A Storyteller's Process: Jacqueline Bain

For me, writing and nature go hand in hand.

Whatever I write wildlife will appear in some form or another. I can go for days, sometimes weeks, without writing a short story or a chapter, but my nature journal is always by my side.

            I write a lot in my head but I hadn't put anything down on paper for a while. To try to action my pen, I did a general Google search for nature writing and came across the Wild Words Website. Words like passion, power and vitality pinged off the screen, and I was immediately inspired.

            I particularly liked the competition prompt, Bob Marley's 'Some feel the rain, others just get wet'. The words crawled quickly inside me and started off a chain of thoughts, initially about our relationship with weather in general, and how sunshine equates with happiness and rain with misery. My mind was flooded with ideas, but I finally settled on a factual account of an event that had happened not long before I came across Wild Words.

             I follow a traditional process of pre writing, drafting, revising and editing. The pre write stage usually takes place inside my head, though on occasion I will brainstorm, and throw all sorts of words and ideas onto a page. There was no need to do this for 'A Life Worth Saving'. The memory was fresh in my mind, and I knew roughly the points I wanted to explore, mainly the sensory experiences of rain and its (often) misunderstood beauty, but when I decided to make the starling chick the key focus, a new element of living and potentially dying also came into play.

            A first draft is always in long hand, a jumble of words, images and thoughts. Then, I type up and get an idea of word count and structure. On this occasion, I had 3500 words, far too long for a competition count of 1000 words. I had to chop and chop.

            Out went a lengthy rant about how I know some people who seem to shut down when it is raining. Out went a trying-not-to-snivel account of losing a lot of my mobility. Out went a detailed explanation of starlings.

            To get down to 1000 words, I constantly referred back to the prompt and tried to focus on the sights, sounds and smells of rain to evoke the right atmosphere.

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid

***

A Life Worth Saving

"I think there's something in the water butt," my friend said as she skidded, breathless, into the kitchen.

            Her owl-wide eyes were brimmed with the memory of last year's macabre discovery, when a sickening stench betrayed the watery grave of a bloated rat and a bald blackbird chick.

            As the 'nature' person in our household, it was my job to investigate. I hobbled down the garden path. My mobility-crutch clicked on the glistening, rain-soaked slabs. The sky spread out, a ceiling of frosted, wolf-grey glass. Smoke-ring clouds and mist topped the distant braes like a sea haar.

            Sheets of crystalline raindrops fell in biblical proportions. Within minutes, my clothes stuck to my skin and rivulets streamed down my face. I could taste the rain's unique, supposedly tasteless flavour.

            No splashing came from the butt. Did the silence mean the 'thing' had perished like the rat and baby blackbird? I tried not to become irrationally upset. Accidents and fatalities happen all the time in wildlife's world. I braced myself to be a momentary undertaker.

            The water butt was almost half full. The rainwater was covered by a soupy layer of luminous-green duckweed. A starling chick bobbed among the weed like a toy boat.

            I silently cursed myself for not putting the lid on during the fledgling period, but clumps of mottled-brown snails liked to overwinter inside the rim, so I had left it propped against the fence. The snails maintained their cosy vigil, now obscured by swathes of verdant, sprouting nettles.

            The chick was still alive. It turned its head slightly, startled by the sudden shadow that loomed over it like a fallen thundercloud. There was no wing flapping, no panic, just a pair of unblinking, bronze-beaded eyes filled with despair and hopelessness.

            I am often guilty of anthropomorphism, giving wild creatures human emotions and values, but it was impossible to look at those eyes and not see a plea for help. The diminutive, full moon-shaped orbs surely mirrored the dread and regret we would feel, on tumbling into a deep-water crevasse with no means of escape, other than a miraculous rescue.

            I grabbed one of our pond-dipping nets, and fished the poor wee soul onto my palm. Its heart fluttered wildly and it mewed like a kitten, a babe's heartbreaking cry for its mother. The chick felt like a sodden sponge and was weighed down by a rug of weed. It was so cold, I doubted it would survive.

            The summerhouse offered shelter to my little patient. I settled it on my lap, and began to untangle bunches of stringy weed from its downy, beige feathers. It was a young bird, newly fledged, and as yet unable to fend for itself.

            As I preened the unnaturally still bird, I was aware of life carrying on outside. Rain drummed on the roof and like a manic sprinkler system, the downpour transformed the pond into a sloshing, blurred sea of silver. Feathery-tailed tadpoles glided, submarine-like, through the deeper, calmer depths.

            I chatted to the juvenile starling, telling it to hang on in there, in my childlike tone usually reserved for the dog. I rambled on about how there is so much more to rain than just getting wet. I told the chick of rain's magical pitter-pattering sounds, of how it waters the plants and helps worms to move from place to place. I explained its necessity for planet Earth, beautiful but powerful enough to devastate and destroy lives and landscapes.

            Despite the morning's greyness, signs of early summer were abundant. Marsh marigold flowers bordered the pond like splodges of egg yolk, and breeze-ruffled forget-me-nots undulated in shimmering-azure Mexican waves. Perfume of broom and wild garlic mingled with the earthy scents of damp grass, fern and moss. Smells that sing, like rain, of nature's wildness and freedom, but only to those willing to listen.

            I wondered if the scents triggered nostalgic thoughts in the chick's tiny brain. Did it have enough olfactory senses to associate the dank fragrances of wood and pasture with reminiscence the way I did; a deep-rooted connection to childhood, the natural world and home? Were the smells of the nest: twigs, grasses, mosses and feathers etched into its avian memory? And if so, were these sensations pierced by anxiety that life could ebb away at any moment?

            I glanced over at the feeders. A squirrel dangled upside down at the seed, its grey fur speckled with glittering, liquid gemstones. Jackdaws and a host of starlings squabbled at the fat balls. Fluffy starling chicks lined the fence in a soldierly row, making a merry din, beaks agape. Feed me, feed me now, they squawked in unison.

            There were no distraught parent birds looking for a missing child, no siblings mourning a lost brother or sister. I contemplated placing the chick on the grass to see if an adult bird would come to its aid, but deep down I knew the chick was too cold and the weather too wet. It would die quickly of cold and starvation, or in the claws of a neighbouring cat.

            We had been planning to go out for the day. I thought of wrapping the chick in a box, and see how it had fared when we got back. If it was alive, all good and well, but if not, it was meant to be. Conscience wouldn't let me. The tea flask and sandwiches would have to wait.

            I phoned Hessilhead Wildlife Rescue Centre. They advised me to warm the chick with a hairdryer, and get it to them as soon as possible. When we arrived at the wildlife hospital, it was still clinging to life. The staff plopped it into their brooder, and assured me it would be fine. Once healthy and able to feed on its own, they would release it back to the wild in my home patch. My heart jumped for joy, when I pictured it winging its way back to the garden feeders. Even wet, rainy days have happy endings.

From the archive: Hunting For Mushrooms

We head into the dark centre of the forest, where even the intense sunlight of Southern France can only sometimes penetrate, freckling the ground. The tall, skinny pines wave wildly in the wind. Underfoot is a spongy layer of pines cones, decaying leaves and the bristling shells of last year’s chestnuts. Everything is mud brown, except the swathes of green ferns that fill the clean mountain air with a smell like freshly cut grass.

To find the small, late season Girolle mushrooms, I will have to learn how to really SEE. The more I can see, the better I will write. I clamber over fallen tree trunks. Creepers lasso my feet. The ferns give way under me and I sink into the swamp. The pine branches that I grab for are hollow, and break off in my grazed hands. There’s an area of newly crushed ferns the size of a large pig. The Sanglier (wild boar), have been there.

There is no sun to steer by now and I am disorientated. It’s difficult to scan the ground and stay in touch with my companions at the same time. I lose sight of them, and the sound of them fades away too. Fear spikes me. Then I hear the screeching, the rasping of wild creatures. The fear is terrible for a moment, but there is no-where to run to, so I just stay put. I listen to the sounds, increasingly awe-filled.

After a time something shifts, and I realise I’m doing what I went there to do. The wildness is no longer ‘out there’. I’m no longer pushing it away. And what I’ve experienced I will be able to express later in words. A human call rescues me, reassures me. Apparently the noises are just the stems of trees rubbing against each other in the wind. I’m almost disappointed. Back to the treasure hunt.

Several times in the next three hours I trumpet with joy one minute, only to deflate the next. I find a mushroom whose stem excretes milk. There’s another one that under its fleshy umbrella is flecked with red, like spilt wine. But both of these are dangerous, not to be touched.

Then, at last I spy Girolles, their sandy yellow canopies blossoming out of the moss. And the elation answers all the fears. When I eat one it tastes, surprisingly, of pepper. I take the harvest home with me, and later, the vivid experience of the day works its way through me and out, weaving itself into words.

First Published November 6th 2012

Winter Solstice Competition Winner: Fox

This is Sarah Wheeler's Competition Winning Story. Her inspiration was the prompt 'Be a good animal. True to your animal instinct.'

The first time he struck, we made our excuses.

Like the apologists, who take to Facebook and the letters page of the Western Daily Press, we tried to see it from his point of view.

He’s only doing what comes naturally, I reasoned.

Boy, eyes red, his voice choked with tears and snot, was less convinced. 

We’ll have to bury her, he insisted, in between sobs.

So, reverently, together, we collected the shards of Beaky. There wasn’t much left, a few strands of tail, a white wing feather bearing her distinctive dark, non-breed-standard, patch. A trial of soft breast down was already rapidly blowing away in the late afternoon sunlight, like a cloud of dandelion seeds, but we gathered what we could, put the pieces in a shoebox, and saved her, for internment later.  

As a parent, part of the rationale for getting a pet is this, I told myself; the small losses that foreshadow others, the gradual familiarisation with our own mortality, death in bite-sized pieces, if you’ll forgive the pun. However, confronted by the immediacy of Boy’s tears, and the shrieks of the traumatised survivors, who were still perched precariously on the shed guttering, refusing to come down, I was not so sure.

I don’t much care for anthropomorphism. Pictures of miniature pugs wearing polka dot bandanas, kittens in pink tutus, and the internet craze for pet shaming, leave me cold, and slightly uncomfortable. Mostly, I want to shake the owners, and tell them their Lasha Apso trashed the Phillipe Stark sofa, and gorged itself on toilet roll, because they left it alone all day, that, if it’s staring at the camera with those doleful puppy dog eyes, it’s because it’s bored and hungry, not out of some sense of Judaic-Christian guilt.

But, in the wake of Fox, I discovered that, if funny animal stories didn’t exist, like God, we’d have to invent them.

No longer in thrall to his wildness, in my retelling, Fox became more than the sum of his hunger, his lust to survive, to outrun hounds and spread his progeny. Instead, he was a lesson in parenting skills, extrajudicially killing, only because it was necessary, to feed his cubs.

The second-time Fox came, he took a Pekin pullet. At least, we thought it was Fox.  We never saw him, just his calling card of feathers, a slither of bone, and fear.

Over the following days, and weeks, we lost more birds. As Boy grew more sanguine, I turned into an aproned vigilante. I kept the birds shut in if I was not around, and, when I was working from home, I took my morning coffee or lunch outside, sat in an old deckchair in the barn, and watched them through a gap in the wall timbers.

I never caught a glimpse of fox. Like a film noir serial killer, he regularly left behind a grisly totem, a curl of fur, or a strip of turf, incised by a frenzy of claw.

I couldn’t see Fox, but he was always there, like a thunder cloud, the threat of violence hung heavy in the air.

On All Souls’ Day, he took a broody hen, and left her clutch of eggs, cold and useless as stones.

That night, I lay awake, listening for the bark of dog fox, but all I could hear was the lashing rain, the distant hum of tyres on the wet road, and the isolated chime of the clock in the hall. I looked out of the bedroom window, but the night was moonless, the security light hadn’t clicked on, and I couldn’t even make out the barn, or the edge of the box hedge. The outline of all that was familiar was lost in the dark, our cottage adrift in the darkness.

Somewhere, in the blackness, a screech owl called. Ethereal, and insistent. I stood listening to her cries, my feet cold on the bare floor boards, my mind chilled with the recollection of myth and an old wives’ tale, the owl as harbinger of death.

Unsettled, I crawled back to bed, where I tossed and turned, and, in a semi-deranged, insomniac state, listened for the shrieks of chicken in her plaintive song. When I finally fell asleep, the owl had long stopped, a robin was cheerily cheeping, and sky was broken by a delicate pink band of morning sun, but still the spectre of fox crept through my dreams.

Opening the hen house up that morning, I held my breath as I, literally, counted my chickens. Despite the previous night’s portentous cawing, there were no casualties.

Later, at my desk, I checked the morning’s email. There was a message from Jared, our nearest neighbour and one-time gamekeeper.

Good morning, he wrote, I think I may have solved your fox problem.

I clicked on the attachment, and watched the JPEG unfurl. Slowly, it revealed the sleek outline of fox, caught in a shaky flashlight, her pelt warm against the earth, like a swath of ripped velvet, eyes luminous, unreal as glass, all-knowing in the darkness, perfect and still, frozen in death.

When I told Boy, he air punched the sky. Yay, he shouted, before running off to spread the good news to the chickens.

I felt relief, but something else too. Not sadness, or sorrow, exactly, but an absence, the loss of something, which challenged and vexed me, like the sting of salt on winter dry skin, or the creak of an old church door.  

A few days later, hoeing under the reach of our beech hedge, I found a fan of grey feathers, not chicken, but a remnant of wood pigeon, its ribcage ripped and flattened, like some macabre dream-catcher. I pushed the remains back under a blanket of leaves, and kicked some soil over them, so Boy wouldn’t see.

I held the secret of Fox close to myself, where it chilled me, and warmed me, in equal measure.

Writing Outdoors

 

The other week I taught a workshop on ‘writing in the wild’.

In the opening circle, everyone said that they habitually wrote indoors, and at least one writer admitted to nervousness at the thought of trying something different. She’d woken up in a cold sweat the previous night, having had nightmares of being devoured by big, hairy, sharp-clawed Wild Words that hid in trees. As she described this, tight laughter juddered across the room. There are, in fact, many reasons to take your lunch hour in the park with a laptop, to climb out of your bedroom at midnight with your notepad tucked into your trousers, or to take your holidays in the country, rather than falling for the all-too-tempting city break in Belarus (although I’ve heard credible reports of all manner of wild things in Belarus).

Most of us live and write indoors, in controlled environments.

Opening ourselves up to that-which-we-cannot-control, being in contact with new and unexpected stimuli, and seeing, at first hand, the instinctual at work, can profoundly affect our writing.

At the end of the workshop, the ‘nervous’ writer put this on her feedback form:

‘At first it was hard. Everything was unfamiliar, the way my body felt after we’d walked two hours, the landscape, and the deluge of sensory impressions. But that newness was exactly the point, exactly what expanded my world today. Today I became an animal, feeling and sensing my way in my environment. And the words followed’.

At the end of the workshop we came up with a communal list of reasons to write outdoors, which I have pinned to my wall:

…because we want to be as passionate as Anais Nin

…because we want to be as awe filled as Mary Oliver

…because we want to dream as vividly as William Blake

…because we want to look as cool in our slacks as Ernest Hemingway

…because we want to look as hip in our shades as Bruce Chatwin

And because the best way to defend from enemy fire is by tucking a moleskin notebook into the pocket over your heart. Oh yes…

This article was first published on 8th November 2013

Why Write Outdoors?

Why it is that I love to write outdoors?

At first I was just desperate to unchain myself from my desk, break out of the building, and write in nature. I craved seeing something other than a computer screen. I wanted to feel the movement of the pen again, instead of just the striking of keys.

I wanted to free up the qualities of ‘wild’ in myself and my words- expressiveness, spontaneity, the untamed, the intuitive. I dreamed of becoming the writer that I’d always wanted to be. Writing begins with living.  How could I write in full colour, if I wasn’t living in full colour?

Once out there, stripped of the trappings of society, I felt I could be more honestly myself, and that my words could be more honestly themselves too. I found that surrounded by movement, my words gained a sense of movement and drama too. When I explored and went into unknown territory, my words followed hot on my tail.

The closer I looked at the minutiae of nature, in order to describe it in words, the more vivid the outdoor world became, and the more I needed to express what it, and its salvation meant to me. It’s a virtuous circle. Not only is great writing enabled by living fully and vibrantly, living is also enabled by bringing our attention to a writing subject that embodies those qualities. Picking out details of nature to describe, I saw that everything was hitched to everything else in the universe. The world was indeed in a grain of sand, and the ocean in a drop of water.

And above everything else, I love to write outdoors because it is truly the most joyous experience. In the words of American poet, E.E. Cummings, the world becomes ‘mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful’. There is no better feeling than when my words canter on the broad savannah, dive deep in the dark ocean, and swoop in the vast blue sky. 

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid.

The Weekly Prompt

Why are you a writer-in-the wild? Please write and tell me about it.

This article was first published on May 14th 2013

Ten Experiences of Wild

The Red Admiral butterfly flitting on to my hand, and settling a moment to dust his wings. Feeling touched by magic….

The sound of the Wild Boar cracking fallen walnuts and snorting, close to the house…

The necklace of Lapis Lazuli I was given by my boyfriend. It’s silver veins sparkling like sunlight on water. Feeling loved…

The warm wind from the tropics whipping round me, caressing my skin, and spinning golden autumn leaves into a whirlwind…

Standing in the Negev desert, when there was nothing but gently undulating sand in every direction. Nothing had ever seemed so vast…

Diving into a wide river, my whole body being gently pulled and pushed by its flow, and the duck gliding serenely past…

Lying down in a wildflower meadow in the mountains of the Pyrenees, and the shock of smelling strong wild garlic…

In France, hearing a high yelp from above me. My head snapping up to see a huge golden eagle circling in the limitless sky above, eyeing me up as prey…

The delight of the moment when they delivered the new coffee table to my first house. Running my hand along the grain of the wood, and smelling pine…

Standing, awestruck, in Devon, in the dark of the night, close to the roaring sea. The waves rearing up before me at twice my height. The moonlight catching the spray that flicks, cold into my face…

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid.

This article was first published on December 20th 2012

From the archive: Wild In The City (Part 2)

I went walking througris in search of the wild. I stopped on Pont Neuf, and let the tide of commuters flow past me.  As I recited my mantra of the day ‘wild, wild, wild’, the strangest thing happened. A small brown mouse came out from under the bulwark of the bridge and sat by my feet, cleaning his whiskers. Where I live, in rural Southern France, a wild animal is gone if your tread snaps a twig, or even before that. But this was a town mouse, used to noise and bustle, fearless.

But there was another place I found wild in the city, and that was in one of the homeless people I saw on the streets. It was a head scarfed young woman, and she was turning circles in the street, shouting words I didn’t understand. A dog on a lead followed her movements, yelping excitedly.

You can spot the quality of wild by how we react to it. We are scared of it, because it isn’t kept in check by the straightjacket of the rational mind. It is instinctual, emotional, energised. That makes us nervous.

I knew the quality of wildness was present because I saw Parisians look at her as if she wasn’t there, or walk in wide circles to avoid her. I had difficulty not doing the same. I noticed I immediately judged her to be ‘mad’ or similar. Because if she was mad, then I was sane. She was doing life wrong, and I was doing it right.

And I asked myself: what aspects of myself am I not acknowledging when I locate all the emotional unpredictability, or all the madness in someone else?  How can I take back the parts of myself I’ve disowned, so that I can write from the broadest emotional spectrum? I want my writing can be mad and unpredictable when required, instead of always sane and predictable.

This article was first published on December 14th 2012

From the archive: Wild In The City (Part 1)

I live in rural Southern France, on a mountain. Yesterday I got on a train going to Paris, heading into a throng of 2 million people.

My work is based around the natural environment. It’s about exploring the ‘wilds’ out there, in order to understand how to bring that quality into our words, to find freedom in writing. I’m interested in those parts of ourselves- the spontaneous, intuitive, instinctual- that we’re afraid of. Our fear is such, that instead of acknowledging these aspects within ourselves, we project them outwards, saying they’re out there ‘in the wilds’ , in the ‘wild animals’.

On my mountain it’s clear where ‘wild’ resides. In the badger, the deer, the wild boar. But where those disowned aspects go when we live in, or visit a city? Where do we see ‘wild’? I’ve been feeling excited by the challenge of tracking it down.

So, this morning I went walking beside the Seine in central Paris, that mission on my mind.  I was swept along the pavement by a river of people. The noise of feet and cars swirled in my ears. I found places where the city had replicated the wild. There were garden shops with fountains shaped like elephants.

When it hadn’t replicated wild, the city had tried to tame it, contain it, to take a moment of its beauty and fix it in time. There were posters of big cats, and plants in pots. But best of all, on sale for 90 euros in Centre Pompidou, I found green grass, neat as a lawn, growing in a frame, a living picture.

This was all fascinating, but I wasn’t seeking castrated nature. No, what I wanted to find was the places where wild was living free in the city. Then I wanted to see how people responded to it. The search continued…

First Published November 30th 2012