Centre for Environmental Humanities
One of the UK’s leading centres for research on the environmental humanities
The hearse stopped at the crossroads – two lanes folded like ribbons. It was left or right to either end of the hamlet. The left lane led to the church, now decommissioned, while the right made its way to the family farm.
‘Why has it stopped?’ I asked from the back seat.
There was a brief pause. My mother said: ‘They’re giving him one last look.’ And then the hearse turned left towards the graveyard.
Dr Davina Quinilivan (Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol) introduces her forthcoming book, Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration, a blend of nature-writing, magical realism and memoir, which will be published by Little Toller in Spring 2022.
I am born of a colonial past and indigenous tribeswomen from Burma. I fashion new things from these old maps. Here and there. Different orientations. I do not name these new continents: the only gesture to the language of naming is the word ‘Shalimar’.
My book is an account of a period during which my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, my departure from our family home with my husband, the varying rural places we lived in the Home Counties, transitory, as I wrote my PhD thesis, and the imagined memories and stories which helped shape my perception of the world. It is a song, a lyric-memory, a fever-dream. Like the work of the lungs, this story is about the breathing in of a new continent: a meditation on the ever shifting nature of ‘home’ which is hopeful and new. Like the symmetry of the lungs, this book is divided into two parts: the story of the ten years I lived through the loss of my father, and the thoughts I’ve had about cinema and literature, the ‘second breaths’ I have taken as a writer after this period in my life. As postscript, it ends with a reflection on Devon, our new home, the place where I intend to lay my father’s ashes after ten years, in the summer of 2020.
Implied by the subheading which refers to ‘Place and Migration’ is this books’ investment in forms of navigation, orientation and exploration. In other words, more intimate geographies. Imagine Madame Scudery’s 17th century French map of an imaginary land, a ‘Carte du tendre’ (a map of tender). My map is both real and abstract, expressed through my reflections on journeying into Deep England, moving out of our family home, and narratives, impressions and ‘field notes’ which form a way towards a new ‘orientation’ of identity.
In ‘The English Patient’, Michael Ondaatje tells a story strongly rooted in the interrogation of imperialism, ownership, naming, Colonial identity and the fault lines of those systems which prove to be corrosive for his protagonists, a collective who must find new expression through tragic losses and indelible scars. Sensuous and sensory, the body has its own intelligence and this transcends all of language. It is no wonder Katherine chooses to entertain her husband’s exploration team with an ancient tale from Herodotus, the story of Candaules and the ring which makes its wearer invisible. To make the body invisible is the greatest act of imperialism, an expression of power which erases what is written on the body, or remembered through the skin. There is no sand, nor desert drift, in my own book, instead, there are forests and fields. Everything is a racking of vision at close-range, because my hand is better than any cartographic illusion. For some, this might come to represent a form of psycho-geography which the art historian Giuliana Bruno writes of in her book ‘Atlas of Emotion’ in which knowledge is embedded in the senses and vision is implicated in sensory experience; her pyscho-geographical analyses reflect a kind of lived experience of space that is antithetical to the penetrating, scopophilic gaze of Bauderlaire’s flaneur.
Curiosity came to signify a particular desire to know, which, for a period, was encouraged constantly to move, expanding in different directions. Such cognitive desire implies a mobilization that is drift. It is not only implicated in the sensation of wonder . . . but located in the experience of wander
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion
I am a daughter of generations of Colonials, complicated by the knowledge that the women in my family, my great-grandmothers, descend from ethnic minorities, indigenous tribes and diasporas from Burma and India, Portuguese Kerala and the Shan hills. Within this history is the fact that my grandfathers were powerful colonials, from France, Germany and England. So, naturally, I immediately likened my father to Almasy, as he lay dying and speaking in an accented voice, English and Exotic (they called him Yul Brenner in the hospital). Yet, it is rather me who has become this mercurial figure. I have, finally, reckoned with that here.
In my younger days, I sought kinship, of any kind, and wisdom through the writings of Hanif Kureishi, Bidisha, Arundhati Roy (I bought The God of Small Things with a school book token) and Zadie Smith (a few years older than me and also from West London), then, bell hooks, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Said. In my late twenties, my father died and through this loss came a deeper exploration, an archaeological unearthing, of ‘home’, of entangled life and maps, journeys and territories, notably as I wondered, gypsy-like, at odds with everything, as I navigated through Deep England.
I started writing this book in the winter of 2011. By this point, and prior to my final migration to Devon, with my young family, we had moved several times though Surrey and Berkshire, sporadically interrupted with visits to Suffolk, Norfolk and Kent, reading Roger Deakin and Celia Fiennes, Jini Lash’s Suffolk Song Cycle, Ronald Blythe’s Arkenfield, Derek Jarman and Sylvia Plath. In Surrey, I found myself in a forest for the first time in my life. In Hampshire, I encountered the rituals of rural life including wassailing and grand corridors of oak trees which sheltered me as I breast-fed our first child. In Devon, I met a shepherd and women whispering into the lichen on an old ash tree as we recovered from a disastrous move, a difficult time doubled back and tightened further by the global pandemic which spread in 2020. Through all these things, I learned about trees and moss, red soil and acorns trodden by ruby red herds of cows, things which in their own, small symphony of life, enabled a sense of futurity. This is how we make new maps.
An extract from the book features in the Arts Council funded literary journal The Willowherb Review, edited by Jessica J. Lee, a peer-reviewed publication which brings together writers from under represented communities.
Dr Pippa Marland (Bristol, Dept of English) has published a new paper in Green Letters, on rewilding and the ‘new georgic’ in recent nature writing by George Monbiot, Isabella Tree, and James Rebanks. The abstract of the article is copied below.
This essay explores the representation of the concepts of rewilding, wilding and regenerative farming in contemporary nature writing, focusing on George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2013), Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018), and James Rebanks’ English Pastoral (2020). It contextualises farming in the broad social, economic and biopolitical arena of the 20th century, and in literary terms reflects on the rupture in the georgic tradition post-World War 2, in order to understand the current tension between conservation and agriculture. The essay also investigates the deployment of the literary tropes of the wild, the pastoral and the georgic in these texts, and concludes by proposing the emergence of a ‘new georgic’ in which the farmer does not simply wrestle with nature in order to produce food but is engaged in producing nature itself.
Pippa Marland, ‘Rewilding, Wilding, and the New Georgic in Contemporary Nature Writing’, Green Letters (2021)
A post by Dr Pippa Marland (University of Bristol Department of English, and Centre for Environmental Humanities)
This time last year, in my role as one of the Land Lines team at the University of Leeds, I helped to organise a crowd-sourced online Spring nature diary, in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Trust. Taking place on and in the week following the 2020 Spring Equinox, the event coincided with the UK entering its first period of lockdown. As people uploaded their written and visual snapshots it became apparent that not only were we seeing a picture of spring arriving across the country, but also witnessing the cumulative record of what nature meant to people at a time of personal, national and global crisis.
In April 2020 this dimension of the diary was reported in The Guardian in an article that highlighted the way in which the entries spoke of the solace and hope nature offered at this time. The piece also referred to the breadth of the public response to the event and, in fact, the diary had been envisioned as contributing to a democratisation of nature writing through welcoming a range of new perspectives to a genre that throughout its history has been something of a monoculture.
As a result of the Guardian coverage, Rupert Lancaster, Non-fiction Publisher at Hodder and Stoughton, got in touch with me to suggest a collaboration. He was keen to develop the idea of a seasonal almanac, and we immediately contacted Anita Roy, author of A Year in Kingcombe, which traces the course of year in a Dorset nature reserve, to see if she would be interesting in co-editing the book with me. From the start, we wanted to curate a series of essays by diverse, distinctive voices – brilliant authors who might not be immediately associated with the nature writing genre, but whose work nevertheless often revolves around the subject of nature. We also wanted to commission essays that represented a kind of dialogue – with the British landscape, with people’s individual and collective cultural histories, with ideas of ethnicity, disability, sexuality, gender and class, and with existing literary traditions of writing about the natural world.
Anita and I drew up a wish list, hoping to mix emerging authors with some well-established names. Nearly all of them said yes. From early on we had the support of the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, who allowed us to take a passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for our epilogue, and it was while discussing Simon’s contribution to the project that Rupert suggested as a title for the collection the phrase ‘gifts of gravity and light’ from Simon’s poem ‘You’re Beautiful’. We’d been mulling over numerous different possibilities, but this one resonated very powerfully with us. It symbolised the kind of balance we were looking for – between the weight and darkness of writing about nature in the midst of the Anthropocene and the inspiration and illumination that can still be involved in exploring the natural world and our place in it.
We were delighted when Bernardine Evaristo, a tireless champion of diversity in all genres of writing and winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, agreed to write the foreword for the book. Jackie Kay, the outgoing Scottish Makar, also gave us her gracious permission to reprint her New Year poem ‘Promises’ as the epigraph. As the collection progressed, Anita and I assessed our own role as editors and realised that we didn’t want to write a standard introduction to the volume. Instead we decided to contribute our own pieces of creative writing – equinoctial ‘hinges’ for the spring and autumn sections of the book.
Now, a year on, we are checking the proofs and today we’re revealing the beautiful cover, which features a kestrel, or windhover, made by the artist Zack Mclaughlin. It has the names of the contributors – Kaliane Bradley, Testament, Michael Malay, Tishani Doshi, Jay Griffiths, Luke Turner, Raine Geoghegan, Zakiya McKenzie, Alys Fowler, and Amanda Thomson – all fanned out on the bird’s lifted wing.
Michael Malay is, like me, a member of the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bristol, and is rapidly gaining recognition for his nature writing, being shortlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize in 2019.
The book’s content reflects not only the diversity of the authors’ voices but the endlessly changing natural world itself. There are meditations on mud – in a Birmingham park and in the trenches of the First World War – on greeting the arrival of cherry blossom in East London with a Cambodian New Year’s dance; on seeing nature pushing through the cracks of a Manchester pavement; on watching sea otters at play in the summer sun; on imagining eels gathering in the dark waters of the Bristol Channel; on leaving India to spend summers in Wales; on hearing Romany family stories of celebrating the hop harvest; on experiencing the icy stillness of winter in the Cairngorms or remembering the ‘sun drunk’ days of a Jamaican childhood in the chill of a British Christmas.
For me, working on this collection has been an absolute gift of light in a dark year, as has collaborating with Anita Roy and the team at Hodder and Stoughton. Gifts of Gravity and Light will be published on 9th July 2021 and is available for pre-order from Waterstones, Bookshop.org and Amazon, among other outlets.
We had exciting news at the CEH this week as publishers Hodder & Stoughton announced they have commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited by Dr Pippa Marland (Bristol, Department of English) and Anita Roy. The collection features Dr Michael Malay (Bristol, Department of English), alongside some of the most exciting voices in contemporary nature writing.
We’re pleased to share the press release here:
HODDER & STOUGHTON COMMISSIONS ‘A NATURE ALMANAC FOR THE 21ST CENTURY’
Hodder & Stoughton has commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, which will take the reader, season by season, through one year of the natural world in all its biodiversity, as experienced by those who, for reasons of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, upbringing or disability, are not always seen or heard when it comes to nature writing. Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo will write the foreword and the title is taken from a poem by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.
These writers come to the natural world from a different place to the ‘traditional’ nature writer, so the reader will see the seasons through new eyes, focusing on details that have perhaps previously gone unnoticed, or finding nature in places we’ve not thought to look before. Whether it’s the seashore or an inner-city street corner, the natural world is a part of our daily lives, just as we are all part of nature.
Hodder & Stoughton acquired world rights and will publish Gifts of Gravity and Light in July 2021.
Hodder Non-Fiction Publisher Rupert Lancaster explains:
‘Nature writing is one of the most popular genres today and yet it is still disproportionately dominated by writers from very similar backgrounds, making it something of a literary monoculture. Anita Roy and Pippa Marland were so positive when I approached them with this idea and are creating something very special. It feels like a book that is needed, so I’m very proud that Hodder is the publisher.’
Editors Anita Roy and Pippa Marland comment:
‘Gifts of Gravity and Light will explore a year of nature in ways that will challenge and inspire the reader to look again at what is around us. We wanted to include authors who are well known, though not necessarily as nature writers, as well as relatively new voices. All are from diverse backgrounds and we believe will offer fresh perspectives in a genre that often feels predictable in all sorts of ways.’
The contributors each write about a season that has a special resonance for them:
SPRING:
Kaliane Bradley is an Anglo-Cambodian writer, editor and dance/theatre critic based in London. Her work has appeared in Catapult, The Willowherb Review, The Tangerine, Somesuch Stories and Granta, among others.
Pippa Marland, co-editor of this collection, writes on the spring equinox (see biog below).
Testament is a Hip Hop MC, beatboxer and the author of the play Black Men Walking, which was inspired by the Sheffield Black Men Walk for Health group and by historical documentation of black walkers in the Peak District centuries ago.
SUMMER:
Michael Malay was shortlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize. He grew up in Indonesia and Australia and has written for The Clearing and Dark Mountain. He is working on a new book entitled Late Light.
Tishani Doshi is an acclaimed dancer, poet and novelist of mixed Gujarati and Welsh parentage. Her latest poetry collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and her recent novel Small Days and Nights was shortlisted for the RCA Ondaatje Award.
Jay Griffiths is an award-winning author of more than six critically acclaimed books, including Wild: An Elemental Journey. She is a passionate advocate for the living world and the cultures that protect it. She lives in Wales.
AUTUMN:
Luke Turner’s first book, Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize for nature writing and longlisted for the Polari Prize for first book by an LGBT+ writer. He is co-founder and editor of The Quietus.
Anita Roy, co-editor of this collection, writes on the autumn equinox (see biog below).
Raine Geoghegan is a prize-winning author, poet and story-teller of Welsh, Irish and Romany descent. She has recently explored her Romany heritage in two poetry collections: Apple Water: Povel Panni and they lit fires: lenti hatch o yog.
WINTER:
Zakiya Mckenzie was chosen in 2019 to be a writer-in-residence for Forestry England. A passionate spokeswoman for trees, she was born in London, grew up in Jamaica and now lives in Bristol where she is studying for her PhD.
Alys Fowler is an urban nature writer who combines horticulture, biology and biography in her journalism and in her acclaimed book Hidden Nature, which traces both the Birmingham canals and her coming out as a gay woman.
Amanda Thomson is a Scottish visual artist and writer of who teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. Her vivid collection of words and images, from an owl’s call on a summer’s evening (“huam”) to walking in wet mud (“splorroch”), make up her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature. Her writing has been published in the anthology Antlers of Water, the Willowherb Review and in Gutter magazine.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Anita Roy is a writer, editor and publisher of mixed British and Indian heritage. She spent twenty years living and working in New Delhi, until returning to the UK in 2015. Her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Clearing and Dark Mountain. She has recently published an acclaimed novel for children and the nature diary A Year at Kingcombe: The Wildflower Meadows of Dorset.
Pippa Marland is an author and academic, whose research focuses on the nature writing genre, especially the representation of small islands and farming communities. Her creative writing draws on her childhood experiences of living in Ghana, Malta, West Wales, and the South of England, as well as her lifelong islomania. Her work has appeared in Earthlines, The Clearing, and the forthcoming Women on Nature.
For more information please contact:
Maria Garbutt-Lucero maria.garbutt-lucero@hodder.co.uk
Hodder & Stoughton, Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DZ