spring has sprung

Or will, soon enough. Or, this is an invocation. 

I am doubly excited about the season because of the stellar line up at for the UEA Spring Literary Festival which will feature some of my all-time favourite writers. Many of the writers coming to UEA this time are also some of the best contemporary nature-writers of Britain. 

Nature writing in 2015 isn't really all about watching flowers dance in the wind, or thinking about dark things while listening to birdsong, it's much more than describing the non-human world in all its glory or awe. Nature-writing, or good nature-writing anyway, is looking at our relationship with the land, meditating on the history of this oldest form of interaction between species and can even extend to becoming an ecological bond itself, balancing memoir and scientific facts, looking at the layers of socioeconomic interdependence with an eco-critical eye. But I'm not really going to bore you with definitions now, and if you want a fresh perspective on the genre, you could take a look here. 

And here are little nuggets of wisdom about the natural world from the Spring festival authors, not all of them are nature-writers, but I guess no writer can avoid writing about nature, whatever their agenda is. 

"Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting."

— The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane, one of the best British authors writing with a fresh perspective on the human non-human relationship. 

“The thing about trees is that they know what to do. When a leaf loses its colour, it's not because its time is up and it's dying, it's because the tree is taking back into itself the nutrients the leaf's been holding in reserve for it, out there on the twig, and why leaves change colour in autumn is because the tree is preparing for winter, it's filling itself with its own stored health so it can withstand the season. Then, clever tree, it literally pushes the used leaf off with the growth that's coming behind it. But because that growth has to protect itself through winter too, the tree fills the little wound in its branch or twig where the leaf was with a protective corky stuff which seals it against cold and bacteria.

Otherwise every leaf lost would be an open wound on a tree and a single tree would be covered in thousands of little wounds.

Clever trees.” 

— Artful by Ali Smith who is one of the finest, most playful fiction writers in present times (and my favourite short-story writer as well). 

"...when you wanted to see something very badly, sometimes you had to stay still, stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it, and be patient. If you want to see hawks you have to be patient too.” 

—Helen MacDonald's Costa-winning book H is for Hawk is an lyrical narrative about grief and an extraordinary relation with a wild falcon. 

Nature-writing is a lot about patience, silence, and adapting to different kinds of environments. It is also about observing, and observing from new places, new heights, bending over, climbing, walking over or falling down, all in the way to understanding the paradoxically changing and unchanging world around us. 

—Sohini, India Ambassador