ABOUT US

The Pen Mag is run by a crew only occasionally described as motley. 

Ruth Wishart is a journalist and broadcaster who pens columns for a variety of publications and looks after all the editorial content, writing some of the regular features and commissioning others.

 

Rona Grierson is her  principal partner in crime. Rona looks after all the advertising and What’s On entries. If you’re up to good or no good she’ll know about it. A former senior executive with various charities and businesses, she keeps the commercial show on the road.

 

Daryl Youden looks after our finances, billing commercial advertisers and paying invoices. She felt obliged to take on this task having grasped how innumerate the editor was. In real life she works for Ensign Design.

 

Roo Irvine is our antiques guru whose column is informed by her work on Bargain Hunt, Antiques Road Trip and Flipping profit as well as appearances on Celebrity Pointless and Mastermind. She owns and runs Kilcreggan Antiques, which is a positive Aladdin’s cave.

 

Jeanne Brady is our bibliophile who keeps our reading up to date with her Author of the Month slot.  A long time resident who originally hailed from the States, she has introduced readers to a wide range of international writers.

 

Stephen Adam was a cellist with Scottish Opera and his Bottled Pleasures column, giving us the low down on good wines, is usually interspersed with laugh out loud tales from his life on the musical road.

 

Liz Mathie  is our horticultural guru. Though, as she prefers to put it: “having had no formal training she hopes that years spent trying to tame her wild, hillside garden makes her monthly musings mildly helpful” They are! And she’s actually a positive fount of green fingered knowledge.

 

Wells Grogan is the current Commodore of Cove Sailing Club and during the season gives us all the chat about life on the Loch Long waves in the whole variety of crafts now part of the CSC sailing portfolio.

 

Christine Murdoch is one of the local ministers whose monthly musings not infrequently use some song lyrics as a peg for her thoughts. (Just as well because we don’t pay a penny for them.)  We suspect the fact that her man is a choir master is not unrelated to her extensive back catalogue.

 

Marion Hobbs has been press ganged into running our "supporters club" on the grounds that she knows her way round a spreadsheet better than anyone we know.
If folks agree to send a tenner to help keep the Pen Mag show on the road, Marion will give them our bank details, log their donation, and make sure they get to hear about the next issue.

 

Sadly our online crossword is not prize bearing any more, but we continue to feature one because we were  frightened the puzzles lobby might turn nasty.

Occasional features include the Village Voice  slot which provides a platform for anyone needing to get something off their chest,  and Peninsula Profile which highlights some of the more interesting human additions to our local community, as well as long time residents with fascinating lives.

Graeme Provan, our Pen Mag designer,  who runs the Orange Revamp graphic design company, has been with the operation ever since its early print days. He has been an invaluable source of help and advice and manages to stay patient even when the editorial team display a quite extraordinary inability to grasp the basics of online publishing.

 

These then are the main elements of the monthly Pen Mag. But the most important one is you, the readership. Without you, the rest of the operation. wouldn’t have much of a point!

And we’re always happy to include your contributions whether you want to write about your organisation, or just send us details of where it’s happening and when.

Enjoy your community Mag.