Wild Writing.
Three lovely women join me for a Wild Writing Workshop at BBOWT’s Thatcham Nature Discovery Centre. We discuss ‘the new nature writing’, its ancient roots and tradition; its resurgence and the reasons (and need) for it. And we try to define something that, in its wild essence, defies catagorisation. But we come up with some characteristics.
Nature writing is about connection and celebration and it’s about loss (personal and environmental) and that is nothing new. It’s about close observation, personal discovery and experience, wonder, awe and mystery. It has an open-minded attitude to what ‘wildness’ and ‘nature’ is and is literary, lyrical, intense and humble. It breaks open old ground, anew.
We work on making sensory connections with memory with the title ‘On Remembrance Day, I remember.’ We listen for redwings, search for parties of long-tailed tits, spooling out like bunting through the alder trees and identify the whoosh of a raven’s wings as it flies overhead, before we see it. We talk of ‘emotional weather’.
Sunday, I seize a stolen hour at sunset with my middle daughter. Squeezing the last juice from the day, we ride out of the farmyard. Twenty minutes later, we are cantering down a tunnel of light: the beech wood is at the stillpoint when its lacquered, toffee-penny leaves are as much on the trees as they are lying thickly on the earth. The wide holloway is illuminated by the low sun and the leaves glow from underneath, around and over us. Our chestnut horses are incandescent, their hooves drumming up a muffled, military beat.
It is cold, but I can feel the warmth rising from the horse into my own body. I know at that moment, I could ask anything of her. I imagine a battlefield between her pricked, willing ears, haloed by the sunset, and think of those war horses – and the men that had to ride them in.
A woodcock jinks down the lane ahead of us. The sun goes and we trot home in the near-dark, her shoes sparking off the metalled lane.
And in the moment, when I feel utterly free, I realise that writing is an act of freedom in itself: an act of wildness. And what I remember then are two quotes. The first from the old canon of nature writing (Richard Jefferies, 1883) and the second perhaps from the new (Seamus Heaney, 2010):
‘It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine.’
Then:
‘I had my existence. I was there. Me in place and the place in me.’