Horatio Clare is a writer and broadcaster whose books include the Somerset Maugham Award-winning memoir Running for the Hills, the travel and nature book  A Single Swallow, the children’s novel Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, and Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year, Down to the Sea in Ships. Clare has also contributed to Seren Press’s ‘New Stories from the Mabinogion’ series, for which Welsh writers such as Cynan Jones and Gwyneth Lewis were invited to retell a story from the medieval Welsh classic. Clare wrote The Prince’s Pen, based on the myth of ‘Lludd and Llevelys’. His most recent publication is Orison for a Curlew, published by Little Toller Books and illustrated by Beatrice Forshall, in which Clare travels in search of the Slender-billed curlew, a bird thought by many to be extinct. In conversation with The Clearing’s Luke Thompson, Horatio Clare talks about his Orison, migration, birds, people and responsibility.

Luke Thompson: Perhaps you could start by telling me something about the title, Orison for a Curlew.

Horatio Clare: I thought of the project as an elegy at first, and termed it so in early versions, but on the journey it became obvious that was wrong – the bird is not yet dead, and definitely not buried. I like orison and I have only read it in Owen’s Anthem which seems an under use of a beautiful word. The sense is much better – this is a prayer for the slender-billed curlew, not an obit. The themes of the prayer are mystery, change, loss, but also adventure, commitment, and our powers to make changes for the world’s good. Its real heroes are conservationists.

LT: Yes, you have both heroes and villains here, and I’d quite like to pursue that a moment. You record your friend Yannis Tsougrakis saying, ‘We are in a time when everything starts from man’. It’s that ‘everything’ that strikes me. Because we are talking about the destruction of habitats, but another theme – a theme I think is present in much of your work – is that of ‘hope’.

HC: I am congenitally hopeful, except in the blues when hopeless, and perhaps, heaven forfend, more realistic. The birds have changed things. Their very rarity, their possibility, underscores and helps reserves for other species, and many visitors. And if the news sometimes makes these seem like the end of days they are also times of great tides of hope. All those human migrants, who come into Europe just where the bird was – the furiously hopeful of the earth. The many heroes in the book were more downbeat than expectant, but that comes with conservation.

LT: You’ve touched on two themes there which I wanted to ask you about, both of them to do with the political backdrop to Orison. One of these is the role of the EU in conservation, which is brought up a couple of times, most notably when you were in Bulgaria.

HC: The EU and international bodies like Birdlife International and the RSPB have been a vital source of inspiration, aid and funding to the east. Environmental relationships like the one between the EU, the RSPB and its Bulgarian sister have been an unalloyed force for good. Wild species, the environment and humans have all benefitted. To talk to Bulgarian, Hungarian and Romanian environmentalists is to realise that the hopes of the founders of the European Union, the hopes of all of us who live within it, are still alive. The EU is not a dream, it is an expression of what is best in all of us: our similarities are greater than our differences; the Earth is more than a resource; all living things are important. The narratives of many human lives, like those of migrating birds, are voyages of exploration and return. Our challenge is to make the second half of that journey possible by working with the countries of the east, so that their migrants will be able to complete their journeys, rather than being forced to cling on wherever they are able to find handholds in the west. EU environmental projects should be the beginning of transnational cooperation towards a better world, not the end.

LT: That prompts the second theme I wanted to ask you about – human migration. Orison is more than a prayer for the curlew, isn’t it?

HC: Yes. Since writing A Single Swallow in 2008, which followed the birds’ journey from South Africa back to Britain, I have seen migration in the natural and human worlds as halves of one whole. We all move for the same reasons – for food or goods, out of curiosity, to find mates, to find our places in the ecosystem, to build, to breed and raise young. In the human world it strikes me as an abomination that capital is free to move wherever it might increase, while the vast majority of the earth’s people are not free, are restrained by their own or other governments, are hemmed in by regulations and fences. I loathe passports, flags and fences; I detest tribalism. Nationality is an accident which should be a choice; patriotism the festishisation of happenstance. It is great to love a country, but to be unable to love the world more takes blindness, willed or suffered. Border fences, as the great Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh put it, are our greatest mistake. They must end, he said, they will have to, one day. While Orison celebrates cooperation across borders, and the crossing of borders, it is also the story of a world run through by fences. We know they do not really work, that they all fall in time, and that their propagation is the first sign of a scoundrel regime. The tide of migration we are seeing now can either be taken as a great threat, and a signal of a failing world, or it can be seen as an extraordinary upsurge of courage and initiative, which has caused a reciprocal wave of charity, compassion and practical idealism.

LT: Yes, I had wondered about the connection between Orison and A Single Swallow. Could you say something about why you wanted to return to the theme, and how Orison develops those earlier ideas?

HC: It comes from childhood. The first wish I remember making was for wings. A Single Swallow came from the simple desire to know where the skyroads lead, to follow the birds, to glimpse a world to which they, not humans, were central. And of course there was a trick in it, because I wanted to write about borders, and human migration, and paradoxical as it may seem, people seemed more interested in the story of migrating birds than in the story of migrating people. This may be changing. Orison was a development in that there was never any realistic chance I would see the bird: the story had to be about what was known of it, and the people and places it connected. If there was a message in Swallow it was that there is a single road that runs from your front door to the tip of the Cape Agulhas in South Africa and every ordinary person who lives along it is your neighbour: I proved this by throwing myself on the mercy of a lot of them. Swallows live and travel in one country, not thirty.

I did not know what the slender-billed curlew would have to tell the world when I began to work on the book, and the book is by no means definitive – the very opposite, being mostly questions. But the bird’s story does seem to raise an unexpected hope. As the planet heaves under our weight, and human-built frontiers crack and crumble, and the news simmers with transnational evils, from terror to pollution, there also rises a post-national goodness, a new kind of internationalism, a determination to do, to help people and planet, and this drive has a wonderful disrespect for frontiers, passports and dogmas. (Our town was flooded over Christmas. Secular, Muslim, Sikh and Jewish groups, individuals and groups from this country and abroad, turned up to help. No one had asked or directed them. They just appeared.) There is no orison for benevolence in the book; kinder times, perhaps, but one good thing about our record-breaking population is that there are an unprecedented number of kind people alive right now.

LT: And there is more of the human story in the sense of responsibility and activism that runs through Orison. I made a note of Petar Iankov saying of the birds, ‘I am given consciousness, something they do not have; they are not responsible for me but I am responsible for them.’

HC: You can pay the strong no higher compliment than to say that they are friends to the meek. Environmentalists are up there with saints, in my book. The conservationists I met were distinguished by their kindness, their determination, and a kind of fierce happiness. They all refuse to be bowed by circumstance, they set their eyes on higher prizes than money, they serve a higher calling. The recipe for happiness is service – you see it everywhere. This was the wonder of the journey: as monks pray for non-believers in the dark watches of the night, so quiet men and women work for causes obscure and mighty, lost and not lost, with the same care and dedication, while so much of the world marches blithely, greedily, towards destruction.

LT: ‘The recipe for happiness is service’ – I wonder whether you might spell out your own sense of responsibility and service. For instance, what are you serving, and how?

HC: Too little: I think this explains an underlying unhappiness! Teaching is service, and I do quite a bit of that. My books are intended to serve. I hope Orison does not disserve the slender-billed curlew. My children’s book, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, is intended to help people, and I have had some lovely responses to it; Down to the Sea in Ships seems to have had a good effect in that it has made readers aware of a hidden world upon which we all rely. Writing feels such an indulgent, peripheral, hopeless activity much of the time, but if a book chooses you to write it all you can do is be grateful and get on with it. It comes out, hits and misses, you feel wonderful and terrible by turns, but then, either way, letters and messages arrive. And somehow you have served people you will never meet; maybe not millions of them, but to give something to someone, somewhere, is extraordinary. I am not the only writer who feels guilty for not writing more and not writing better, and we are notoriously narcissistic and insecure, but it’s a sense of responsibility of a kind, isn’t it?

LT: And did you approach the question of the slender-billed curlew with this dual narrative in mind – I mean, the story of human responsibility in conservation and of human/animal migration? I’m asking, I suppose, how political your initial intentions were?

HC: I have learned that there is no point approaching subjects from a political position: your job is to put the subject first and see what it has to say. Clearly the disappearance of the bird meant something for us all. And the cause seemed obvious – changing land use, depletion of water, draining of wetlands – but you never know what the truth will turn out to be until you pitch up, ask questions and write down what you find. The message of hope was completely unexpected and organic.

LT: Perhaps we could talk more generally, too, about travel and the practice of travel writing. It permeates even your children’s book, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot. There’s that moment when the whole world opens up and Aubrey and his father are able to see everything, everywhere. 

HC: I often suffer from small, mean, panicked thoughts, to which a joyful vision of the wider world is an antidote. If I have a gift it is to celebrate the wonder and beauty of places and people, the richness of the world’s days, its variety and the great gentleness of its true scale. We are constantly being told the world is small, and made to feel that it is shrinking to a muchness, because that suits sellers and rulers. But it is not so, and it is part of the travel writer’s job to hymn its diversity and detail.

LT: I also wondered about how you wrote. With such an active schedule, there can’t be a huge amount of time to write up. It made me wonder how different the discipline was for travel writers. For instance, do you draft and develop as you go, or do you write brief notes and sketches then develop them when you return?

HC: I write a tremendous amount of longhand, notes and narrative, as I go. I take down ten times more than I use, and that is the first draft. The second, third and nth go into the poor laptop, which is missing two keys.

LT: With your optimism in mind, maybe I will dare to end with this question – I don’t think it’s a spoiler: How confident are you that the slender-billed curlew is still alive?

HC: There were too many unconfirmed sightings during the last push for a confirmed sighting for the bird to be quite gone. I believe there is a remnant population, but whether they are still able to breed is another question.

Melissa Harrison’s new novel At Hawthorn Time is out now, published by Bloomsbury. Her first novel, Clay (Bloomsbury, 2013), won the Portsmouth First Fiction award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year. Ben Smith speaks to her about her recent shift in focus from the city to the country, as well as the role of walking, photography and politics in her work.

Your first novel, Clay, has been described as an ‘urban pastoral’, and your new novel, At Hawthorn Time, has been called a ‘modern pastoral’. What does the term ‘pastoral’ mean to you?

It’s interesting that the term has been used about both my books; it seems to indicate a need to fix them in a tradition; to say, here is a new practitioner of a certain form. Clay was also called a ‘nature novel’ (in The Guardian, I think). The qualifier seems to suggest that there is some difficulty about how to define them.

Since writing both books I’ve come to see that perhaps they’re unconventional because they don’t focus on exclusively human concerns. When you make the world of a novel larger, by including non-human lives and concerns, it risks making the people in it seem slightly smaller. I don’t mind that; I think that given all our depredations we’re long overdue a bit of a demotion – and moreover, I find the world beyond humans almost unimaginably rich and interesting. A big factor in my enjoyment of nature is the refreshing feeling that I am part of a large cast of creatures, rather than always in the lead role.

Fiction can certainly be a powerful tool for changing perspectives, and I think it’s healthy to question the anthropocentrism that has led us where we are. But I didn’t write either book with any conscious intention to add to a tradition, either of pastoral, or the broad genre – if it is one – called ‘nature writing’. In fact, I’ve learned that for me it’s important not to try to force a work into any particular form or genre, despite how much I want to. The more I try to control what I write, the less successful it is – which is deeply chastening, and at times painful for someone like me: a planner and list-maker by nature. Writing is, I have found, a process of learning to sit with the discomfort of not knowing what I am producing, or whether it will be any good, and keep going anyway.

Is your writing process affected by the particular landscape that you are writing about? What were the differences between writing about the urban landscapes of Clay and the farms, fields and villages of At Hawthorn Time?

There was no difference in process for me. Both books are about landscapes I know well, though when I was writing Clay I was living in the place I was inspired by and seeing it daily, whereas writing At Hawthorn Time meant drawing more on memory – although I did visit the village on which I based Lodeshill several times during those two years.

As well as place, at the start of a project one of the most important decisions I have to make is what time of year it is set; I’m not sure I could write anything, no matter how short, without knowing the season as it affects so fundamentally the landscape, the botany, the birdsong ­– the entire world in which the piece will take place. It can be harder to write about a season I’m not in than about a place I’m not in, so sometimes that affects my decision; with Clay, which takes place over the course of a year, I drew on detailed daily notes I had made about what the natural world around me was doing through the seasons. At Hawthorn Time takes place in one spring month, which meant making notes during that time of year, and taking photographs, so I could draw on them even in midwinter. I went on a four-day walk up the A5 as research for Jack’s pilgrimage and waited until April to do it; afterwards, I revisited the sections about his walk to bring in everything I had learned.

So, is it important for you to spend time in the landscapes you are writing about?

I’d find it challenging to write about a landscape I didn’t know intimately, I think. It’s not just the worry that I’d get something wrong; far more importantly, I wouldn’t feel the pull of it, the thisness of it. I need to care about a place, I need to be able to draw on my feeling for it for all those long hours at my desk. Facts aren’t enough.

The one location in At Hawthorn Time I didn’t know well was the places just north of London that Jack passes through on his trek north – which is why I did the solo walk I’ve just mentioned. I’ve already written about this walk here and here so I’m loath to repeat myself and bore your readers, but suffice to say that while it didn’t turn out as I expected, it was really valuable to get out and engage with that part of the country, despite (or perhaps because of) how hard it was to walk in, and how psychologically challenging the trip was.

Both your novels deal with the ways in which different places affect people’s psychologies. Is this something that you’ve experienced yourself?

Human psychology is such a huge subject that I’m not sure I know how to answer! Our state of mind is informed by so many things, from the kinds of attachments we were able to form as children, to our education, our health, our beliefs, our life circumstances, our stress levels… because of that, I think it would be facile to suggest that particular landscapes affect our psychological make-up in any kind of general way; there are just too many variables. Some people get a great deal of joy out of living somewhere rural; others, like Howard, will barely notice it, or may even find the countryside oppressive and instead flourish in towns. And of course the effects of place on each of us may change with time, too.

It’s my belief that having a regular, positive experience of the natural world can benefit most of us, both physically and mentally, but that can be achieved in all sorts of landscapes – including cities.

In the character of Jack, you present us with someone who has chosen a life on foot. How important is walking for you (as an individual and as a writer)? Does it influence your writing process? Do you carry a notebook when you go out walking?

Walking is enormously important to me, whether it’s taking my dog out before bed each night, climbing Helvellyn or hiking on Dartmoor with my husband, or going out alone to hear nightingales or watch the dawn rise. You can’t connect with the countryside from a car or through books; you have to get out there and put your body, your physical self, into it. Walking is a kind of thinking; it’s also a way of connecting with the past, of establishing a sense of continuity with the generations of people who have left their mark on places using their feet, their hands and their imaginations.

This year I was invited to speak at the Hay Festival, and straight after my event my husband, my dog Scout and I headed into the Black Mountains, parked at the first interesting-looking footpath sign we saw, and set out. As well as the lovely little whitewashed chapel at Capel-y-ffin – which reminded Frances Kilvert of an owl – we discovered a ruined, roofless farmstead inhabited only by sheep and entirely inaccessible by road, only a mud-thick holloway, long lost and overarched by trees, leading down from it to a ford. Places like that, redolent with history, are the reward of the walker – not to mention the birdsong, the smell of cow parsley, and the warmth of the sun on your face.

I don’t carry a notebook when I’m walking, no; I give myself up to the walk and to the moment, and try to drink in everything I can with all my senses. Some of it will be lost, but I don’t think that matters: it all counts in the end, consciously or unconsciously. I do take photos, sometimes with my DSLR but often just with my iPhone, although I use these more as prompts than accurate records. The discipline of photography teaches you how to look, and was a big part of learning how to be a writer for me.

That’s an interesting connection. Could you say a little more about how photography ties in with your writing process? Why do you find photographs more useful prompts than written notes? Are there particular photographers who have influenced the way you see (and write)?

I do make written notes about the natural world, and I note down ideas and scraps of dialogue all the time – but I don’t take a notebook with me on walks. I find it interrupts the process of the walk and the natural development of my thoughts too much, whereas snapping a photo makes barely a ripple in the flow of the journey.

It’s worth distinguishing here between iPhone snaps, which I use as prompts for memory, and the ‘proper’ photography I do with my DSLR which is something separate and an end in itself. I’m self-taught and under no illusions about how basic my skills are compared to professional photographers, but even so the process of learning to use a camera fed into my writing in two ways. The first was that, while I really wanted to do it, it didn’t matter to me half as much as writing did – which meant that there was much more ‘play’ to it. It wasn’t achingly serious, it was fun – albeit challenging fun – and I felt OK about making mistakes because it wasn’t as though my whole identity hinged on it. Having a second stream of creativity that had a totally different feel to it freed up my writing to be more playful and take more risks, I think.

The second way it contributed was the process of learning to see. Photography forces you to slow down and frame and think in a different way; and while having a compact or an iPhone to snap with is fantastic, it was the big camera with its difficult settings that really made me engage with light and shade and form and composition. I look back at my early photographs now and it’s not just as though I couldn’t use the camera properly, it’s as though I couldn’t see. That’s been really valuable.

Having said all that, there’s a lot of technically accomplished landscape and nature photography out there that leaves me utterly cold. A rocky stream on a long exposure, or a shoreline sunset with a violet filter, a moody, black and white shot of some pylons… that kind of stuff may be popular on photography websites but it usually has no feeling to it, no guiding aesthetic other than competent use of the camera’s settings. I have no time for that. Give me Tacita Dean’s dreamlike landscapes or Jane Bown’s affecting rural reportage any day.

One of the major debates running through At Hawthorn Time is the issue of what constitutes ‘real’ nature. One of the main characters, Kitty, stops painting bluebells and starts painting plastic bottles and electricity pylons. Do you agree with Kitty that this subject matter is more ‘real’? Or could her new paintings, perhaps, also be accused of a kind of romanticism?

Is romanticism necessarily a bad thing? I’m not sure. There are many different ways of thinking about the countryside, and I’m more interested in exploring them all, and looking at how they interact, than saying that one is more valid, or ‘real’, than another. To the wealthy city-dweller the countryside may be an idyll, all Agas and bunting and heritage chickens; to the farmer, a workplace in which productivity trumps aesthetics. To the psychogeographer it might be an unpeopled, liminal palimpsest ripe for decoding; to the ecologist a patchwork of biodiversity habitats. What’s interesting to me is that all of these things are true at the same time; it’s why I tend to write books with multiple viewpoints, including the non-human. I’m guessing that’s what Ali Smith meant when she said I had a “communal style”.

Kitty’s halting progress in the book is to do with letting go of the broad-brush, picture-postcard dream of the countryside she had when she lived in a city, and starting to notice what is actually around her – which isn’t always bucolic or pretty, but has its own value, and is worth bearing witness to. In doing so, she finds a way to come into her own, authentic relationship with place.

There is a moment in the novel where we suddenly get a glimpse of the effects of ash die-back. How important is it, for you, that contemporary fiction addresses these kinds of large-scale environmental and political issues?

I can only speak from my own experience; I don’t believe it’s anyone’s place to set out an agenda for other writers. Choosing to make art of any kind is tough, and requires real commitment: the results are a gift to the world, freely given. I don’t think any writer has a duty to write in a particular way.

When it comes to fiction, all writers have different concerns. Some want to change the world; some want to be successful; some want to tell a good story. I’m glad of every new voice, whether it addresses environmental concerns or not, because I believe that storytelling itself is so important in developing empathy and imagination: vital tools in living well and responsibly. Stories, I believe, are central to our ability to be good humans.

For me, it’s hard to keep my fears and hopes about the natural world out of my novels because they permeate my life; my books represent what the world looks and feels like to me. Admittedly, there is an evangelism about what I write – although I hope I don’t proselytise. It’s my experience that while some people are ready to engage with the big issues around the environment, many are turned off by issue-based narratives and campaigning literature, and it’s those people who I hope I may reach: with emotional engagement, rather than paralysing guilt. That doesn’t mean I think this approach is better than anyone else’s; the fact is, we need all sorts of voices doing all sorts of work if we are to reconnect people with the natural world. There is no single, right way of going about it.

It seems to me that hope – both for us and for our fellow species – lies in our ability to rediscover a pleasurable, deeply felt connection to nature and place, and I believe that storytelling (and, of course, getting out and walking) is a powerful tool for doing just that.

You can find out more about Melissa Harrison at www.melissaharrison.co.uk A 10” record featuring two tracks inspired by At Hawthorn Time, with an individually silk-screened and hand-stitched sleeve by artist Lucie Murtagh, is available now from www.caughtbytheriver.net.

In your essay, the ‘Poetry of Experience’, you draw attention to Robert Frost’s line ‘one had to be versed in country things/Not to believe the phoebe wept’. Referring to a species of bird related to the flycatcher family, Frost’s line indicates that only an intimate understanding of the phoebe can allow us to judge whether or not the literary representation of it is honest. How important is authenticity in nature writing and how might it feature?

My sense of the word ‘authentic’ has been influenced by an essay written by Barry Lopez, called ‘Landscape and Narrative’. He talks in it about the distinction between authentic and inauthentic stories, taking as his example a group of native people in Alaska who describe a situation involving a wolverine. Lopez told their story to another group of native people (who were unaware of the first group) and they recognised that in the light of their own experience of wolverines it could definitely have happened – they recognised it as authentic. So authenticity in this case had to do with knowing and understanding natural patterns. Lopez goes on to say that an authentic narrative is one that allows you to live sustainably in place, while an inauthentic narrative has the opposite effect.

The epitome of an inauthentic narrative might be a typical television advertisement. The conceit of the advertisement might be, say, buy this cellphone and immediately have fascinating conversations with new friends around the world. This is a fantasy concocted to make a sale—in short, a lie.  Wendell Berry writes, in The Unsettling of America, that the main product of television advertising is in fact ‘hysterical self-dissatisfaction’. Authentic narrative, by contrast, can be instructive, nourishing, and, in the case of nature writing or ‘the poetry of earth’, grounding.

Your analogy between advertisements and inauthenticity is an interesting one. Do you feel there is a particular literary style that suits authenticity and that other styles might be symptomatic of inauthenticity?

The word authenticity has something to do with accuracy but it’s not quite the same thing. If you’re writing about the natural world, its definitely good to have your facts straight! But the ability to see larger patterns, and to register their intellectual and emotional resonance, is also crucial. Such perceptiveness can be as important for a reader as it is for a writer. Ever since C. P. Snow, we’ve spoken of the widening division in academia between ‘the two cultures’. One consequence of this gap is that literary critics don’t always know much about natural science. Thus, when they read poets who are themselves strongly oriented toward science, they may miss vital dimensions of a work. I collaborated on an essay entitled ‘Robert Frost’s Ecosystem of Meanings in “Spring Pools”’ with the ecologist Glenn Adelson. It pursued an extended reading of Robert Frost’s poem ‘Spring Pools’, with a special focus on Frost’s keen ecological insights. A failure to recognise these insights may leave Frost’s poem feeling like only a lamentation in the face of natural transience. But because it is remarkably attuned to a particular northern New England landscape in a certain season, this lyric also establishes a rich dialogue between the speaker’s emotions and the vast natural cycles that surround them. The human experience and what David Abram has called the more-than-human speak to each other in ways that complicate, and open out, nature’s significance.

Writers can move past too narrow and conventional a mode of self-expression through cultivating knowledge of their home-terrain’s geological background, its forest history, and the wildlife that it supports. It’s similarly productive to pay respectful attention to the ancient human communities affiliated with a landscape, the cultures and perceptions that recent immigrants may have brought into that swirl, the ways in which people support themselves there at present, and the impacts of climate change on all these patterns of relationship. Such information is vital—if not always expressed directly in the writing, then at least residing in the mind of the writer.

Do you use particular exercises or prompts when teaching nature writing?

Prompts can help people plunge into writing without too much anxiety about where it may be headed!  Beginning with an open-ended topic can both catalyze close observation of a landscape and propel writers into connections they never expected to be making. It’s a headlong, exploratory way to write—the opposite of reporting on something you’ve already thought through or bolstering a preconceived argument. Rather than working with a standard list of prompts, I try to suit them to a particular group or setting.  But there are certain themes that recur. For instance, I might ask students to sit at the edge of the woods and describe something, without further elaboration about what ‘description’ means. As volunteers then take turns reading what they’ve written we can consider various definitions of that term for ourselves. A number of people will describe visually while others will measure some object or tally its features.  Some students may pursue personal narratives about how, for instance, a certain woodland tree recalls a tree in a childhood garden. Yet others may be fascinated with a web of images, or focused primarily on their own feelings. Such diverse approaches can stimulate conversation about what it means to describe, and can liberate people to experiment with different voices and styles. Quite often I follow up on a discussion of description with a drawing exercise. I’ve been helped in this regard by the artist and teacher Clare Walker Leslie. One of the key points Clare makes is that drawing is not about making a beautiful picture: it’s about seeing. Similarly, an impromptu piece of writing that responds to a prompt nay not lead initially to an orderly or unified piece, but may nevertheless spark insights that would otherwise have been unrealized.
When students first come to these courses, do they hold any particular preconceptions of nature writing that you have to challenge?

We all have to be on guard against the kind of voice dominated by the litany ‘I think, I feel, I remember’. When I teach workshops on nature writing, I sometimes propose technical moves to escape from such self-absorption. One of these is consciously to shift scales, both temporally and spatially. For example, in our Vermont landscape it’s possible (and refreshing) to reimagine a local setting when the Wisconsin glacier rose a mile above it, or when a willow and fir forest was edging back into New England after the glaciers melted. Spatially, too, one’s frame of reference can descend to the microscopic or expand toward the interstellar and cosmic. Many of the most powerful writers strategically shift their attention in these ways in order to invigorate their awareness.

In your book, Imagining the Earth, you draw attention to poetry that moves ‘from estrangement to reconciliation’ with the natural world. Can you say something on the importance of connection in nature writing?

This relates to your previous question about prompts. I often ask my students to write about a vivid experience of the natural world in childhood. Articulating and reflecting upon such experiences can in fact encourage an ethical perspective on one’s own actions. Often when we act wastefully or ignore the destruction of local habitats it’s because we simply don’t feel any connection with them. Wordsworth helps us understand how childhood memories can revive and restore a passionate sense of affiliation with nature. Writing can be a vehicle that renews the feeling of belonging and of loving connection.

Can you say something about the important of first-hand experience of environments to the writing practice?

It can be extremely exciting and productive to teach and write in the field. In one class the students and I walked from Canada to Bread Loaf along the Long Trail: a ridge-top way in the Green Mountains. For three weeks we were out there together in all weathers with our tents, sleeping bags, stoves, and journals. In the course of our walking we learned the trees of the northern hardwood forest, as well as the distinctive ecological communities associated with them. Such growing knowledge helped our writing navigate past solipsism. But it was also associated with experiences of physical discomfort and personal vulnerability fostering remarkable depth in people’s entries and essays. Outwardly and inwardly alike, the process of writing can unfold as a process of discovery. In one letter Robert Frost wrote, ‘No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader’. A personal, narrative essay, while polished and unified in its final form, can also incorporate and convey an authentic experience of discovery.

Both of your books are very place specific. What was it that attracted you to writing about these particular landscapes?

My collection of short stories is set in Cornwall, which is where I grew up. I think I had probably always taken the landscape around me for granted, but when I came to write my MA dissertation (which became three of the stories in Diving Belles) I realized that all my ideas for stories were linked to the landscape that I knew best. I seemed to have a store of images and ideas that I hadn’t really known about before. I’d been reading a lot of poetry about landscape and place, poets such as Alice Oswald and Jen Hadfield, and they inspired me to think about bringing in more magical, uncanny elements into my fiction – which quickly led me to the idea of basing the collection on Cornish folklore. The folklore is intricately connected to the landscape – stories about giants come directly from shapes in the granite, and mermaids from treacherous stretches of the coastline where people drowned – so I became interested in exploring how the stories emerged from the place.

For my novel, it was almost chance that I ended up in the landscape that inspired it. I was moving around quite a lot, renting in different places and generally being unsettled, and I ended up in a wooded river valley near Dartmoor. I found the landscape interesting because it was so different to the coastlines I had written about before – the woods changed so much with each season, and the river changed all the time depending on the weather, the light, or whatever suddenly washed down it. I thought the river valley would be an interesting place to set a novel, and I also wanted to challenge myself to write about a place that I didn’t know quite so well.

We tend to think about place as something stable and grounded and yet water seems to be fundamental to your writing. Could you say a little about the relationship between water and place in your work?

I tend to feel landlocked if I am not living near a wide stretch of water, so I guess that I find water an essential part of feeling inspired and at home in a place. I think the tension you’ve asked about, between what is stable and what is constantly in flux, is the very reason why water features so much in my fiction – it’s that conflict between stability and change that drives narratives and creates characters. I’m interested in the ways that people often resist change but how we slowly, incrementally change anyway, without really noticing it. Water is a good symbol for these kinds of ideas – and both the river and the sea offer up really interesting contrasts. The river is a constant feature of the landscape but it is also changing moment by moment: small changes such as flipping over small stones and flashing in the light, and big changes, like biting away at the bank and changing its own shape. I am also fascinated by the way the sea can wash things up out of nowhere and then cover them over again.

When you started writing Weathering, did you have the idea for the story first, and then fit that into the setting, or did the landscape influence the story?

I think I have a set of overall ideas that I will probably always come back to in my writing – ideas about home and belonging and family – but the actual story itself pretty much came out of the landscape. The river valley offered a lot in the way of dramatic tension; it is a beautiful place, with fascinating birds and plants, but it’s also isolated, very cold and damp in winter, and it’s difficult to get around. The contrast between the different aspects of the place and the landscape gave me the idea of writing from three different perspectives – playing around with the conflicting versions and experiences there are of a place. It was easy to imagine someone who loved living there, someone else who was forced to live there and desperate to get out, and someone else who had become stuck there and let the years pass by before they really knew it. These became the outlines for the three interconnected narratives that made up the novel.

Can you say a bit more about how you used these three different narratives to explore the landscape?

Each chapter in the novel follows the story from one of the three main characters’ point of view. All of their concerns and perspectives collide and contrast, but also sometimes overlap and mirror each other. They all have very different perspectives on the place they have found themselves in, based on their past and present experiences of it. But equally, their perspectives tend to colour or distort how they view the place too – so because Ada, one of the main characters, doesn’t want to be there, she notices grey skies and gloomy weather and the constant thump of the river, whereas Pepper, her young daughter, who is fascinated by the place, notices the colour of mushrooms and the flash of a kingfisher. Each of the characters can’t help but bring their own baggage along, which influences how they view the landscape.

Both your books draw on particular places, but there aren’t any specific place names or locations mentioned. Why did you make this decision?

I decided when I first started to write Diving Belles, that although I was writing about a specific place, ie. Cornwall, I didn’t want to use specific place names, or real towns or anything like that. Partly it is to do with the fact that, as soon as you say, ‘this story is set here’ then there is a chance you will have got it wrong in some way, some minor detail will inevitably not be quite plausible in your story (at least, I imagine that would be what would happen in my stories!). Also, everyone’s perceptions of place are different, and I wanted to draw on this and try to create a sort of patchwork effect, an overall impression of a place, which people can then situate as they want. I hope it allows the reader to draw more on their own imaginations and perceptions. Places are a combination of detail, imagination, and personal experience, and I draw more on that idea in my writing I think.

How different was it trying to evoke a sense of place in a novel compared to short stories?

It was quite a different experience. In the short stories I think I used broader bush strokes in lots of ways, because the place had to be captured quickly to get each story going. I probably conjured up a more general and less specific landscape than the one I created in my novel. Partly this is to do with the sheer amount of time and space spent in the one small setting of the novel, and maybe partly to do with having more experience this time around.

However, writing about a place in the novel presented difficulties, because there are certain things you categorically have to talk about, and you can’t gloss over and use sleight of hand in the same way as you can in short stories. For example, in the novel, I suddenly had to think about things like, ‘where is the nearest petrol pump?’ ‘Does it actually make sense that this particular bird would be around at this exact time of year?’ ‘I need there to be bright colour in the landscape for the main character to notice and wonder at, but apart from maroon bracken what else is there in early winter?’ (Lots of things, including spindle fruits and gorse!) In lots of ways the narrative forced me to create a more detailed picture.

You have described your writing as magical realist; is this style/technique particularly useful for evoking landscape and place?

Magical realism can offer a different perspective on a place and a landscape. By slightly skewing our perceptions of the everyday, it can more strongly evoke the beauty, the wonder and the strangeness that is already inherently there. In Cornish folklore for example, the buccas, or wind-spirits, draw our attention to the ferocity and temperament of the Cornish weather. Mermaids evoke the beauty and danger of the sea. In stories of mermaids luring men out to sea, there is the whole history of drownings in a community lurking under the surface.

I find ghosts a particularly interesting way of exploring landscape and place. In my novel, one of the three main characters is a ghost who is stuck in the river because her ashes have been scattered there. I hoped that the ghost would add another layer to the evocation of the place. She is suddenly a part of the river, and a part of the landscape; she experiences the tiny details of the landscape, but also gains a sense of its vast scale. Magical realism highlights the richness of the places we find ourselves in, and encourages us to wonder at things – the magic is already there.

You mentioned before about being inspired by poetry, how exactly does this kind of writing feed into your fiction?

I definitely read more poetry than fiction while I am in the depths of a project. I find it useful to read from different genres to the ones that I’m working in. I enjoy poetry that is very rich in images and description and which uses unexpected, startling language. As I mentioned earlier, I found that magical elements in poetry such as Alice Oswald’s Dart and the strange, uncanny glimpses in John Burnside’s poetry, helped inspire me to bring these elements into my fiction. I think reading poetry also encourages me to make sure I’m always searching for the best word to use when describing something, and not to just go for the easy option.

Do you see yourself continuing to write about the South West in the future?

I hope so! Partly it depends on practicalities, such as where I will find myself living. But I am keen to go back to writing about the sea and the coastline next. I think that a river worked well in the novel because it twined right through its length, whereas the sea has made me think again about a short story collection – the small things that are washed up and taken away, the ebb and flow of the tides suggest small surges of stories. I would like to be more specific place-wise with these short stories, and set them in North Cornwall perhaps, which is near where I grew up. And I would like to carry on exploring the idea of ghosts – I am really interested in the idea of haunted landscapes.