What do heirloom apples, Frisian cows, farming, prehistoric burial chambers, little crater woods, autism, my family and a boulder clay ridge have in common? Not much you’d say at first glance, but these are my backdrop, my history, my life and the landscape I live in. And the one I write about.
If someone had said I would start writing late in the game, I wouldn’t have believed them. I always felt my life was pretty standard and I hated writing in school as a teenager, but I loved to read. But writing seemed one of those illusive acts that was outside my reach and too far out of my comfort zone. No one in my family of farmers wrote and I was the first one in my extended family to go to university. Writing was something people did who had something to say, people who wrote books and published essays in reputable magazines, people who had time to think and write about important issues. And time was in short supply in my life. And I did not think I could.
So why did I start to write? What changed? In 2020, I was selected to attend the Rural Writing Institute summer school, taught by bestselling authors James Rebanks and Kathryn Aalto in the English Lake District where William Wordsworth ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’. I had started to write my application the week before the deadline without much hope of being selected since I hadn’t written anything before besides work-related pieces and paperwork to convince my local council to grant my funding for my boys. I sent it in and to my surprise I was invited to attend. The reason for applying was quite mundane: I wanted to see if I could write an application that would gain me entry into a retreat with these two fabulous authors to explore if writing could be something I could learn to do and more importantly could love. And leave behind the trauma of having to write, and finally finish, a thesis at university.
Then the Covid 19 pandemic threw a spanner in the works and the retreat was cancelled for two years. In those two years, I attended an online lecture series organised by James and Kathryn and afterwards signed up for Zoom non-fiction writing classes with Kathryn. There I found my tribe and I found out I could in fact write, that I loved it, and that others felt a connection to my writing. And I started to carve out time to write daily and to make the personal global.
In the summer of 2022, I finally travelled to James Rebanks’ sheep farm and met fellow aspiring writers from across the world. Since then, we cheer each other on in our WhatsApp group and share successes and setbacks.
Now the question no longer is whether I can write. Or why I do. But now it is about carving out a space to continue writing and finding homes for my essays and poems. I am working on a memoir about apples and autism. And I found that there is a small window in my day in which I can write and so I do. A day without writing feels like a day without purpose, a day that I let slip through my hands like the fine mortar sand that used to lay in my sandbox as a little girl. So, I write every day. And I am lucky to be part of an international online writing community that spans the globe: from Tasmania to India to Europe to the United States of America. Writing is all about community however solitary the practice is.