexuality Conference.
Shown below are prints featuring text from the work, placed on conference chairs before attendees arrived.

A newly edited version of the work was performed with The Queer Dot collective at Generator Projects, Dundee, in 2019.

Script reading, Suffer The Workers? - Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2019.
This event coincided with Ceremony, an exhibition of work by Phil Collins exploring the legacy of Friedrich Engels, in collaboration with SCRIEVE, a playwrighting scratch night.

Rowan has over 10 years of experience in workshop design and delivery across drama, improvisation, devising theatre, science communication and health education. Their most recent work has been in drama facilitation and devising theatre with young people. Through drama and theatre-making with young people, Rowan’s facilitation celebrates the individuals in the room and makes a place for play, connection, creativity and political exploration.

( section under construction! )

• Young Quines / Younger Quines
• Perth Youth Theatre
• Theatre Insights

Improvisation and clowning workshop held at Generator Projects, Dundee, as part of their Summer School Programme, September 2022.

Workshop sessions researched, developed and delivered collaboratively for Dundee & Angus College Period Positive Programme.

Rowan's mixed-media work includes collage, sculpture and vast quantities of glitter in a genre they describe as "passive-aggressive."Their traditional drawings are alive with the strangeness of organic shapes. They illustrate and collaborate for Forest Secrets - an interactive folklore expedition on Patreon.

A pastel picket fence celebrates the birth of the queer self. Two hearts meet where gender and body horror coexist in a spiral. A small felt monster speaks with it's teeth.Pieces of this collection featured in Dundee Contemporary Art's Echo event in 2018, corresponding with their Shonky exhibition.

The ACE RAGE collection reflects a journey towards re-making: re-making childhood, re-making gender, re-making mess. Embracing the unpolished, the joyful, the amateur, and the hand-made. This collection is for the queer folks who are hand-made, as we are frequently forced to uncover and shape parts of our identities that out families or communities try to conceal.There remains a sense of the obsessive and the meticulous - rows of sequins individually threaded, thin strips of plastic glued down one by one. But there are exposed seams and rough edges, glistening layers of peeling glitter glue like dried slime, plastic eyelashes and spilled wax. At it's heart ACE RAGE is passive-aggressive.