Your Own Carrigskeewaun

The ghosts are finished. Now it's time to write about nature.

Here’s Part 1 of a substack by Clare, with reflections on writing place. It includes reflections on the writing process, with unpublished writing by Clare, plus two poetry prompts.

I’ve done it. I’ve finished writing the book.

I Know What I Saw will be my fifth poetry collection with Bloodaxe, yet bringing this book to completion has been an unfamiliar process. Like never before, I’ve seen how the ordering of collection is its own act of creation – producing new narratives, new poetry even, as poems meet and synthesise. I experienced, to a new depth, how the extended process of drafting and editing – including experimentation with capitalisation, bold, white spaces, punctuation – is not just a matter of presentation. It is transformative, generative: it creates new voices and characters, new stories.

It's been a time of great learning, and I will certainly write more about it. But for the last few months I’ve felt impatient for this stage of writing to come to an end. My mind was full of the next book, fizzing with green excitement. I’ve had my fill of ghosts – I want to write about moss and shards and trees.

This month, I’ve also been delivering 30 Days Wild Writing every morning with Miriam Darlington. You might think that delivering an hour-long workshop is a fairly undemanding workday - but alongside other tasks like organising the Mass Wuther on the Haworth Moors (more of that in the coming weeks!), I’ve often found myself up past midnight researching – amongst other things - the romantic lives of badgers, the motivations of sledging crows.

It's a relief then, to come back to land, and specifically to my love of it. My as-yet-unstructured ideas for the next book cluster around my relationship with a small patch of forest in Calderdale - and in a recent Wild Writing session, I was able to express and explore this. The rest of this substack is based on this session – and it comes in two parts. I hope you enjoy it, and as usual, I would love to hear your responses.

Part 1: a Poetic Square Mile.

Topophilia, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the love of, or emotional connection to, a particular place or physical environment. The term was created by the poet W.H. Auden, and according to him, it’s that particularity which brings poetry to life.

In short, having a deep connection with a particular place leads to better writing. According to the “topophilia hypothesis”, it also leads to better living: improved mental and physical health, and a more sustainable with the environment. This is especially true for people who, like Gillian Clarke, have a deep connection with the place where they live. Beery et al (2015) argue that this might be rooted in an evolutionary drive: historically, people who bonded with their own landscapes understood them better, and were more likely to hunt, forage, farm and survive them. These days, the hypothesis suggests, a deep connection with a landscape means we are likely to know and understand that landscape more thoroughly - its strengths, its needs – and to care for it more effectively.

What is that particular landscape for you? Write it down. The more specific you can be, the better. It doesn’t have to be grand, or beautiful, or even rural. It could be a disused railway, your garden, a particular park. For Alys Fowler in Peatlands, it’s Borth Bog, or Cors Fochno. For the poet Harriet Tarlo and her partner Judith Tucker, it’s the Fitties – an area of chalets and caravans on reclaimed salt marsh near Grimsby. Gillian Clarke lives in Blaen Cwrt in Talgarreg, south Ceredigion, and describes it as her poetic 'milltir sgwâr' (square mile). For Michael Longley, that 'milltir sgwâr' was Carrigskeewaum. Here he is reflecting on his relationship with that landscape, in an interview reproduced on teachnet.

Carrigskeewaun changed my life radically. It changed my poetry.

When I go to the West of Ireland I don't go there to have colourful talk with the natives. I go there to look at birds and flowers and the beautiful countryside.

When I see birds my heart stops and my stomach churns over...they're a symbol for me of the human soul, of spiritual aspiration.

I would hope, that in my poems, that I am encouraging people to feel reverence and wonder in the natural world.

Carrigskeewaun is unbelievably beautiful - it's the most magical place in the world for me. It's the Garden of Eden and I often think about it. If I am depressed I go for a walk in my mind up the path to the cottage around the little ruined out houses and I stand taking in the view even though I am in Belfast or London or New York.

The most urgent political problems are ecological: how we share the planet with the plants and the other animals. My nature writing is my most political. In my Mayo poems I am not trying to escape from political violence. I want the light from Carrigskeewaun to irradiate the northern darkness. Describing the world in a meticulous way is a consecration and a stay against damaging dogmatism.

...a poet's mind should be like Noah's ark, there should be room for all the animals.

For ten minutes, write about the first time you encountered this piece of land. Write your earliest memories – describe what it was like to fall in love with it.

Last year I ran a series of workshops to raise money to work I was carrying out with a small group of friends. Together, we were clearing and restoring a small patch of land by a river in the Calder Valley; a strange landscape of ancient woodland and slag heaps; a river over hung with ivy, rubble and pits and trenches. What follows is a version of my notes for that workshop:

“I grew up in Burnley, in the seventies and eighties. Some landscapes welcome you in - soft valleys, rolling hills; waves breaking on white sand beaches. Burnley was not like this. My first landscapes were back streets, the choked industrial river, the green canal. Shut-down mills and their chimneys, terraces in tight rows. Over it all, the bent back of Pendle Hill, its enormous shoulder set against the sky.

On our moors, nature lashed down and howled and burned. In the town, it grew on wastelands, in moss on damp brick walls, through tarmac and concrete back yards. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to challenging landscapes: bogs, old tips, backstreets, miles of moor. Slag heaps and culverted rivers, old sheds.

Or perhaps it’s the paths that I’ve walked. I started to self-injure at ten; the bulk of my twenties were spent in psychiatric hospitals. Despite my initial expectations, these were not stately homes with curving, poplar-lined drives. They were flat-roofed and strip-lit. They smelt of stale smoke and blood and sweat.

On Broadoak, I watched one tree from my window. On 2Y, I looked out over the city; by night, there were arteries of lights. I was twenty-seven when I left the wards for good. By autumn, the maple in our garden was brilliant red. I know how to walk to the centre through a series of parks and green spaces; I didn’t know birds could sing so loud.

Some landscapes make you look hard for the beauty. Some days, there’s no beauty at all.

I want to tell you about a wood I love. I want to tell you that I was caught there by the landowners that year, I ignored the “PRIVATE WOOD KEEP OUT”. I want to tell you how much I love old bottles, their glow and richness; the wood was full of them and so was my bag. I want to tell you that we talked, and they told me how bottle diggers how felled the trees, how there were deer and 49 species of bird and the diggers left trenches ten foot deep. I want to tell you about what I said, that surely we could work together, those who love history and those who love birds and trees – how we could work together, those who own land and those who don’t, those who love people and words, those who love broken things, those who love badgers.

I want to tell you what happened next”.

I’m fascinated by range of lands we fall in love with – what brings us to connect with our places, in all their vast particularity? Of course, each of us could point to the features – the plants, animals, atmosphere, memories - which explain their compelling appeal. But love of a particular place is, at heart, a deeply personal experience - there’s something within us which draws us to that place. And that’s what I’m inviting you to explore.

Why do you love the places we love? For ten minutes, consider what is it about you – your history, your body, your psychology – which has brought you to love your particular place. What are the needs and desires it meets in you?

In Part 2 of this substack, which will be made available to paying subscribers in the coming weeks, I’ll continue my story of the land, and offer another two ways of engaging poetically with your own Carrigskeewaun, your own Fittie, your own 'milltir sgwâr’.

If you’d like to join our daily Wild Writing sessions, tickets are still available – we’d love to welcome you! If you can’t make a 9am live workshop, recordings of all sessions are available - plus there’s a pay-what-you-can ticket option for people are low- or unwaged, and who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1321753463189?aff=oddtdtcreator