In a newspaper article in May 1938, readers were informed of a new community being born in the outer Hebrides, on Iona.
The response to the article was swift and plentiful with over 1,000 requests for more information. In October of the same year, Rev George MacLeod launched “The Coracle”: a magazine which would carry messages to the mainland, just as the small boat of the same name carried news in the days of St Columba.
In October 1938, the first pamphlet of Iona Community news set sail into the world. While the frequency of the magazine has varied, it has been produced every year since that first edition under the watchful eye of 7 editors. You can download the first edition of The Coracle from our archive.
Kathy Galloway, former leader of the Iona Community, pays tribute to Neil Paynter as he retires as editor of our magazine: the Coracle.
“If I was asked ‘who is the expert on the Iona Community?’, I might be very inclined to answer, ‘Neil Paynter’, who is stepping down as Coracle editor after seventeen years.
Many of us know Neil as a book editor for Wild Goose Publications. We have learned to be profoundly grateful for his meticulous care of our precious literary offspring, and his dedication to midwifing them into the world in the best possible health.
Neil has brought these same qualities of attentiveness and intuition, and his own passion, to the task of interpreting and presenting the whole Iona Community to a wider world, and, not least, to ourselves. Through news, views and reviews, through calls to action and words for contemplation, through prayers and poems and images and stories, Neil has brought us the life of our Community in its complexity, imperfections and moments of high (and low) humour. He has also brought us the best of ourselves: our aspirations, our dreams and visions, and the people and places that inspire us, sometimes in articles that will resonate with us for the rest of our lives.
He has truly made Coracle a source of courage, faith and cheerfulness to members and friends across the world.
Reading through Coracles from early in Neil’s editorship, I came across a great article by Erik Cramb, called ‘Always the object of the story’, and it reminded me of words from a poem triptych by Tom Leonard:
for those of us who have to live outside the narrative…
that each one become the subject of their own narration
as to become verb
This is what you have done, Neil. Thank you.”
USA North East