Sarah Moss

I find it odd when I teach creative writing as well, when I'm teaching students and they think that writing about the natural world is one of the things one might do, but not by any means the only thing.

And I think, but how do you think you write?

You write because you eat.

You get your energy from the food and the food comes from the earth.

we're not separate from those cycles of water and food and farming and nutrition and eventually decomposition.

We're not on some different plane.

I mean, I write partly to recognise...

our embodiment.

So for me, writing about the natural world is really inseparable from writing at all.

Well, I'd love to have it by Kathleen Jamie.

She's a Scottish poet and essayist.

and writes so beautifully about history and archaeology and environments in a way that's exactly the opposite of that lone ego on a mountaintop.

I mean, she's always respectful of and interested in other people's presence in the landscape and very clear about what we don't know and what we have to imagine and about the damage that our curiosity does, but also how much we need to celebrate our curiosity.

So I think she's wonderful and she writes very beautifully.

Dorothee Wordsworth, sister of William Wordsworth, really taught me how to start thinking about these issues of landscape and community, because she writes about their household's production of poetry, and it's very definitely a household production rather than just William's.

deeply plaited into the work of being in a body and being alive so there's a lovely moment when she drags william away from his poetry to go dig a path to the necessary which was the outdoor toilet and lovely snowed and she can't get there and she needs to but he goes perfectly willingly because obviously there needs to be a path to the necessary and he's the one with the upper body strength and the spade so he's going to have to stop writing for this and dig it

And she jumbles up picking apples and washing floors and helping William copy out his poetry and making a journal entry that gives him the basis of something else and doing a bit of translation and then cooking an apple pie.

And I think that's a much healthier model for how to think about being in a mind and in a body and being a writer and being a parent.

than the more conventional versions.

Mary is one of my favourite characters to write.