The Stream Flows On With Janet Henderson

Janet Henderson is at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Saturday 14 November, reading from her first collection, Still Swimming, and singing songs by her father, Hamish Henderson, alongside her own compositions. It's an informal afternoon session that sits within the Carrying Stream Festival, which grew out of the Edinburgh Folk Club and celebrates the organic route by which music, song, spoken word and culture are passed from person to person and from generation to generation.

The afternoon honours Hamish Henderson, the great Scottish folklorist, songwriter and activist, who experienced poetry, storytelling, music and song as an eternally life-affirming flow of creative energy. Janet, his younger daughter, was encouraged by him to write poetry as a teenager, though she then took a fifteen-year sabbatical working as a lawyer in London before moving to Provence in 2003. Since 2016 she has written lyrical meditations infused with the energies of nature, returned to poetry in 2020 and published Still Swimming in 2021. In 2025 she began turning those poems into songs and is looking to record an album in 2027.

After the performance, the audience is invited upstairs to the Storytelling Court for a book signing and conversation. The session runs for two hours, starting at 3pm in the Netherbow Theatre, 43-45 High St, Edinburgh EH1 1SR. Tickets are free but required, with a handling fee of £1.25 per ticket, capped at four per person.