Film: Rights of Nature

Watched by Phil Scraton:

Narrated by Ireland's fine singer-songwriter, poet, story-teller, and environmental activist John Spillane, Rights of Nature is a fine short film proposing the necessity of taking a 'journey of unlearning' to develop and progress a 'dialogue with nature'. It envisions a new socio-economic narrative for Ireland that resonates well beyond its shores.

It is self-evident that living beings are subjects despite consistent attempts to objectify the human experience, limit potential and impose restrictions on freedoms of thought, association and movement. We live in environments alongside non-human subjects consistently objectified as property to be used and discarded. Land is owned, enclosed, exploited and changed forever without consideration of long-term consequences for the future of life in its broadest definition.

The film asks what it means to claim ownership, to 'belong' within place, exploring the significance of cultural and spiritual inheritance and their connection to identity. It considers the destruction of culture, language and community through colonisation and its invidious political-economic exploitation and cultural subjugation; the objectification of place and the control of land through property law; the denial of access and the right of commons. It proposes a new dimension in approaching democratic rights.

The narrative challenges the assumption that nature is nothing more than property to be owned, developed, laid waste and destroyed by private interests but is essential to the construction and maintenance of communities through time. It calls for the defence of our environments against commercial exploitation and the clear evidence of harm. Only through personal engagement and collective activism, committed to challenging the short-termism of that commercial exploitation, will the health of communities, the land and seascapes be protected and advanced.

Together with the depth of his narration, John Spillane's music is woven into the film's dialogue.

Filmed and edited by Simon Wood
Directed by Peter Doran

Return to Lewis

By Ian Grosz:

It had been fifteen years since I had last sailed on the Lewis ferry. The largest of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis is separated from the mainland of Scotland by an often stormy stretch of sea known as the Minch, the crossing twice that of Dover to Calais. This distance, and its Celtic, Gaelic heritage, has maintained Lewis’s mystique in the imagination. Romanticised through the ages but found often lacking by its visiting authors, a series of historic writers from Johnson’s infamous eighteenth-century post-Union A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, to Louis MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch in 1937, have been less than kind about the islands.[1]

MacNeice, a Belfast born, Oxford educated poet, playwright, BBC producer, writer and critic, declares in the opening to his travelogue of the journey he took through the Hebrides, that ‘I doubt that I shall visit the Western Islands again.’ Filled with the memories of childhood visits to Connemara and the vicarious childhood memories of his father’s own Connemara childhood, MacNeice experienced an ‘out-of-placeness’ that came as a surprise on an island where he hoped to find something of his own ‘Celtic soul.’ 

‘What is shocking is to find an island invaded by the vices of the mainland,’ he says, his sentimental view of what life should be there, knocked off-kilter to find a crofter industrialise the weaving of Harris Tweeds, capitalising on the work and skills of his own community. Islands, no matter how romantic, are never as isolated and changeless as we might imagine. I sit at a window table and look out to Ullapool’s slowly shrinking harbourside cottages, and the mist and drizzle beginning to shroud the hills. The Summer Isles slip by to starboard and the boat passes quietly into the strangeness of the sea-swell and the mist, the horizon indistinct, a thin grey line between sea and sky. 

*

Driving off the boat and into the town, the years that have passed since I lived here suddenly contract to meet me. Nothing at first appears to have changed: like I have never left and am simply returning from a visit to the mainland, but I stop at a new supermarket to pick up some supplies before driving to Achmore where I will be staying ten miles south of Stornoway. The supermarket is full of teenagers on their lunchtime break from school, their universal Americanised accents shaped more by social media and Netflix than by the islands. At the checkout, the lady putting my shopping through the till is English.

The first morning I wake to find it wet and windy: the kind of wind that makes the rafters moan and snatches a car door from your hands. After breakfast I take a drive down the single-track road to Stornoway through the moor, chasing the ghost of Lewis poet Iain Crichton Smith. Crichton Smith had grown up in Lewis during the Second World War, learning English as a second language in school and leaving the islands to attend University in Aberdeen, before becoming a school teacher which he remained until he retired in Oban on the west coast of Scotland to write full-time in 1977. He was one of few island poets to find success writing in both English and Gaelic, and although he never returned to live on the island of his youth, it remained a fundamental part of his identity as both poet and person. 

Passing cold grey lochans alive with waves, and peatbanks signalled by rows of tattered plastic bags and upturned wheelbarrows scattered along their length; lonely looking, makeshift shielings sitting high on the moor, I pull over and look out across its undulating expanse, feeling its apparent emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I am reminded of Crichton Smith’s description of the setting for his childhood home. ‘My house lay between the sea and the moor,’ he tells us; ‘the moor which was often red with heather, on which one would find larks’ nests, where one would gather blaeberries: the moor scarred with peatbanks, spongy underfoot: blown across by the wind (for there is no land barer than Lewis).’[2]

No land barer; and yet the moor was filled with untapped memory and story, locked away like the carbon stored within the peat. I wondered how the moor appeared to the local crofters on their way home from the town. The moor’s monochrome appearance to me, a result of the lack of colour that can be painted by the brush of emotional attachment, but even Crichton Smith had articulated this chromatic sameness: ‘The sky of Lewis above the stones, the sea, the bleak landscape almost without distraction of colour.’ Today it seemed a fitting description. I put the van into gear and continue on, following the long and empty road toward Stornoway. I arrive at the town by the land-fill site, gulls crowding greedily overhead, before the road gives way to familiar looking streets and houses that almost erase the time since I lived here completely. I stop at the supermarket again, picking up some last-minute supplies I’d forgotten yesterday. The people inside are warm and friendly, chatty and open. I have not heard any Gaelic spoken yet. 

I am making my way to the village where Crichton Smith had been raised under the regime of his strict Presbyterian mother, ever terrified of her sons falling ill after losing her husband to tuberculosis when the future poet was still only an infant. The church figured heavily in Crichton Smith’s early life and the Sabbath strictly observed. Even the village’s name has a darkly biblical resonance. Bayble, or Pabail, like most of the island’s place names has a Norse rather than Gaelic origin, and is derived from Papa- býli meaning ‘dwelling of the priests’, possibly named so when the Norsemen who first settled here found the Culdee already inhabiting the fertile peninsula where the settlement is situated. It lies on the headland east of Stornoway, on the other side of `The Braigh’ (pronounced Bry): a narrow sea-battered spit of land connecting the eastern arm of Lewis – known locally as ‘Point’ but officially as The Eye Peninsula, or An Rubha – with the main island.

After crossing the Braigh, I head east a mile or two and then turn right down a long, minor road following the sign for Upper Bayble. The village is divided into two parts: upper and lower, its houses, some empty and dilapidated, scattered like pebbles either side of the single-track road that cuts a line between the moor on one side, and steep cliffs that meet the sea on the other. I try to imagine growing up here under the watchful religious gaze of the widow, the town of Stornoway with its little harbour and its few shops the highlight of my week; school and literature my escapism and my chance of escape; a wider world invisible beyond the horizon, seeping in only through the radio and the stories of returning servicemen and whalers. I would have wanted to leave too, and yet Crichton Smith never really escaped. He looked for it ever after, finding it always just beyond his grasp. 

It’s the island that goes away, not we who leave it.
Like an unbearable thought it sinks beyond
assiduous reasoning light and wringing hands,
or, as a flower roots deep into the ground,
it works its darkness into the gay winds
that blow about us in a later spirit. [3]

This haunting Crichton Smith conveys – the ghost memory of the island of his imagination – is expressed in much of his poetry: a lament for an island not only diminishing in personal memory but its language and culture slowly being lost, slowly sinking beyond the horizon of the collective past. 

I drive down to the pier where I sit and watch the waves jostling each other into the small bay, and wonder how many times Crichton Smith may have come here to do the same, dreaming of the wider horizons that lay beyond the Minch; the view of the headland, and the moor beyond the row of small houses lining the cliff-tops, as familiar to him growing up here, as the tightly-packed terraced houses of the street where I grew up in the northwest of England, and a knowing deep-down that to thrive meant to leave. In that way we are similar, but the difference is that I did not have to leave my language behind, and without a language that you grow inside of, that fundamentally connects you to home but that you see in slow decline, you will struggle to know who you are no matter how many times you return. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in the northeast of Scotland. His writing features in the forthcoming book Four Rivers Deep, a collaborative deep mapping project that explores the rivers Don and Dee in northeast Scotland and the Swan and Canning rivers in southwest Australia, due for publication by UWA Press in 2022. Ian is currently working on a narrative nonfiction project exploring the ways in which landscapes help shape a sense of place and identity. He has a website at https://groundings.co.uk

Notes:
[1] Louis MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, (1938, Longmans, Green & Co, repr. Edinburgh, Polygon, Birlinn Ltd, 2007).
[2]  Iain Crichton Smith quotes taken from Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human, Selected Essays, (Loanhead, Midlothian, MacDonald, 1986)
[3]  Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Departing Island’ from Three Regional Voices, 1968, in Mathew McGuire (Ed.), Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, (1992, repr. Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2011), V 13-18, p.65 

A Drift in Eden

Photography by Julian Hyde

By Mark Valentine:

It was an iron bench on a country road, a bit dilapidated but still staunch. We were glad to take our rest there. The design was pleasing in a minor, unassertive sort of way: the arm-ends that stretched out like paws, the legs that might have been modelled on the lithe limbs of a wild cat. The narrow slats of the seat were now mostly innocent of paint, but still firm. From a few last flecks and scrapes, it looked as if they might once have been coated in the pale blue of winter sunsets. The backrest had an ornamental escutcheon and a date which seemed to be in the 1950s, and there was a Festival of Britain or Coronation feel to it.   

Set at an angle to things, and on its own tussocky plot, it had no significant view. Immediately opposite was a little lane between hedges, leading nowhere in particular. Above was rising ground but to no great height. The road it was on turned slightly away at this point so there was no line of sight there. Leading away from the bench was a drive that had once led to a railway halt, long since closed, though you could still see the remains of the platforms and the tracks. Like a lot of rural halts, there was a certain distance between it and the nearest village, and so we supposed that there must once have been a bus, or a taxi service, and the bench had been put there for passengers. There was something about the spot that seemed unusually restful, as if the patience of all those lost travellers had somehow seeped into the scene itself. You could imagine them sitting here in their long coats and hats, with their newspapers and cigarettes, looking out on pretty much the view we now had.  

If you turn to the left from the little bench, you pass Little Salkeld watermill and cafe, still grinding corn for wholegrain bread, and then at a green you come to a meeting of ways, and on the black and white signpost one of the arms has some of the oddest words ever seen on any signpost, even though there are many quaint and picturesque place names in England. It reads: Druids Circle. This is Long Meg & Her Daughters, who are not after all Druids, but witches turned to stone, at least for the time being and while you are there. The tallest of these, Long Meg herself, is adorned with grains of lichen of ochre and scarlet and evergreen, like some fine embroidered cloak not made by mortal fingers, and at her foot there are often offerings. The stones cannot be counted, it is said, perhaps because they do not quite stay still. 

Suppose, though, that you do not follow the road to the Druids’ Circle, but turn instead the other way at the green. You go under the high arches of a railway bridge and then follow a track above the river Eden, you keep on through the trees, and you come to the overgrown ruins of an abandoned gypsum mine, Long Meg Drift. It operated between 1880 and 1976 (with a gap during WW1), employing between 12 and 30 people. There was a short works railway, pretty much where the footpath now runs, which connected to the famous Settle-Carlisle line. It had its own signal box (demolished a few years ago) and a few steam locomotives, one now at the Bowes Museum, Co Durham. As for the works itself, this has gone back to nature: there are brick footings, stone steps, platforms, caved-in sheds, all now covered with nettles and brambles, ash saplings and moss. 

In a corner though, quite unexpectedly, there is an electricity installation that buzzes and crackles behind its high spear-shaped grey palings, and with red lightning-flash signs warning of danger. You are taken aback: it seems like some secret race of engineers has landed here from a distant star and put this here for inscrutable purposes. About this place, one day, there was once a great flickering array of amber butterflies, rising and tumbling and pausing only to drink their nectar, and it seemed as if the secret rays from the hidden sub-station had quickened their exultant spirits. The fierce machines and these frail beings, like torn-off pieces of old silk tapestry, made a startling contrast that seemed uncanny, a glimpse of a world where they will go on, with their whirring and their dancing, but we will be gone. 

On the way to the works you might have missed something, on a verge not far from the lodge house at the entrance. Embedded in the wild grass there was a long ripple of glazed clay tablets, each about as big as a playing card, and all carefully plotted together as a mosaic. And if you looked closer you might make out painted houses, a bridge, a boat, a horse, a church, a train, because this is a picture-book map, in bright colours, in speedwell blue and primrose yellow and rose and parsley green. It was made over 20 years ago by the children of the four primary schools of the area, High Hesket, Armathwaite, Culgaith and Langwathby, in an arts project led by the ceramicist Michael Eden, and the map is of their local world. The place where you are now standing is the fulcrum of an X shape connecting the four villages, in a flourish of secular magic. 

The bricks they made and laid here are chipped and cracked now, and the grasses and dandelions grow between them, and the red mud begins to congeal across them. The last I heard, because of landslips and heavy rain, the mosaic did not look like it would still be there much longer: its colourful little world was sliding away.  

***
Mark Valentine is originally from the radical shoemaking town of Northampton but now lives in Yorkshire near the Leeds-Liverpool canal. His short stories and essays are published by the independent presses Tartarus (UK), The Swan River Press (Ireland), Sarob (France) and Zagava (Germany). His writing on landscape and lore has appeared in Reliquiae, Echtrai and Northern Earth.

The pursuit of peaceful coexistence

Illustration by Kami M. Koyamatsu – Website

By Mackenzie Kelly:

The first cloud-free day of spring acts as a beacon of hope in Seattle. Reminiscent of a Hallmark movie, people across the city of all ages emerge in unison from their homes, lifting their hands to shield sensitive eyes, eager to soak up the sun. After enduring my first Seattle winter, I was grateful for the additional daylight hours so I could enjoy the last moments of sunshine walking my two dogs near the lake after work. I grew to love this walk for the dichotomy between the beauty of nature and the urban landscape.

As the sun set and we made our way back home, sniffing every bush as we went, I saw little creatures erratically diving near the streetlights. I had only ever seen bats in videos on the Internet, flying out of a cave en masse like a dark cloud spilling into the sky. As the bats dove into the light, I watched with reserved excitement and a little undercurrent of fear buzzing through my body. Am I too close? Is this safe? Are the bats lost? Are they supposed to be in the city?

 After doing a deep dive on our local Washington bat species, I was happy to share my warm dusk walk with these misunderstood mammals of flight. All of our local bats are insectivorous and a world with fewer mosquitoes has its appeal. Just as the people in Seattle are emerging from their winter seclusion, the local neighborhood bats are roused from hibernation and hungry. Bats can eat roughly half of their body weight in a single evening. How could natural pest controllers this efficient ever be considered insidious? As the ancient proverb goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 

Last year I accepted and cemented my new title as City Slicker when my husband and I became homeowners in Seattle. This came as a shock to my husband who had bet this move would amount to nothing more than a brief sampling of city living before I begged to retreat back to a more humble life in the countryside. We moved in search of better opportunities, though chasing after our lofty career-oriented dreams left us feeling like underdogs adrift amongst the crowds. Although I had made my decision to settle into my new urban existence, I still longed for backwoods amenities.

I grew up thinking city living was somehow devoid of nature which contributed to my apprehension about making this move to the big city. I worried that I had to make the choice between civilization and wilderness, but catching my first glimpse of urban bats on that spring walk calmed my fears and dispelled my reservations. Nature and civilization do not have to be incongruous presences; instead, I commenced my pursuit for peaceful coexistence.

As a new homeowner, I began my journey as an amateur gardener, focusing on making my little neck of the city a natural safe haven with the ultimate goal of creating a backyard “bed and breakfast” (B&B) for bats. I dove into researching and collecting native plants in the Pacific Northwest. Though there were a few casualties along my journey, through trial and error a few plants have now survived their first winter under my care. One of my personal favorite survivors is our mock orange flowering shrub, emitting a beautiful smell reminiscent of orange blossom mingling with jasmine. It’s also a favorite for butterflies, beetles, and moths. This motley crew of arthropods were my first residents in our backyard bed and breakfast of biodiversity! These “pests” are welcomed with open arms and hopefully open wings eventually. While I appreciate their residency, my hope is that they will ultimately play the role of “breakfast” in my aspirational Bat B&B. In order to preserve bat food, our yard is a pesticide-free zone. Using pesticides would reduce insect abundance, leading to a food shortage for my prospective tenants.

A key milestone in my campaign for peaceful coexistence is the installation of a bat house. What kind of an innkeeper would I be without a proper place for bats to rest their weary eyes? I bought a premade bat house from the National Audubon Society because I was worried my shoddy carpentry skills would soil my reputation, shifting my status into slumlord territory. With my husband’s help, we mounted our bat box under the eaves of our home. Bats need a clear, unobstructed flight path in and out of their roosting site so orienting it south only a few feet from our neighbor’s towering home wasn’t exactly ideal. Just like the rest of us emerging from our “caves” in the spring and turning our faces towards the sun, bats long for direct sunlight so we placed their home facing east for ample sunshine.

As spring returns, I continue to anxiously await our first tenant. It can take months, often years for bats to take up residence in a newly erected bat house. Although our bat house remains empty, it has turned into a symbol of hope in our new home. I can’t help but root for these misunderstood mammals. In some ways, bats are conservation underdogs with undeserved and maligned reputations who lose the spotlight to other more charismatic megafauna. As nocturnal animals, they are often only seen elusively fluttering at twilight, easily forgotten amongst the crowd. Bats are vital pest controllers and are also the primary pollinators for agave plants. Imagine a world full of mosquitoes, yet void of tequila! Instead of living in fearful ignorance, I choose to pursue coexistence with these beneficial beauties. When I can sit on my porch and see bats flitting around my mock orange bush at twilight, I will know that I have made a home for them and a wilderness for me. Everyone loves an underdog story. I’m happy to play a small part in it.

***

Mackenzie Kelly is a veteran veterinary assistant and budding field biologist with a passion for conservation. She loves all critters but is especially fond of non-charismatic species like bats and insects. She studied Political Science at Northern Arizona University, but couldn't help but felt compelled by the beautiful Southwest scenery to stick around Flagstaff, AZ after graduation. While completing two AmeriCorps terms, she facilitated service-learning youth clubs that explored the rivers and canyons of the Southwest. These educational outdoor experiences sparked a passion for sharing the wonder of wilderness with others. She is currently finishing her Master of Biology through Miami University’s Advanced Inquiry Program where she hopes to inspire social and ecological change by being nature’s biggest cheerleader.

Nothing to see here

Illustration by Karen Joyce

By Jane Hughes:

Going back to Mum’s house after she died was always going to be traumatic. But nearly a month had passed. I’d had time to prepare for it. Looking at photos of Mum, sorting through her belongings, remembering old times, these all came with a mournful, aching sadness for something that was gone. It went through me in sickening, oily waves, but it was something you could get used to. What threw me utterly was not her empty house. Not her empty wheelchair. It was something unbearable about the landscape that I used to call home.

The day before the funeral, I took a taxi from the station, along narrowing roads on the edges of damp, stubbly fields, and I felt viscerally distressed by the place. But I couldn’t see what it was that was so hard to look at. In the months that followed, I found myself grasping for it. 

I scrolled through photographs of the area, trying to find whatever it was that kept making me cry. I’m continually struck by the emptiness of the place – is that it? The feeling that something used to be there, but has gone now? People and places from long ago whose stories have been lost. I’m here too late. Roman villas, iron age forts, the people who carved the White Horse on the chalk downs above my home town, the lively communities who planted the hedges and farmed the fields that no longer require labour - is that what makes me sad? That something I can’t understand was once there, but all I can see is the empty space where it was, and I’ll never get a connection? That would make sense. I try it on for size. No, it doesn’t make me cry.

The landscape is so featureless that it is hard to define, but I recognise it immediately, and the recognition feels physical. I tried to find a landmark to anchor a memory. Some local artists fixate on the White Horse, or return repeatedly to Wittenham Clumps as a subject, like the crazed man in Close Encounters sculpting an oddly-shaped hill out of mashed potato.

But I don’t think I ever went to Wittenham Clumps, why would we? Especially since Mum couldn’t walk far, and certainly not on rough ground. I realised that, as a family, we had never really explored on foot. Everything I had seen had been through a car window. Dad used to point out groups of trees on small hills on the horizon, and say ‘wittnum clumps!’. I thought that all small thickets on small hills surrounded by the more or less flat fields of the rest of the landscape were wittnum clumps. Recently, I sent Dad a photo of a painting that looked like a wittnum clump to me, and he replied wistfully that those were the days, when we still had Elm trees. I remembered Dutch Elm disease in the 1970s, and the big tree dying at the front of the house that Mum had named Elmwater. Dad didn’t know that the old trees at Wittenham Clumps were Beeches, not Elms – and so, why would I? 

I remember walking up to the White Horse with my Dad, mainly to show it to some Swiss visitors. There’s not much to see up there. I couldn’t not stand in the horse’s eye and make a wish, because I knew that every chance I got to make a wish, I should use towards trying to make Mum better, but the eye of the White Horse was a deep, milky puddle. My memory of the White Horse is of grabbing a private moment, when the Swiss and Dad were heading back down to the car park, to do something that would have looked idiotic if there had been anyone else up there to see it. 

(As I write, another memory that’s recent enough to be raw – of taking Mum out in the car so that she might be able to see the White Horse again, and not being able to find it at all, and then glimpsing it, but never being able to find a place where the car could go where Mum could see the horse, because by that time she couldn’t turn her head.)

I bought a map. It upset me. Despite having spent my whole childhood and adolescence in the Vale of the White Horse, I couldn’t find my way around it. I had no idea what was where. How could I call it my home? I felt embarrassed. And I couldn’t locate places of importance because, it turned out, I couldn’t think of any.

I bought some local history books. They upset me. Despite having (etc etc) I didn’t know most of the stories - or else, it turned out that what I thought I knew was all wrong. I knew that King Alfred burnt the cakes at Wantage, because my parents told me, but it turned out that they weren’t cakes, and that anyway, he didn’t. 

The more I looked, the more it seemed that there was no actual place for me to attach my grief to. I was not crying over my old school, or any of the houses where my family had once lived. I thought I was upset about the cherry orchards being grubbed up – could I cry about that? Not really. I had no right. I was one of those kids who grew up on the brand new housing estates and never gave a thought to whatever was there before them. In the middle of one of those estates, there was a nice patch of green where we had a party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and I ate a fish paste sandwich for the first time. I think that that patch of ground had some interesting bits of broken masonry on it, a sort of a ruin, and at the time I think I thought it was something to do with Abingdon Abbey. But it looks as if it might just have been an artful attempt to repurpose some of the more interesting lumps of rubble that came from demolishing an old children’s home. Once or twice I went with schoolfriends to the Abbey Meadows and hopped about on the ruins there, but they weren’t the ruins of the abbey either, just a Victorian folly. Everything I thought was wrong, and my memories are just loose rubbish blowing about like tumbleweed.

The place has changed. Is that the problem? Chagrin: I have to admit, the change that hurt me most was the brutal demolition of Didcot power station! I cried over that. But it’s not the sense of things changing that hurts me. It’s something about being disconnected, about not belonging there any more, and about not having anything to hold onto. My attachment seems to be to a landscape that is mostly empty. The pictures that feel most like home to me are the ones without landmarks. Pictures of empty fields. Nothing there, nothing at all. Just something so familiar about the shape, and the lines of the plough furrows. The feeling I get is of a landscape that doesn’t feel any need to connect with me. 

The last time I went to the place that used to be home, I felt lost and rejected. I recognise the place, but it doesn’t seem to recognise me. From now on, I’m just a visitor. I have no reason to go back there unless to visit a grave or two. 

August 1, 1978
Disappointment of various places and trips. Not really comfortable anywhere. Very soon, this cry: I want to go back! (but where? since she is no longer anywhere, who was once where I could go back). I am seeking my place. Sitio.
– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

***

Jane Hughes is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her work is currently focusing on bereavement, attachment to place, and life writing around loss. Her essay, ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’, appears in Essays in Life Writing published by Routledge in 2021.

Illustration is by Karen Joyce and is used with permission. You can find Karen’s website here.

Reflections in the Maine Light

Photo: Tina Long

By Doug Long:

A hillside led to the sea—its rising waves tipped with white foam seethed in a rush over colored and smoothed stones. Gentle thunder filled the salt air. Then a quiet whoosh—a rhythmic encore at the water’s edge. 

Nowhere does the light change and reflect and lift my soul into unworldly realms as it does along the Maine coast. It’s oceans and lighthouse beacons and fog shrouded shores and granite rock peninsulas reflect nature’s spirit. It’s the essence of life. 

I stood a stone’s throw from an old three-story. While faded and worn, it was quintessential New England. Its paint weathered. Summer’s open windows displayed red geraniums. Steps to its front door were cracked, slanted from years neglect. But it somehow still stood—stubbornly proud in the growing light. 

The renowned Maine son, Andrew Wyeth, rowed his wooden dory here most mornings from a half-mile up the back bay. His reflections of Maine were often defined by the people who lived here—spending an entire summer in 1948 sketching, working his brush to capture the moment he saw Christina Olson on the ground; crippled in life, yet finding her way home from her garden of wild flowers unable to use her legs. 

He painted from an upstairs window. Hathorn Point was his canvas.

Richard Meryman, of Life Magazine decades ago, described the Olson House as “looming ... lit by slanting sun, weathered silver-gray ... soaked in coastal storms.” Meryman was invited deep inside the Wyeth world and learned how blank canvas became iconic art for the ages. 

It was a complex task. Wyeth appeared to view the Maine landscape in a way that exceeded sunlight and shadows. 

In Meriman’s book, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, he stated how the artist often contained fragments of the outdoors framed by windows, amplifying the mood and meaning of the interior. 

“The glimpse you get of a landscape, whets my imagination—if I don’t see too much,” said Wyeth.

Others deeply rooted in Maine’s granite and pine tried to capture the true light in books and artwork and narratives of nature. Winslow Homer had a carriage house transformed to an art studio at Prout's Neck in the late 1800’s. 

He captured sensory elements—the drama of the sea; the breeze of a passing storm and man’s relationship with the natural world.

“So I blurred my eyes and gazed toward the brim of my hat,” wrote Annie Dillard. “And saw a new world ... turning mute and perfect.”

Along the coast, it often becomes a world transformed from sunrise to sunset. 

I remember the early morning charter I once experienced on a sleek Alden-designed wooden schooner. As a young boy, John Alden’s family moved to the New England coast. It was here he often sat on a hillside overlooking a harbor filled with Grand Banks fishing schooners that the boy—a future naval architect—began to sketch the gentle curves and towering masts of pine and cedar and the canvas of billowing sails that would later inspire designs of boats considered classics today. 

His sketches would come to life.

Our sails were raised high as we left the tiny harbor. I could see the cedar shake cottages sprinkled along the shore—screened porches offering Maine-sized views of a flashing light on the point. The clamor of US 1 and lobster roll stands quickly behind us, a cloud of misty fog was soon filling the chilled air of late summer. There was a brisk rush of northeast wind as our captain adjusted his jib—a watery tide of salt splashing against the well-polished hull. 

I was suddenly thrusted free of life’s complexities—rolling waves rocking gently toward the Atlantic sea. 

There were barking seals on rocky islands; the bellowing fog horn from a distant cove, the light tap dance of rain and images of so many ancient mariners still peering ahead to distant horizons.

In 1943, Ruth Moore published The Weir capturing life survived on offshore places with fishing wharfs and wood-framed homes; the pined forests and jagged cliffs a stage for hard seasons and lonely years isolated from the mainland—lighting fires on cold nights and gathering cords of driftwood, “to git our stoves through the winter.”

She observed “spruce-covered islands ... neat against the horizon. To the east, the tremendous blue plain of the ocean spread, empty except for three lobster boats, small as bugs in the distance, circling for traps under the pale December sky.” Winter is a time, she once wrote, “the land huddles into itself—a time for “gear-overhauling in the fish houses ... of building traps and painting buoys.” 

She later describes an early Maine morning, “blue with snow and coming light, the deer comes to the orchard, digging with her cold hoofs for the frozen buried apples ... the boat is painted, content comes out or loneliness bites deep.”

Thoreau said coming here was like “returning to his senses ... seeing things purely extracted and dazed.”

“It rained all this day and till the middle of the next forenoon,” he reflected, “concealing the landscape almost entirely ... I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fur and spruce tops ... peering through the mist.”

He called it the “unaltered face of nature.” 

I stood in the waning light—Wyeth’s most painted New England house overlooking the sea. Laced curtains drifted gently from an upstairs bedroom. A harbor bell sounded. Its deeply pitched ring seemed echoing spirits of Maine’s past. 

I held a faded photograph—standing on a spit of sand. My little boy—just beginning to walk, running toward shallow waters. Tiny footprints. A pathway soon faded and washed by tides. Time stretched to years. The boy would move away; the future transcending like the downeast wind.

So much of this place now lived inside of me. The nighttime fires on rock-strewn beaches and blueberries on hillsides—the silent moose in the forest mist. Years of aging memories.

In that moment, I saw a young Wyeth oaring across in his wooden dory—paints and brushes and fresh canvas palates—ready to recapture the Maine light.

“People will say, ‘did you notice the amazing sulfur yellow in the sky’ ... “that stuff never strikes me to paint. It’s got to click with something I’m already thinking about,” said Wyeth. Then my hair rises in the back of my neck. I get goose pimples.”

“It was a place you were homesick for, even when you were there,” wrote Weir.

Reflections. Fragments of life—each a window in time.

***

Doug Long is a writer and traveler living along Florida’s Gulf coast who enjoys exploring natural landscapes. He often writes about people and places defined by nature; discovered in quiet coves, blue mountains and wild coastlines. Reflections in the Maine Light is an essay inspired by visits along the rocky shores of Maine. The piece was captured through a camera lens by his wife, Tina Long. Doug has been published in Lighthouse Digest, Saw Palms Literary Journal and Lowestoft Chronicle

The Borders of Winter – Reading Ukraine

Photo by Maksym Diachenko on Unsplash

By Marcel Krueger: 

Despair and sadness, this is what I first felt when waking up to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The thing that I had made dark jokes about just the day before with a Polish acquaintance with relatives in Ukraine, a thing that felt like abstract posturing with words and guns, had become bitter reality, a war in the middle of Europe. As our editor-in-chief Paul wrote in the latest Letter from Elsewhere, “in a time like this our small journal of place doesn't seem to really matter all that much.” 

As the Books Editor of Elsewhere, I do think that reading continuously and widely can help us prepare – up to a point – for violent change, and help understand where it is coming from and why. The more we inhabit positions and points of view of others, the more we understand some of the multitude of currents at play in Europe today – and in the case of Ukraine, the fierce independence of its people. I have compiled a list of Ukrainian authors past and present for everyone interested in learning more about the country, but this is purely based on personal reading experience and by no means an exhaustive list. 

As writer and editor Kate Tsurkan writes in her review of Andriy Lyubka’s “Carbide” and Oleg Sentsov’s “Life Went on Anyway: Stories” in the LA Review of Books:

This has always been the beauty of Ukraine — its diversity. If you walk through the downtown area of any major Ukrainian city, you can hear conversations in more than one language at the same time. Each region possesses its own unique character, its linguistic blends; what brings Ukrainians together, despite these so-called differences, is a greater sense of Ukrainian identity, which has triumphed over years of conflict.

When you look at Ukraine today and the complex history of the region, you will also find that many crucial European literary voices come from here: Joseph Roth was born in Brody, Paul Celan in Chernivtsi, Bruno Schulz in Drohobych. Because of this diversity I have also included Polish voices in this list, due to the special and not always easy relationship between these two neighbouring countries. 

Ukrainian as a literary language first emerged into a wider European awareness in the 19th century, but this was not a language spoken in all areas of society of an area of Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian people, all ruled over by Imperial Russia. As Anne Applebaum puts it in her essay “Calamity Again”:

The Ukrainian language, as well as Ukrainian art and music, were all preserved in the countryside, even though the cities spoke Polish or Russian. To say “I am Ukrainian” was, once upon a time, a statement about status and social position as well as ethnicity. “I am Ukrainian” meant you were deliberately defining yourself against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the urbanites.  

The two key figures from that time are Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814 – 1861) and Lesya Ukrainka (Larysa Petrivna Kosach, 1871 – 1913). Taras was born into poverty but as a gifted and self-taught painter and poet (and later attendant of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts) laid the groundwork for Ukrainian as a literary language. Lesya, who published her first poem at 13, became the first female literary voice writing in Ukrainian and has become, after a lifetime of prolific publishing poems, prose, essays and dramas, a symbol of national pride: hence her honorific last name Ukrainka, “The Ukrainian”. One of her best-known poems is “Contra Spem Spero” from 1890:

On this poor, indigent ground
I shall sow flowers of flowing colors;
I shall sow flowers even amidst the frost,
And water them with my bitter tears.

Chyhyryn from the Subotove road, 1845 by Taras Shevchenko

The Russian Revolution and the end of World War I also brought an end to the empires that had ruled what is Ukraine today, and with it, on the one hand, chaos and revolution, and on the other an explosion of Ukrainian culture. The Ukrainian War of Independence, in which Ukrainian forces fought Poles, Germans, White Russian Forces, Rumanians and French, lasted from 1917 to 1921 and saw the creation of first the Free Territory of Ukraine, the Ukrainian People's Republic and the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and later the whole of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian writing and self-expression was at first supported by the Soviets, and so a whole generation of fresh Ukrainian voices emerged in that time, including writer, playwright and musician Hnat Khotkevych (1877 – 1938), writer Valerian Pidmohylny (1901 – 1937), poet and translator Mykola Zerov (1890 - 1937), and writer and critic Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska (1868 – 1941). 

This first modern generation of Ukrainian writers however only published and flourished for a few years. At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin had replaced Lenin as the head of state of the USSR, a new cultural policy was enacted and Ukrainian publishing increasingly suppressed. All of the members of the new Ukrainian avantgarde were arrested and executed or, in case of female artists like Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska, sent to the GULAG where they also perished. Named after an anthology published in 1959 by Polish writer and activist Jerzy Giedroyc (1906 – 2000), these writers became known as the “Executed Renaissance”. The result of this purge was also that there were hardly any Ukrainian literary voices documenting the Holodomor, the catastrophic famine of 1932/33 induced by Stalinist policies that killed an estimated 3.5 million people.

Another writer that perished in the Stalinist terror was Odessa-born Isaac Babel (1894 — 1940), Jewish-Russian writer, journalist, playwright and revolutionary best known for his “Red Cavalry”, a fictionalised account of his time with the 1st Cavalry Army of the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet war. In 2016 the Pushkin Press first published his stories about his sea port hometown in the early 20th century in all its shabbiness and glory, translated by Boris Dralyuk:

Odessa has sweet and wearying evening in springtime, the spicy aroma of acacia trees, and a moon overflowing with even, irresistible light above a dark sea.

The beginning of World War II saw even more calamity heaped upon Ukraine. In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and occupied the eastern parts of the 2nd Polish Republic, adding it to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1941, Nazi Germany in turn invaded and occupied what they called “Reichskommissariat Ukraine”, and in the years that followed the region saw increased fighting not only between occupying forces, the Red Army and partisans, but also many horrendous crimes of the Holocaust being carried out on the territory of Ukraine, including the infamous Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv. There was also a policy of ethnic cleansing enacted against the Polish inhabitants of Volhyina by the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which killed thousands of Poles between 1943 and 1945. One of the victims was Polish-Ukrainian poet Zygmunt Rumel (1915 – 1943) who grew up in Kremenets, and two years before his death had published the poem “Dwie matki” (Two Mothers):

Two Mother-Fatherlands have taught me speech -
In the bloody braid of a berry-blossomed dew -
So that I could break my heart into two halves with pain -
To make my split heart cry like a voice...  

After the end of the war the suppression of Ukrainian expression and literature continued, and dissident writers like Vasyl Stus (1938 - 1985) and Yuriy Lytvyn (1934 – 1984) died in Soviet labour camps. Only after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and Ukrainian independence in 1991 did – like the literature of neighbouring Poland – modern Ukrainian emerge again. Ukrainian writers started experimenting with form and styles, a reflection of the changes and challenges of a newly independent nation, and at the same time addressed themes of memory and identity within the context of the violent history of the region – even more so after the momentous changes brought in by the 2014 Euromaidan protests and subsequent invasion and occupation of Crimea and the wars in Donbas and Luhansk. Ukrainian writers today address the ravages of war and the landscapes of history and memory, often with the help of comedy and dark humour.

Vladimir Rafeenko (born 1969) is a Russian-language writer from the city of Donetsk in the Donbas who now lives near Kyiv. His novel “Mondegreen”, the story of a refugee from Donbas, translated by Mark Andryczyk, was published by the Harvard University Press in February of this year, and his short story  “7 Dillweeds” translated by Marci Shore can be read on Eurozine. 

Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter also from the Donbas region, and her long poem “Apricots of Donbas”, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2021.

stitch the wounds on your building
with white bandages cover up
black burns on its pelt

with a hand — just don’t twitch —
shield the gaping mouths of windows
so marauders won’t get in

Serhiy Zhadan (born 1974) is one best-known contemporary Ukrainian poets and writers who has published widely in the English-Speaking world, and also the frontman of ska band Zhadan and the Dogs. In his 2017 novel “The Orphanage”, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler, the narrator tries to retrieve his nephew from a children’s home on the front lines.

Żanna Słoniowska (born 1978) is a Polish writer and journalist originally from Lviv in western Ukraine, and her 2017 novel “The House with the Stained Glass Window”, translated by Olivia Lloyd-Jones, tells the story of her hometown through the eyes of four generations of women living under the same roof in a house noted for the enormous stained glass window of the title. 

Andrey Kurkov (born 1961) is originally from St Petersburg and after a stint as prison warden and journalist has become a full-time writer of novels and screenplays. His tragicomic 2002 novel “Death and the Penguin” about a writer, his pet penguin and the mafia, became a bestseller, and in 2014 he published a diary about the Euromaidan and the Russian invasion. His 2020 novel “Grey Bees”, translated by Boris Dralyuk, tells the story of the conflict that has engulfed Ukraine in the last years through the eyes of a mild-mannered beekeeper, and has just been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. An excerpt can be read on the Calvert Journal.   

That was the first spring of the war. And now they were in its third winter. For almost three years he and Pashka had been keeping the village alive. They couldn’t very well leave it lifeless. If every last person took off, no one would return. This way, folks were sure to come back – either when all that nonsense stopped in Kyiv, or when the landmines were gone and the shells stopped falling.

Again, this list is only a spotlight on Ukrainian writing past and present and I hope it serves a segue into more fascinating writing (and reading) from a country under siege that deserves all the support we can give. Many thanks to Kate Tsurkan, editor-in-chief of Apofenie, who instigated this piece and who is currently holding out in Chernivtsi in Ukraine. You can read her wonderful portrait of her hometown on the Calvert Journal, and Apofenie is a great place to start discovering more writers from Ukraine. Many thanks also to Jesse Lee Kercheval who started a wonderful thread on Ukrainian writers on Twitter. Slava Ukraini. 

Packed with Hope: Campaign for children displaced by war in Ukraine

Two of our finest independent publishers, Little Toller Books and Bluemoose Books have just launched a campaign called PACKED WITH HOPE that we encourage our readers to support if at all possible. Already over a million people have fled the war in Ukraine and the estimates are that many more will be forced from their homes in the weeks to come. PACKED WITH HOPE is a campaign for children who have been displaced, separated from their friends and family, school and community.

On the campaign’s JustGiving page, Gracie Cooper and Kevin Duffy (Little Toller and Bluemoose respectively) write:

“With such terrible disruption to the familiar places, people and routine of their lives, we are hoping to offer just a little comfort and escape, especially as they try to settle for bedtime. Starting with storybooks, every one of the 10,000 backpacks will be filled with a selection of items that are both comforting and essential, such as head torches, notepads, colouring pencils, toothbrushes, puzzles, playing cards, activity books, bags of marbles, hot water bottles, socks, hats and scarfs, reusable drinking bottles, and many other much-needed things.”

You can support them financially via the JustGiving page, and the money will be used to purchase any items that are not donated as well as the costs of transporting and distributing the 10,000 backpacks.

At the same time, PACKED WITH HOPE are looking to mobilise a volunteer network in Dorset, as well as sourcing books and all the other items listed above. If there are any publishers reading this, or others who think they might be able to help, then please use the contact information that can be found on the campaign press release.

DONATE TO PACKED WITH HOPE HERE