This is a place where you will find me writing about nature in my parish on the edge of Dartmoor. But it also a place where you will find me thinking and writing, about writing about nature. Thinking about writing, full stop. The more I write and the more I learn about the writing craft, the more I understand that to think about writing is as important a task as the former. Forgive the digression, but I’d like to share some of the process I’ve been working through this month.
Finding time, and most importantly, inspiration, to write is a perennial issue for writers. I’ve said it before - many writers have said it before - this is an old tune for the aspiring writer. The attention to the first point - time - is a constant feature of my life these days: tipping the balance from reading others’ words toward writing my own, meticulously keeping my appointment with my writing self for one precious hour each morning, watching the clock creep towards nine o’clock when I require my head to switch into the realm of curriculum frameworks and pedagogical innovations. Working a day job in academia uses up more headspace than I care to admit so I have learnt to use wisely the precious little that is left over.
The second point, inspiration, is an ever-hungry beast. I read. I walk. I watch our contemporary society’s equivalent of tales around the fireside (AppleTV). I read the news (less frequently these days). I read other Substacks. Ideas are capricious and I’ve acknowledged that I need to take in many ideas and wait to see what floats to the surface, or what lands on fertile ground. Mixing those metaphors there, but it can feel like I can’t pursue an idea until I am assured it has substance enough to stay around awhile.
In terms of writing process, and maintaining the engine of production, inspiration has come from several places this past month, shaping my writing in various ways.
Summer Brennan’s idea for a Five Things Drafts caught my attention. I try to write in my journal each day - not emotional stuff, those days of self-indulgence are long gone - rather, I like to write the edited highlights. As a daily writing practice that nurtures that elusive flow, I can vouch for it. I write the date. I write the number 1. I think of just one thing the previous day that struck me. And I write about it, allowing the words to come, jumbled sentences, stream of consciousness, all thoughts welcome. When I run out of steam, I write number 2. and begin again. A simple practice that to my astonishment has yielded pages on pages of ‘things’. A quick count, and since January 16, I have accumulated eleven days’ worth of five things, fifty-five snippets of writing that may lead somewhere, or not.
Reading is a constant source of inspiration. Unusually for me, I have two books on the go. Both are composed of short essays and I like flipping between the two in the morning, for small splashes of inspiration. The first is Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, in which he writes daily essayettes on a delight he has encountered or remembered that day. As he explains in the prologue, the word essay comes from the French word essai, to try or attempt something, or a trial. I have a natural leaning toward this form of writing and it is joyous to find it is a valid form of writing style, not just me being lazy. The second book is Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, in which this afficionado of essay-writing offers enchanting longer-form essays on her encounters with the more-than-human world: in the Galápagos, at home in Puget Sound, in the farmlands around Tinker Creek. Her essays are masterpieces in how to bring the internal world into conversation with the external world, a glorious metaphysical voyage into the ‘mute materials’ of the more-than-human world and our relationship with them. I am inspired daily and devastated in equal measure that I will never produce such exquisite writing.
On the recommendation of Christina and Ruth from our writing group, I also signed up for an Arvon Masterclass with Tania Hershman, poet and collider of things. She offered a fantastic muddle of exercises that brought together disparate styles of writing, different genres, and collisions with other writers’ work. Food for creative thought and one for longer-term composting.
January has been a necessarily introspective month. As Dillard said, winter is a time that we live in our minds. Here are some extracts from my journal this month:
January 16
The sun is low, blinding, as it skims the old city runway. I look towards its path across the long flat discarded grasslands and all I can see through the squares of the chain-link fence is a perfect sunburst of light. Fierce light travelling millions of miles to reach my retina, picture-perfect. Within that square of light, all my joy is contained.
It turned five o-clock last night and a blue light lingered. Nights are drawing out, pulling away from the solstice, hurtling toward spring when I shall breathe easy in the green light. Then, it will be time for spring to hurtle away from me. Better to enjoy these still-dark days with their clacking bare branches, their velvet buds of readiness, their folded secrets of living close to the ground.
January 17
An owl hoots in the morning darkness. Time to hurry home, roost in the darkened branches and sit out the coming light. It is icy cold out there but how I long to learn owl-ways of merging with the dying night. I would watch my house that shines bright from within. I would nod at the human troubles that swirl within the closed walls, fighting each other to find a way out.
A day of icy sunshine. Each leaf, twig, blade of grass is dull and lifeless, enclosed in rimy grey ice that holds them still all day. We take the path up into the field, past sunlight falling askance on gravestones and under branches coated in evergreen ivy. The snowdrop patch has clumps of stems, flowers-in-waiting.
The light is fading. I walk around the house, dipping blinds against the coming darkness and lighting the lamps. A burst of song causes me to stop in my tracks. It sounds like it’s coming from the room next door. It is a robin’s final song to the night. Perhaps it’s a hopeful song, of joy at surviving the day. Perhaps, though, it is an ancient song of readiness to face the darkness, for who knows what shall pass in these hours before dawn?
January 18
Driving home last night, as I turned west down the lane that leads to the village, the hedgerows either side had transformed into a towering handfast of bare sinuous beech trees. You don’t seem to notice it on the drive out of the village, but at a certain time of dusk in the winter, as the sun has set and casts a far-off vermillion-glow, the beeches tell a new mythical story.
As I stepped out of the car into the already chilled air, an all-but full moon hung above the quarry wall, blinding white against an aquamarine sky. One lone star accompanied the moon, a small celestial assemblage to remind me (as if I ever need reminding) of my place in all things.
January 19
The sycamore branches stand like cyanotype images, almost translucent, white against the dark fir beyond. Two pigeons flap and scrabble in the yew branches. A faint pink cloud sits above the northern horizon, three, four strips of lilac, and the church stands tall, frozen in time. Each azalea leaf is distinct. The chairs and table are frozen, waiting for spring guests. The deck retreats into white. The occasional bird crosses the sky, but even they are quiet this morning. Some may not have made it through the night.
Annie Dillard reassures me we are here to witness, for there is ‘thing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meagre meanings we are able to muster for them. The show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in daylight. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things.” (Dillard, 1982, p.93).
January 25
A light tops the brow of the hill, the only one in this early morning valley. Its slow wink suggests movement, a farmer perhaps on the edge of the moor. The light is returning to my early mornings, deathly slow.
January 29
A walk alone: cold, blustery, bright. I walk along the far oblong of the lanes, past Belstone Farm and Coppicetown, down the bridleway where new sweet fronds of wild garlic already show themselves in the sheltered soil. The first in the village, their home lies low between two close walls topped with trees, safe from the winds that sweep across the fields.
January 30
A heavy, long day where sombre clouds beckon to me. Come out, the air says, but I’ll give you no colour, no joy today. In a colourful world (I know only because our jigsaw says it is), this land, this month, has so little of it. I dream of warm terracotta rooftops, of sparkling navy sea, of swifts buoyant in the air, of dust at our feet.
I watch the far hills. No-one is abroad, no light pierces the retreating night sky. It is a lonely place at this time of day, any time of day really, once a place of activity in past millennia, but today a forgotten and inaccessible place. Our village is a giant cul-de-sac, on a road to nowhere, a bounded place, a bowl of presence.
Yet - the light is coming a little earlier to the valley these. I sit in the dark for barely half-an-hour now before the dull outlines of the garden trees appears in the deep blue, the turrets of the church loft to the horizon, and the birds begin their morning music. The eastern face of the church foretells the rising sun, a sharp line dividing light from shadow, day from rapidly retreating night. Can I picture the Earth tilting east, revolving towards the distant star, opening itself to light and the potential of a new day?
I watch the far hills. A soft lilac grey cloud hovers, the colour of a fine Persian cat laying across the horizon. It could be a day of delights, or horrors, who knows? It is all a matter of luck. How might I live a good life in the lee of these hills? To know my own boundaries, my furthest reaches, my playful edges? To go no further until the sun reaches those trees that top the horizon, until a light beckons me to follow, west into the unknown lands.
February 1
A movement in the dawn deep sky, overhead. A group of rooks disappears over the roof to the south. They know something is afoot today, some barely perceptible shift in planetary consciousness, a micro-adjustment of light, air, angle of sun. Imbolc. The tide turns, spring begins, hope returns. Life begins, or rather, rises to the groggy surface of a long winter dream. I hear the rooks again and a shattered diamond whorls in the sky.
Something close will be lost. Something quiet, small, secretive will begin to fade. A ghost of a memory of a long winter. I already miss the darkness.
Here I am, in the far west of Europe where the land tilts into the sea, sometimes wet, sometimes cold, watching the light creep up the hillside. Keeping an eye on things.
Oh that ending, ‘Something close will be lost. Something quiet, small, secretive will begin to fade.’
This is so very true. I love the gentleness of this piece. X
Beautiful writing, Lynne