Many years ago, I heard one of my university lecturers say that they could only write whilst travelling somewhere on a train. When the time came to make headway on an academic paper, they would get on a train to some destination – anywhere – and then turn back, writing steadily the whole time. At the time, I thought it seemed an expensive way to go about one’s writing but having just come back from a trip to southern Brittany that entailed taking a combination of five trains, two buses, and two ferries between Plymouth and Roscoff, I can appreciate the benefit that movement and voyaging brings to writing.
I scratch together brief moments to write in the mornings but to move a project along I’ve found that space to think, really think, is critical. But space (and time) to think is scarce in our modern British lives. Tethered to a screen during my working day, I have to force myself to think in a fixed position, only inspired by what I might have read as I awoke and the tentative thoughts captured in my journal. Ruth Allen (Breccia), who leads our Embodied Mentorship programme, is a firm advocate of writing in different spaces or bodily positions. As Alain de Botton writes in his wonderful book The Art of Travel: ‘It is not necessarily at home that we encounter our best selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not.’ In this case, it is not change of self I am after but change in perspective. Change in the way I think about my writing.
Luckily for my writing project, I had a walking trip planned with an old friend in Brittany. It took me almost a whole day to get from my home just north of the port of Plymouth in south-west England to the beautiful ville de peintres, Pont Aven, in the far south-eastern edge of Finistère in Brittany - and, of course, I made the delicious journey in reverse at the end of the week.
On each journey, I did my fair share of thinking and writing, but I listened to two programmes that I thought worth sharing here. Each brought something new to my thinking, which I hope in time finds its way into my writing.
Train from Landerneau to Quimper
Janine Benyus – Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings (On Being with Krista Tippett podcast).
This extraordinary conversation introduced me to the power of orientating ourselves towards the more-than-human world and how we might learn to live on the planet more gracefully (Benyus’ words). Towards the end of their conversation, Krista shared the closing words of Benyus’ book:
We are surrounded by geniuses. They are everywhere with us, breathing the same air, drinking the same round river of water, moving on limbs built of the same blood and bone. Learning from them will take only stillness on our part, a quieting of the voices of our own cleverness. Into this quiet will come a cacophony of earthly sounds, a symphony of good sense.
The words touched me deeply. The ethic of learning from the more-than-human world lies at the heart of my writing project and, as I gazed out of the train window watching the light play through newly unfurled leaves and dancing off glowing limbs of bark, I fizzed with the possibility of this way of being with the world. How to bring this ethic into my writing has become an urgent question and one that will stay with me for a long time.
Ferry from Roscoff to Plymouth
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Radio 4)
Recently, I’ve been interested in how I might bring poetry into my writing and trying to learn why the essence of poems can be so arresting. This was a wonderful programme that explored the perennial power of the poem by Robert Frost. They speak of the blend of the practical and the beautiful, and the way in which he makes us aware of our species loneliness. I wonder about this desire to become part of the consciousness around us, how we yearn to lose this separateness. What might it mean to merge?
Listening to an old crackly recording of Robert Frost speaking about his poetry, I learn that writing for him starts with a mood. I encountered so many moods throughout this Breton journey, but I took the mood that my homeward journey on the ferry evoked as a prompt for some freewriting. I’d like to share an ever-so-slightly more polished version of that writing here and in the spirit of understanding my writing voice, I’ve recorded it too.
I sit here in the very middle of the bow, witness to the boat’s watery passage. Sounds fade away: the old jazz tunes that echo at my back and the soft French voices to my left. A distracting sticky smell of warm gravy appears to my right – it is time for evening meals - but ahead of me through the large window a slow curve of blue swell rolls across from the goldening west.
My eyes cannot settle. Endlessly generative and each time different, multiple and random slabs of white-water slant east before the bow. Fractious clouds of spume bubble up then disappear, like endless lines of pale verse scribbled on teal canvas. Each one, a tiny and spectacular event that only I witness.
It is endless, this evening, with miles to go before I sleep [1]. I catch two shiny specs of mirror light, birds or fish I can’t tell, and they hover for a moment above the waves. One settles, then the other, then they both lift and dip beneath the waves as the surging bulk of our boat draws near.
Each time I look up, this moving theatre of sea completes me. Clouds gather as we near the land that touches the horizon, the palest line of shimmering grey. Now the rain comes and each sociable raindrop bleeds the line of waves watched from my window, blurring grey and white and deep, deep blue. It clears in an instant and nearing sunset light spreads from the west. I wonder how I might save this sense of movement. How might I cut and paste it back into my desk life that tomorrow will engulf me with its pointless perambulations of process and structure?
Long conversations unspool around me. We have all felt the promise of this steady voyage northbound. We are all part of the deepening of the day, our small species’s concerns gently rolled and tipped towards deeper affairs and bottomless connections.
And then just like that, in another instant or a long hour I can no longer tell, Plymouth appears between the dark shadows of Rame and Mewerstone. My place, my home, lies beyond that heavy horizon and I shall be there soon enough. Keep my movement close, the sea whispers, keep me safe. Store me up in a tiny pocket of your belly and whenever you need me, I will be there. My maddingly endless blue and white, my deep.
[1] Thank you to Robert Frost who repeats this simple line twice at the end of his poem.
This is really beautiful Lynne. I love both your reflection on the writing process, which I think is very interesting in and of itself, and a useful diary for you. But also the reading. I think you have the most beautiful, lyrical reading voice. It really came alive in your telling and the rhythm you brought to it really spoke to the movement I could imagine on the boat. I think your writing is very lyrical and you made enchanting use of repetition and long and short lines for impact. Really, really brilliant. Are you pleased with it? xx
Wonderful, rich writing and reflections Lynne - I loved getting to go on this journey with you. The image of the sea as a moving theatre will stay with me. Looking forward to exploring those listens too, thanks for sharing! x