Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bittern

Wednesday Afternoon

Conferences have to walk it like they talk it, so just as it would be wrong to have a technology conference in a place without technology (believe me, I've been to them!) a nature conference that is purely indoors would seem a little bit of a missed opportunity. Luckily, New Writing Partnership have been working with the RSPB these last few months, and so with them, and the nature writers Richard Mabey and Mark Cocker, we headed off to Strumpshaw Fen. The drizzle stayed off, despite a big cloud over the weather map when I woke up this morning, and we had a pleasant hour and a half walking through the maintained land of the fen. A marsh harrier was seen carrying a pheasant to its young; a family of coots were having an afternoon out on the water; and finally, in the distance, a bittern was spotted, poking its long neck above the grass. Twenty writers, some with binoculars, others straining to see, looked over for the distinct neck in the distance, but like a magic eye picture where you're not quite sure if you've seen it, not all of us managed to see it. However, we definitely saw the bizarrely beautiful bee orchid, a plant that has flowers that looks like bees, and being self-pollinating, annoyed Darwin no end. Stubborn little fellow, the bee orchid.

Writing Catastrophe: Nature and Panic

Wednesday Morning

The second salon session's title "Nature and Panic" was a sombre title. In the idyllic surroundings of the UEA campus, where the only possible threat is the physical size of the numerous rabbits (clearly being fed on student ready meals), the ominous world can seem along way from us. Adam Thorpe gave the first presentation, and followed on from some observations he'd made yesterday about having a particular view of time. On an archeological dig a few years ago, he'd been amazed by how an ancient site had brought up evidence of a hearth that had been used for hundreds of years. Our ancestors it seems believed in the eternal - without a written history, and with peoples spread out across the land, a sense of permanence, if not of life, certainly of existence was commonplace. If the history of this planet was revisited as the journey from London to Norwich as had been posited during Monday night's lecture, we are apparently just coming into Norwich station - but Thorpe baulked at this: for what comes after? This, he insisted, was not scepticism about the science, but about the almost theological tenets of the climate change debate, with scientists as priests. Surely, science was equally to blame in getting us into this mess? Thorpe's often written about history, but with a contemporary sensibility - and made the link, between medieval indulgences, available to the rich to forgive their sins, with modern ideas of carbon offsets to forgive our "carbon sins. Our panic is both a media one, and a Western one - as other contributors to the debate pointed out. For those in Britain and America, our fears and perils are different than those in, say, Eastern Europe, where freedom, and the loss thereof, remains a living memory. Whilst in India, just beginning to gain some of the benefits of a growing economy, the idea of climate change as the key issue of the day, or a reason to "panic" would seem absurd...a marginal and marginalised affair. It was pointed out that though on the one hand there seemed to be a need for some trans-national movement for ecological change, the risks of ecological Robert Mugabe were real.

If our sense of panic is so embedded now in the Western psyche - then how writers deal with this was a more difficult issue. We'd moved on, it seemed from yesterday's thoughts around being true about nature, to something more difficult to articulate. Yet, at the same time climate change, like 9/11, was in danger of becoming a media event, with the artistic imperative forced upon us for that reason. Should we, the writers in the room, be making some kind of statement, lying as if dead on the rabbit-plagued lawns of UEA?

C.K. Williams, in the second part of the day, talked about his own writing, and how increasingly climate change had become his subject, finding its way into many of his poems. He talked about early man, the Paleolithic cave painting from 30,000 years ago, where, it appeared, an aesthetic was already in place. Our response to nature could, even that far back, already encompass humour, aestheticism, even love for our landscape. Man has already suffered climate change, or a changing climate, with the virtual wiping out of the reindeer in an earlier age, causing unknown catastrophes from which we only somehow survived. He spoke about how the sense of dread that you get from knowing more about climate change can certainly affect a writer who has takes a depressive view on things; but also, that as a writer - the task is always to look for beauty. He spoke about the lack of hope in a novel like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" - a book I'd packed in my bag on the way down to Norwich, but had left for another time - with its incredibly sadistic, dystopian view of the future: our darkest fate if you like. I probably wasn't the only person in the room wanting a little light at this point, enter stage left Beckett, who, always seems to turn up in conversation when there's some brooding to be done. A need for a kind of optimism, even if it's only humour, or perhaps humanity, becomes a necessity. There's always the search for beauty even if its a broken world. I don't know if we all agreed with the dark pessimism that was sketched out here: after all, even in the worst of times, art - and great art can flourish. Though, its perhaps not the very worst of times; compare the flowerings of Weimar Germany to what happened afterwards, or the virtual extinction of music in post-revolutionary Ethiopia. Was there a certain pathology in extreme situations that led the writer into a dark place? If so, what was the way out? It was a rather nervous laugh we gave when Gwyneth Lewis pointed out the mordant truth, that people often got to beauty spots to kill themselves.

A panic hadn't really gripped hold of the group - but a sense that we still needed to tease out the mysteries of how to deal with a sense of "dread" - perhaps the west has had it since the 2nd World War - potential nuclear holocaust first, global warming second. Yet, may that be a better state than walking blindly into battle, because God and your country needs you? Like yesterday, both speakers gave detailed and learned "think pieces", adding history and philosophy to yesterday's ecological expertise, and demand reviewing, revisiting, when they're put up on the web, following the event.

The Planet Has The Last Laugh

When we talk about saving the planet, what we're really talking about is saving ourselves. Species come and go, the planet keeps on turning. Here's a fantastic poem which reflects on just such matters from Jenny Toms, an RSPB worker who attended Mark Cocker's Reads and Writes workshop at Strumpshaw Fen.

Horsetail

The rain brings back the smell
The memories of ancient things
The sodden peat, driving out new life
From decaying dreams
of bark-dark canopies and liverwort.
Horsetail, not just clinging on, but thriving
through the aeons,
makes the solitary tern
seem a new strange thing.
A sudden happening.
Brief, then gone.
Too fancy; too new-fangled
to survive for long
And flowers - fashionistas:
what use for them?
next to the ages of this wise old man
Horsetail.
Who knew the world long
before horses - or tails - had come along.

A Tuesday Six Pack

Tuesday Evening

The "overnights" are never easy - those first cut reviews of the night before's "show" - but at least with this week's events they're delicious one-offs, be there or its gone. With 3 poets tonight in Norwich Millennium library our accompaniment this time was a jazz band tuning up. Libraries used to be built with walls as thick as castle keeps, but in our "open plan" present, everything runs into each other. Never mind, for another packed audience came along for C.K. Williams, Gwyneth Lewis and Adam Zagajewski, each given a rounded 20 minutes. There's all kinds of poetry readings, of course, but twenty minutes, just poetry, with three poets of intelligence and reputation, is perhaps an unbeatable model. They all commented wryly on the theme of "nature", since poets, good ones at least, don't write to theme - but it's rare to find a poet who hasn't seen something in the natural world to admire. Zagajewski read in translation, except for a short poem he read both in Polish and English, and the value of having a regular translator could be seen when he gave us a very recent poem, freshly minted, freshly translated. Williams half name-checked his Polish friend in one of his new poems; the opportunity to read something new - as well as something old - one of the advantages of the "twenty minute set." The last poem he read was a parade of his personal saints - yet, these saints were poets, a reminder of how art itself can have the power of the spiritual. Whilst Lewis gave us a mix of poems, some sad, some funny. Norwich is lucky indeed to have so many poets and other writers passing through its doors, and nipping out for a quick reading, such as this one. Before we moved on to a show at Norwich Arts Centre, everyone sat down for pizza. A pizza of course is very like a poem, From the outside it always looks rather familiar, a mix of dough, tomato, cheese and toppings. You need to bite into it to find its essense. I'm pleased to say, the pizza was delicious.

Norwich Arts Centre is in an old church, and as a result has both a grandness and a quirkiness to its layout. Tonight's show, "Turning up the Temperature" was a livelier, lighter kind of event. Performance poetry has sometimes been the bane of my artistic life living in Manchester, but arriving to find Ben Mellor sat on an exercise on the edge of the stage, was a surreal start. A one-man show, (albeit with audience assistance), Mellor gave us a performance, not just perfomance poetry, which generated its own energy (literally). He was followed by the Jamaican writer Kei Miller, who read both his poetry and fiction, to much acclaim; humorous, confident and orginal. I've been a little allergic to bands/artists singing in front of films ever since seeing the Beta Band many years ago, where all their musical genius couldn't quite hide how awful their student film backdrop was. Art students, eh? So apologies to Samia Malik, completing the evening, who sung and performed her set with confidence, if it took me a while to shake off my post-Beta Band aversion to film backdrops.

Nature and Nation

Tuesday Morning

The first session of the writers salon took place in the Council Chamber. We were sat around like knights of the round table, or perhaps, Alderman passing parking legislation... but so much nicer than being in a lecturer theatre, all facing forward. The theme before us, Nature and Nation, with the "unacknowledged legislators" including poets, non-fiction writers, memoirists, fiction writers, and, best of all, multitaskers. Last night's debate, primarily on climate change, had seen the imagination take a little bit of a backseat, as the heaviness of science's worst predictions seemed to label the creative writer as being either a denier or a propagandist. The writer, I've always thought, can sometimes go underground when faced with politicians, economists and... yes, scientists. A few years ago there was a big splash about poets like Lavinia Greenlaw writing about science in their work, poetry apparently requiring a specific relevance to time and place...

...so the first job of the day, I think, was a bit of untangling, an unburdening, if you like of the expectation that writers could somehow be enlisted in some environmental Peace Corp. The messages here were far more subtle. Gretel Erhlich has spent many years travelling with the inuit, and she was never less than fascinating. It was the detail that stood out: the mythologies of the people; their belief that over the ice horizon, was simply more ice; even the insistence that they are modern people (fax machines, portable radios), living an ancient, and endangered life. The danger, of course, comes from the changes to the ice, where even in the coldest February, the ice hasn't the thickness to carry sleighs; not the cold, but the turbulent waters underneath causing it to crack and shatter. "Nation" here defined itself, not with flags and anthems, but with ice, with polar bears and reindeer, with finding and sharing food. I'm reminded of Thomas Hardy's "Woodlanders", an enclave community, that is still holding on to an ancient way; the difference being that here it's not "progress" that is destroying the life, but the effects of progress. Her most important point, I think, iterated from the floor, was that if we lose these people and their lifestyle we lose an echo of our own past life, and with it the skills, the understanding that we might just need in the potentially turbulent future.

It wasn't so much that the naturalist and nature writer, Richard Mabey, had a different view, as a different subject. He talked more about the need for us - for writers - to have, and he put it bluntly, a less colonial attitude to nature. The emphasis on writers is to tell the truth, to get it right. Neither to sentimentalise nature by our reference to it as "our" landscape, nor to denigrate it when it's less than beautiful. It is not the snow leopard or the elephant whose extinction that will be unforgivable, but the insect life, the microbe life, the plant life. Extinction, we were reminded, is a relatively modern concept - not a comfortable one for theologians, I guess, and even problematic for Darwinists, with their emphasis on "natural selection."

How then to reconcile these complex messages? Mabey felt, not uncontroversially, that there was a duty now on writers to "get it right" when talking about nature; that using the moody landscape as a "prop" for our own melancholy was no longer enough. Teasing out how all writers - any writers - can take on board a responsibility that seems counter-intuitive to the creative process, was one of the day's - so far - unanswered questions. Mabey's other points perhaps got lost in the complexity - and politicisation - of the argument. His initial point had been how for much of his life he'd wanted to "own" a landscape, one where he'd lived for so long, and yet when illness led to him leaving, it also freed him. Our own "private" nations are adaptable, it seems, if we're willing to accept a different kind of citizenship. When owls arrived in his village, he had to dump his preconceptions of owl life, and think again, on their terms. This, it was agreed, was no longer a scientists' job; perhaps a writers.

I think everyone in the room will have had more things that they didn't say, than did, as both Mabey and Ehrlich, ably chaired by Jon Cook, were giving us the anti-Powerpoint, a polemical essay. Emerson, Dickens, Shakespeare, Stevens, Sebald, Thoreau, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Clare and Ruskin were mentioned in despatches, amongst others. Literature - great literature - changes us by letting us see the world through its prism, understanding more in the process. Though certain writers can appear to be express universal thought (wither the Lakes without Wordsworth for instance?) it is their individual sympathy and empathy (John Clare, suggested Mabey) that comes first. If, as Adam Zagajewski, maintained, the 20th century writers state of being was primarily that of "exile" - what of the 21st? I suggested that both of our "case studies", if you can call them that, the inuit community of Greenland, and the threatened Norfolk coast, were both, in their different way "margins", but ones which were increasingly valid to our understanding of what comes next.

Future Imperfect?

Monday Evening

The majority of the "worlds" writers arrived tonight, and there's something quite inspiring about a group of virtual strangers, with something in common, getting together. For what...? Well, that will come clearer over the next few days. A writer, at least should approach something like this, without preconceptions. I'm reminded of a country house mystery, we're all meeting in the drawing room, and haven't yet realised the chambermaid's been murdered in the kitchen with a staple gun. Yet, if tonight's debate, "Future Imperfect?" discussing the planet-in-peril, is anything to go by, the victim is already tagged, it's US. Prof. Andrew Watson gave us a cautionary history story about blue-green algae who manufactured the oxygen that took over the atmosphere and destroyed all life on the planet; leading the way (much, much later) for our evolution. Giles Foden, whose next novel, Turbulence concerns the weather conditions at D-Day (a kind of gung ho "Perfect Storm" perhaps), is investigating another kind of evolution - for that event remains one of the key events in our living memory. An imaginative writer can do justice to D-day, but to humanity as the next blue-green algae? The subject suddenly seems too big and serious for art; yet at the same time, artists, writers, poets - though rarely bellwethers (aside: I was very pleased, a few years ago, when I found out that the "bellwether" was nothing to do with the weather, but referred to the practice of tying a bell round the the neck of a castrated ram to lead the sheep home) are still something of the written conscience of a society. We don't have to go as far as Harold Bloom, who reckoned that Shakespeare showed us how to be ourselves, to appreciate that art is like a cultural flouride, providing a slow, counteraction to our decay.

Earlier in the pot-banging maelstrom of Norwich Millennium Library (Q. at what point in human history did libraries not just stop being silent, but became loud?) Mimi Khalvati and Adam Thorpe read bravely above the din. Mimi read from her book, the Meanest Flower. A question from the audience to Mimi said, "I'm a bloke, I only buy flowers for my missus when she's ill, so they don't really interest me that much." Men should be more careful in their appreciation of the dark beauty of flowers, there was many a husband who didn't recover from a bit of digitalis (the poisonous foxglove) in the soup. Nature always has its way.

Bishop's Garden: inspiration through the rain

At about 1pm yesterday afternoon, the rain was thundering down on the NWP tent, and spirits were sinking. Will anyone really come out in this weather? We talked of Dunkirk spirit and such, and said yes yes they will, and then all fell silent as the hail bounced off the tent. Yet at 2pm when the gates opened a steady stream of the truly great British public started coming through, just as the sun splashed out onto the green.

Half an hour later there was a queue for the ice-creams, children running round the maze, and much toing and froing from the cafe. Yet for many the beautiful Bishop's gardens served as a backdrop for the main event - the readings - which were delivered to a packed tent, despite all the other attractions on offer. It was easy to stay interested, as each reader delivered a little insight into their world and the world of their writing, and the general feeling was of wanting to hear more. Mark Cocker, Jay Griffiths and Richard Mabey all related how they turned to nature during periods of depression. Nature was presented not only as a salve, but as the essential base of our nature that we have to get back to. Griffiths elucidated most directly how the lack of 'Wild' is at the root of many of the social ills that we see today, however all the writers delivered the same insistent story - that we ignore our natural home at our peril. The joy of living more directly with the natural world was evident in the writing - from the colourful images of Guthrie's poems, to the poetic imagery in Cocker's Crow Country; all in all it was inspirational.

The kids showed us how it's done as well, running around through the flowers, and taking part in the many RSPB activities. Thanks to the RSPB, Charlie CrickCrack , all the authors, and of course all those who came out despite the showers...