Literature and landscape

I work in what is sometimes, and to my mind very weirdly, called nonfiction, and it is weird for many reasons. One is that negative, ‘nonfiction’, this huge territory of writing, we define just for not being fiction, and the other, to me, is that it is limiting. It is a suggestion that it is an insufficiency at work; yet for me, nonfiction, which in German is the sachbuch, the fact book, is actually this immense terrain of possibility. When I was about 21, I read a book called "Arctic Dreams" by Barry Lopez, and I read it while walking the west coast of Vancouver Island. It blew my mind. It opened up the possibility of what nonfiction could be. That book is coming up to its 40th anniversary now. It blended reportage, travel writing, nature writing, as we might call it, cultural anthropology, ethnography and natural history — it was lawless in a thrilling way. It was scintillating visually and atmospherically. It was very ethically charged. It had a huge responsibility to the real, and that is a way in which the 'non' of nonfiction becomes a good thing. This was before I had become a writer myself, and I have remained so grateful for that encounter with that book, because it suggested to me that I could adventure in language and in form.

Literature and landscape have always been entangled for me; I have often read my way into places before I have walked my way into them. I have come to believe that every hour spent learning to read is also an hour spent learning to write, and when younger writers, or would-be writers, sometimes come to me and ask if I have any advice, I say, "Read as much as you can, as widely as you can."

I cannot remember a time when I did not write, really.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi Citizen Nation member, writer and plant scientist, has this wonderful phrase, "the grammar of animacy", that has really stayed with me and indeed animated my own grammar as an aspiration. She is trying to think about the ways in which English broadly objectifies and ‘its’ the living world, deadens the living world and muscularizes it into obedience. Kimmerer says we should be trying to verb the world, to let the world speak back and be reciprocal with us. I have, for a very long time, been trying to work out how to write using, or in, grammars of animacy, and that task became most vivid while trying to write about rivers. I noticed that full stops were fleeing my sentences to begin with; language was becoming looser and more fluid, more reactive to my subject and also that I was verbing a lot of nouns.

In English we typically 'it' and 'which' and 'that' the living world, and you would say 'the river that flows' or 'the river which flows', but I have tended to speak of 'the river who flows'. It has actually become, I realize, so natural to me that the unnatural thing is now to speak of 'the river that flows' or 'the river which flows'. It is just a way of recognizing otherness, but the otherness of the subjects with whom we share our world, not the objects we dominate in our world. I have just finished a huge book that has taken seven years called "The Book of Birds", and it is a reimagining of the field guide.

In Chennai, traveling with Yuvan Aves, the young water defender there, I came to understand that I was in a region rich with ancient water literacy. This was a region that had suffered excesses of water, monsoons and cyclones, but also typically very protracted droughts, and the people there, over hundreds of thousands of years, had learned how to keep water, how to live alongside water and recognize its vital presence in their lives.

Part of my project, if I can call it that as a writer, I have realized looking back, has been to encourage what could be called a nature literacy or a literacy of landscape, language, lexis, and also at some level, a syntax of place, of landscape — not just the names of things but how things themselves relate to one another to form the ecological web in which we are entangled. One form that took was a book called "Landmarks", which is a book of essays about the writing of nature and place but also a book of glossaries, which sought to regather from around 35 languages, dialects and subdialects in the British Isles and Ireland words for place from the Gaelic. There is this wonderful Gaelic phrase, runich moen, which means the shadows cast on moorland by clouds on a sunny, windy day, and that is just one example of the many forms of precision, of lexis, of naming, that are still there in the treasure troves of coinage that our languages and dialects possess.

The German painter Anselm Kiefer has this line — I do not know what the German is, but in English it is often translated as "there is no such thing as an innocent landscape". I have certainly walked, worked in and written about landscapes that have seen atrocities, been witnessed to bear the scars of terrible histories — whether that is the Foibe executions in the sinkholes of the Julian Alps in Slovenia; or the White War that was carried out in those mountains as well; the occupied territories of the West Bank (which I walked with the Palestinian human rights lawyer, Raja Shehadeh); or even the cleared Glens of Scotland, where people were forced from their homes in order to open up grazing land for sheep during the wool boom.

Like many, I am a longtime reader of Walter Benjamin — his essays, his amazing Berlin memoir, "Berlin Childhood" around 1900, and his great unfinished work, "The Arcades Project", which did not aspire to the delusion of a comprehensible totality but sought to tell a city, a consciousness, a teeming multiplicity, out of bits and pieces to create a navigable blueprint for Paris. I have come to think of all the kinds of writing I have done, and indeed all the kinds of reading I have done, most of them, as a continuous terrain. Each book I have found grows very naturally out of the last. With "Underland", the book surfaces from the below, as it were, in a little wood called Nine Wells Wood, where a chalk spring rises, and that same place becomes the very opening page of "Is a River Alive?" I have always been drawn, like Benjamin, to writing about what we cannot see as well as what we can. That reached its sharpest expression in "Underland", which was the longest book I have ever written; it took eight years and about 550 pages to go down into what lies beneath us, what we often turn away from, what we use to both shelter and dispose of things, and I came to realize, to use a phrase from that book, that sometimes in the darkness we can see more clearly.