Much is made of the relationships, the intersections, the similarities and differences between various feelings and emotional states. How do you tell envy from jealousy? Why does love so readily turn to hate? What are the tonal variations between shame and embarrassment, fear and anxiety, guilt and remorse? I find myself churning over these […]
There were blue tits nesting in the eaves above our front door this spring. The parent birds brought beakfuls of fat green worms and spindly flying bugs for the calling babies. We moved into a small gite, the lower floor of a chalet at the top of a small French mountain just a month […]
Read More… from Read: A dispatch from the French AlpsNatasha Randall
Tell us a bit about your current work on environmental issues and the pandemic, and your book about personal and social anxiety. My collection of poems Reckless Paper Birds contains a large number of poems that inhabit my experiences of severe anxiety and vulnerability. Since it came out, I’ve written a number of poems […]
Read More… from Read: Q&A with John McCullough, Hawthornden Prize 2020 winnerJohn McCullough
The Hudson Valley suburbs, I am happy to report, remain a savage place. Two days ago (in the first week of August 2020) we took a direct hit from Tropical Storm Isaias and bosky turned brutal. White oaks and red maples, shag bark hickories and tulip trees bent, broke or uprooted, smashing down on […]
Animal Eden It was the year of the viral video, nature coming out of hiding. We were supposed to believe that within weeks, animal life had overwritten us with their joy and reckless abandon, as if instincts told them like radio waves signalling through the ether that humans are under quarantine and no […]
‘On a hill above the valley there was a wood. In the wood there was a huge tree. Under the tree there was a hole. In the hole lived Mr Fox and Mrs Fox and their four Small Foxes.’ These are the opening lines of Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl. It’s July […]
Read More… from Read: Blog From the Treetops in the Roald Dahl WoodsAmy Caitlin
It was a windswept Saturday afternoon in early February this year, as I huddled by the doorway of the Coach House at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith waiting to meet the writer Zakia Carpenter-Hall. “… the wallpaper man.” A snippet from a breeze-snatched conversation interrupted my thoughts. William Morris: Wallpaper Man. Somewhat irrationally the words irked […]
Read More… from Read: William Morris and the Art of DissentClare Conway
Dundee, where I grew up, is currently among the world’s coolest small cities. It has a V&A and hotels surrounding the V&A, not just to mask the city centre from visitors. In my day, Dundee was post-industrial, reliant on a few failing employers, full of health and social risks, particularly for the poor. But […]
Ever wonder who the pink boat in Oxford Circus was named after? Berta Cáceres was a Lenca from Honduras who won the prestigious Goldman Prize. She was subsequently murdered in her own home for resisting work on the Agua Zarca dam. The Writers Rebel podcast focuses on indigenous environmental defenders this episode, and […]
Read More… from Listen: Nina Lahkani asks ‘Who Killed Berta Cáceres?’
Your new book is about a very special tree and – perhaps – it’s also about our relationship to time, human time versus ‘nature time’? Could you tell us a bit more about what inspired you to write it? Has your relationship with this tree changed the way you perceive other trees? Can you […]
Read More… from Read: Q&A With Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’ Author James CantonJames Canton
For a Coming Extinction (after W. S. Merwin) You whom we have named Charger, Challenger, Great King, and Noor the shining one, now that you are at the brink of extinction, I am writing to those of you who have reached the black groves of the sky, where you […]
On the last day before the hospitality sector in England locked down, my wife and I sat in a hotel garden in Cumbria watching the comings and goings at a bird feeder. The occasion was my birthday and the dinner had been booked for months. It just happened to fall on the last day […]
There’s an argument that we all feel a need to belong. Somewhere, to someone beloved – to something. To a place where our books are; music, pictures and stuff, that we can call home. And to some kind of ‘-ism’, a position in the spectrum of opinions, a locator in society. This text may […]
XRWRITERSREBEL · Twenty Four Splashes Of Denial by Ruth Padel Ruth Padel is a poet, novelist and non-fiction author, Professor of Poetry at King’s College London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She has published a novel focusing on wildlife in India, and a range of non-fiction […]
Read More… from Listen: Twenty Four Splashes of DenialRuth Padel
American Poem I hoped to visit tropical resorts to feel that texture of expensive sadness. I wanted to avoid slaughter by growing so large I would not fit in the machine, but thinking everything was magic was the same as thinking nothing was: magnets, racecraft, three card monte. I know nothing […]
This blog was originally published on July 9th 2020. This week, on his first trip abroad as Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador is meeting with Donald Trump in Washington, presumably to celebrate the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, an updated version of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. This visit has been harshly criticized […]
I remember the moment of panic on the tube as it clattered towards Waterloo. Was I really going to go through with this? I was in my mid-fifties, a grandmother to two, and I had agreed to be part of a topless protest on Waterloo Bridge. What was I thinking? Let’s begin with the easy […]
Read More… from Read: Where Are Their Cats? Jessica Townsend
The world is holding its breath. We are in lockdown, each of us caught somewhere along the spectrum between hell and heaven and the sense of waiting pushes down on my shoulders and steals my breath. If I go up the hill to ask What do you want of me? (I live on the […]
Read More… from Read: On Being a Conscious EvolutionaryManda Scott
As I lay in the middle of the road outside Downing Street, surrounded by police, awaiting my imminent arrest, I looked up at a cloudless blue sky. It felt like a sign that the rain had finally stopped and, as I enjoyed the sun on my face, one of London’s famous parakeets flew overhead. […]
Read More… from Read: Tear Gas or Tea? A Very English ArrestBeth Pitts
There was a meme circulating a few months ago which contrasted the competing virtues of Greta Thunberg and the Dutch inventor Boyan Slat as poster children for the climate movement. Both Greta and Boyan are young, idealistic and passionately committed to environmental causes. They were both still teenagers when they first came to public prominence. […]
Read More… from Read: Telling the Story of Climate CrisisPhilip Seargeant
When the sun started shining, earlier in the month, I couldn’t decide whether it made lockdown harder or easier to bear. To begin with, the answer seemed obvious: even people who don’t have a garden or a balcony could still get to a park for their daily exercise, and those that had to self-isolate could […]
Read More… from Read: Floods and Plagues and Other ThingsEdward Platt