Look to nature
Writing fiction – especially during the early, inspiration-seeking moments – requires establishing your personal preconditions for creativity, and preparing to inhabit different states of being. Each element of the writing process has its own energy and it helps to recognise what stage you are at, and what you need to draw inspiration from to move...
One person trying to be three or four
Not many of my days are the same but the range they cycle through remains consistently varied. Let’s take a random sample, say, yesterday, and see what happened in 24 hours of my writing life… Weather: 15 degrees and torrential rain. Bondi Beach, Edge of the World. It hasn’t stopped raining for four days, the sort of water-sheets you only get...
Véronique Tadjo: Listen to the trees
French-Ivorian writer, academic and artist Véronique Tadjo’s spellbinding novel In the Company of Men draws on personal testimonies from medical workers and those affected by the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as oral traditions of storytelling, to create an urgent modern fable about the strength and fragility of life on...
Fiction and climate change
Our dog used to have minor health issues, and so we often had to come up with inventive ways of giving her pills. Many a morning I had a soggy pill spat out in my face, Lumina the dog with her beady eye daring me to try that again. It was not tasty, it was...
A symphony of life
The daughter of a biologist, the wife of a biologist, and the mother of a biologist, it’s safe to say that Kathleen Dean Moore has an affinity for biology, environmentalism specifically, and comes across as a staunch activist concerning the deleterious effects of climate change in her most recent collection of essays Earth’s Wild Music:...
From Tiger Girl
Pascale Petit’s new poetry collection marks a shift from the Amazonian rainforests of her previous work to explore her grandmother’s Indian heritage and the fauna and flora of subcontinental jungles. The ‘Tiger Girl’ of the title is the grandmother, with her tales of wild tigers, but also the endangered predators Petit encountered in Central India. The...
The hunter who crossed a continent
The last hunter in the village of Lalaoran, which in my dialect of Paiwanese means “the first ray of dawn’s light”, has pairs of hand and feet that were given to him by the ancestors, and he has wisdom that helps him coexist with the mountain. When I was a boy, what I liked to...
The view from below
Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey has its roots in three ‘surfacings’ that occurred in the spring and summer of 2010: the explosion of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, the Deep Water Horizon blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, and the entrapment of 33 miners at the San José copper and gold mine in northern...
Life on the edge
Rodrigo Fuentes’ Trout, Belly Up is an extraordinary collection of tales that weave together to create a dark picture of contemporary rural Guatemala. The stories coalesce around Don Henrik, a kind but unlucky landowner of Scandinavian descent, whose abortive agricultural projects include trout, cardamom and melon farming. We hear from family members and employees how his attempts...
The noise of ice: Antarctica
MEN WANTED for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success. Ernest Shackleton expedition advertisement, 1900 One day, in a bookshop in London, I stumbled across a book about Shackleton. I was struck by his character, and his spirit of...
The marginal world
The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely...
