Writing Outdoors

 

The other week I taught a workshop on ‘writing in the wild’.

In the opening circle, everyone said that they habitually wrote indoors, and at least one writer admitted to nervousness at the thought of trying something different. She’d woken up in a cold sweat the previous night, having had nightmares of being devoured by big, hairy, sharp-clawed Wild Words that hid in trees. As she described this, tight laughter juddered across the room. There are, in fact, many reasons to take your lunch hour in the park with a laptop, to climb out of your bedroom at midnight with your notepad tucked into your trousers, or to take your holidays in the country, rather than falling for the all-too-tempting city break in Belarus (although I’ve heard credible reports of all manner of wild things in Belarus).

Most of us live and write indoors, in controlled environments.

Opening ourselves up to that-which-we-cannot-control, being in contact with new and unexpected stimuli, and seeing, at first hand, the instinctual at work, can profoundly affect our writing.

At the end of the workshop, the ‘nervous’ writer put this on her feedback form:

‘At first it was hard. Everything was unfamiliar, the way my body felt after we’d walked two hours, the landscape, and the deluge of sensory impressions. But that newness was exactly the point, exactly what expanded my world today. Today I became an animal, feeling and sensing my way in my environment. And the words followed’.

At the end of the workshop we came up with a communal list of reasons to write outdoors, which I have pinned to my wall:

…because we want to be as passionate as Anais Nin

…because we want to be as awe filled as Mary Oliver

…because we want to dream as vividly as William Blake

…because we want to look as cool in our slacks as Ernest Hemingway

…because we want to look as hip in our shades as Bruce Chatwin

And because the best way to defend from enemy fire is by tucking a moleskin notebook into the pocket over your heart. Oh yes…

This article was first published on 8th November 2013

Why Write Outdoors?

Why it is that I love to write outdoors?

At first I was just desperate to unchain myself from my desk, break out of the building, and write in nature. I craved seeing something other than a computer screen. I wanted to feel the movement of the pen again, instead of just the striking of keys.

I wanted to free up the qualities of ‘wild’ in myself and my words- expressiveness, spontaneity, the untamed, the intuitive. I dreamed of becoming the writer that I’d always wanted to be. Writing begins with living.  How could I write in full colour, if I wasn’t living in full colour?

Once out there, stripped of the trappings of society, I felt I could be more honestly myself, and that my words could be more honestly themselves too. I found that surrounded by movement, my words gained a sense of movement and drama too. When I explored and went into unknown territory, my words followed hot on my tail.

The closer I looked at the minutiae of nature, in order to describe it in words, the more vivid the outdoor world became, and the more I needed to express what it, and its salvation meant to me. It’s a virtuous circle. Not only is great writing enabled by living fully and vibrantly, living is also enabled by bringing our attention to a writing subject that embodies those qualities. Picking out details of nature to describe, I saw that everything was hitched to everything else in the universe. The world was indeed in a grain of sand, and the ocean in a drop of water.

And above everything else, I love to write outdoors because it is truly the most joyous experience. In the words of American poet, E.E. Cummings, the world becomes ‘mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful’. There is no better feeling than when my words canter on the broad savannah, dive deep in the dark ocean, and swoop in the vast blue sky. 

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid.

The Weekly Prompt

Why are you a writer-in-the wild? Please write and tell me about it.

This article was first published on May 14th 2013

Ten Experiences of Wild

The Red Admiral butterfly flitting on to my hand, and settling a moment to dust his wings. Feeling touched by magic….

The sound of the Wild Boar cracking fallen walnuts and snorting, close to the house…

The necklace of Lapis Lazuli I was given by my boyfriend. It’s silver veins sparkling like sunlight on water. Feeling loved…

The warm wind from the tropics whipping round me, caressing my skin, and spinning golden autumn leaves into a whirlwind…

Standing in the Negev desert, when there was nothing but gently undulating sand in every direction. Nothing had ever seemed so vast…

Diving into a wide river, my whole body being gently pulled and pushed by its flow, and the duck gliding serenely past…

Lying down in a wildflower meadow in the mountains of the Pyrenees, and the shock of smelling strong wild garlic…

In France, hearing a high yelp from above me. My head snapping up to see a huge golden eagle circling in the limitless sky above, eyeing me up as prey…

The delight of the moment when they delivered the new coffee table to my first house. Running my hand along the grain of the wood, and smelling pine…

Standing, awestruck, in Devon, in the dark of the night, close to the roaring sea. The waves rearing up before me at twice my height. The moonlight catching the spray that flicks, cold into my face…

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid.

This article was first published on December 20th 2012

From the archive: Wild In The City (Part 2)

I went walking througris in search of the wild. I stopped on Pont Neuf, and let the tide of commuters flow past me.  As I recited my mantra of the day ‘wild, wild, wild’, the strangest thing happened. A small brown mouse came out from under the bulwark of the bridge and sat by my feet, cleaning his whiskers. Where I live, in rural Southern France, a wild animal is gone if your tread snaps a twig, or even before that. But this was a town mouse, used to noise and bustle, fearless.

But there was another place I found wild in the city, and that was in one of the homeless people I saw on the streets. It was a head scarfed young woman, and she was turning circles in the street, shouting words I didn’t understand. A dog on a lead followed her movements, yelping excitedly.

You can spot the quality of wild by how we react to it. We are scared of it, because it isn’t kept in check by the straightjacket of the rational mind. It is instinctual, emotional, energised. That makes us nervous.

I knew the quality of wildness was present because I saw Parisians look at her as if she wasn’t there, or walk in wide circles to avoid her. I had difficulty not doing the same. I noticed I immediately judged her to be ‘mad’ or similar. Because if she was mad, then I was sane. She was doing life wrong, and I was doing it right.

And I asked myself: what aspects of myself am I not acknowledging when I locate all the emotional unpredictability, or all the madness in someone else?  How can I take back the parts of myself I’ve disowned, so that I can write from the broadest emotional spectrum? I want my writing can be mad and unpredictable when required, instead of always sane and predictable.

This article was first published on December 14th 2012

From the archive: Wild In The City (Part 1)

I live in rural Southern France, on a mountain. Yesterday I got on a train going to Paris, heading into a throng of 2 million people.

My work is based around the natural environment. It’s about exploring the ‘wilds’ out there, in order to understand how to bring that quality into our words, to find freedom in writing. I’m interested in those parts of ourselves- the spontaneous, intuitive, instinctual- that we’re afraid of. Our fear is such, that instead of acknowledging these aspects within ourselves, we project them outwards, saying they’re out there ‘in the wilds’ , in the ‘wild animals’.

On my mountain it’s clear where ‘wild’ resides. In the badger, the deer, the wild boar. But where those disowned aspects go when we live in, or visit a city? Where do we see ‘wild’? I’ve been feeling excited by the challenge of tracking it down.

So, this morning I went walking beside the Seine in central Paris, that mission on my mind.  I was swept along the pavement by a river of people. The noise of feet and cars swirled in my ears. I found places where the city had replicated the wild. There were garden shops with fountains shaped like elephants.

When it hadn’t replicated wild, the city had tried to tame it, contain it, to take a moment of its beauty and fix it in time. There were posters of big cats, and plants in pots. But best of all, on sale for 90 euros in Centre Pompidou, I found green grass, neat as a lawn, growing in a frame, a living picture.

This was all fascinating, but I wasn’t seeking castrated nature. No, what I wanted to find was the places where wild was living free in the city. Then I wanted to see how people responded to it. The search continued…

First Published November 30th 2012

A Writer's Process: John Porter

Walking to my studio in the Leighton Artists’ Colony just before dawn, I mentally pen a haiku;

Gravel dark and wet

Shines at first light as I walk

Easy under foot

 

A mist lingering from damp snow overnight creeps through half perceived trees.  The few amber lights along the path are just enough to show the way through the pines.  I imagine deer lying nearby in long brown grass beneath the trees, but the dim illumination does not reveal their location.

 In the bright circle of the Valentine Studio porch light, a young man unexpectedly appears and slouches past with a large portfolio tucked under his arm.  He looks up momentarily with a sad, tired expression that seems to say;  'That was my last night spent on the drawings … now I'm leaving but wish I had more time.’  

But I am just arriving to work for a month.   I turn right down the little track that leads to the bottom of a small ravine where my studio Evamy awaits.  I set down my computer case on the porch.  It makes a soft thump on the old boards. 

In the darkness, I search for the key in jacket pockets before remembering that it is carefully zipped safe in the inside pocket.  Fishing it out, I fiddle with the handle lock, before feeling it relent and the door opens towards me, sticking slightly on the jam just as it did three years ago when last I opened it.  

Switching on the light, a warm interior welcomes me back.  I cannot resist saying aloud; ‘Hello Evamy ’ as if addressing an old friend or lover.  I make a quick inspection.  Two computer chairs are neatly placed at either end of the long desk surface.   A lounge chair extends beneath shelves with clean glasses, a Banff Centre mug and a box tea bags left by the last occupant.   Nothing has changed, except perhaps. me. 

This is where I wrote my first book.  It success renewed my life and connected me with so many different people.  

My main job is no longer as a business advisor to small engineering companies.  I am now a writer.

I extract a tea bag from the box and fill the kettle, putting the carton of milk in the small fridge beneath the sink.     Multi reflections of my presence move hither and thither in the studios many windows.  They are still dark mirrors before the dawn.  In an hour they will be windows again, revealing the woods beyond and hopefully an old friend.  I recall an earlier haiku;

We work together

You store pine cones for winter

I fill a blank page

 

No more excuses.  With tea made, I sit down and turn on the computer.  While it fires up, I extract the first of hundreds of poems which need to be polished and brought into the light. 

A Storyteller's Process: How Nature Supports Me

I am familiar with the creative release that a good walk can provide.

It’s one of the most well known inspirational activities, along with having a bath. There’s something about the inwardness they induce, along with the mechanical process of habit, that allows my mind to wander, sometimes along the most fantastical loops and avenues of imagination. Often work that was stuck can come dramatically unstuck, or a new idea can come seemingly from nowhere.

Walking in nature adds another dimension. Not only can I commune with myself in imaginative ways, but in doing so can find myself immersed in the vastly elemental, or the intricately particular, enraptured by the beauty of colour, movement or sound, or plunged into battle with weather, rocks and other natural obstacles.

I can identify, in my mind, with anything from an ear of corn, or a woodlouse to a buzzard or oak tree or – if I’m so lucky – stag. I can engage with all the symbolism and dreamscapes drawn from the natural in art and writing.

I can connect to the past and future beyond human measures of time, or find myself at one with the present moment in all its unfolding complexity and richness.

For me there are a couple of particularly productive places to wander, where I will always regret it if I have forgotten to take a notebook to write down my thoughts.

I’m extraordinarily lucky to live by the sea, giving me rugged inland landscape as well as beaches, horizons, and that extraordinary west coast light that has inspired painters and sculptors as well as writers.

A couple of years ago, the shoreline and the rhythm of the ocean were inspiring my thinking. Presently it is a particular sub-tropical garden that was once a monastery vineyard and looks over the coast to a view of St Michael’s Mount. The seascape is breathtaking, but no more so than looking closely at the plants growing there, at their fractal geometric patterns, their dramatic colour and shape, at the way they filter light, their natural cycles of rebirth and decay or the sound of the stream mingled with the soughing of the majestic summer trees.

Sometimes I sit in a gardener’s hut, making stream-of-consciousness notes, channeling myself into an almost visionary state.

At other times, as on my last visit, I flop onto the grass, thinking my mind is empty and exhausted, only to roll over, see the swallows zipping across the space in predatory arcs, and suddenly find my brain is embarking on a poem.

It doesn’t always produce a finished piece of work – though many of my favourite completed poems have come from walks there – but this particular garden, with its sights, sounds, smells, textures, layered symbols of birth, fertility, death and renewal, never fails to inspire me. 

Mushrooming Words

We head into the dark centre of the forest, where even the intense sunlight of Southern France can only sometimes penetrate, freckling the ground.

The tall, skinny pines wave wildly in the wind. Underfoot is a spongy layer of pines cones, decaying leaves and the bristling shells of last year’s chestnuts. Everything is mud brown, except the swathes of green ferns that fill the clean mountain air with a smell like freshly cut grass.

To find the small, early season Girolle mushrooms, I will have to learn how to really SEE. The more I can see, the better I will write. I clamber over fallen tree trunks. Creepers lasso my feet. The ferns give way under me and I sink into the swamp. The pine branches that I grab for are hollow, and break off in my grazed hands. There’s an area of newly crushed ferns the size of a large pig. The Sanglier (wild boar), have been there.

There is no sun to steer by now and I am disorientated. It’s difficult to scan the ground and stay in touch with my companions at the same time. I lose sight of them, and the sound of them fades away too.

Fear spikes me. Then I hear the screeching, the rasping of wild creatures.

The fear is terrible for a moment, but there is no-where to run to, so I just stay put. I listen to the sounds, increasingly awe-filled.

After a time something shifts, and I realise I’m doing what I went there to do. The wildness is no longer ‘out there’. I’m no longer pushing it away. And what I’ve experienced I will be able to express later in words. A human call rescues me, reassures me. Apparently the noises are just the stems of trees rubbing against each other in the wind. I’m almost disappointed. Back to the treasure hunt.

Several times in the next three hours I trumpet with joy one minute, only to deflate the next.

I find a mushroom whose stem excretes milk. There’s another one that under its fleshy umbrella is flecked with red, like spilt wine. But both of these are dangerous, not to be touched.

Then, at last I spy Girolles, their sandy yellow canopies blossoming out of the moss. And the elation answers all the fears. When I eat one it tastes, surprisingly, of pepper. I take the harvest home with me, and later, the vivid experience of the day works its way through me and out, weaving itself into words.