Sakura Not Yoshino in April when blossom-fringed branches bow towards the ground in prayer beneath an early moon illuminating the frailty of white clouds where friends gather to sip sake and petals flutter to the ground pale as moths but deep January in Islington’s Highbury Fields where these tender buds this early […]
Liz Jensen gave this speech at the XR event Forfattere gør oprør, which was held in front of Danmarks Radio (DR), the national broadcaster, on the afternoon of 18 September 2020. Grief can do two things. It can shrink your soul – or it can expand it. Most of us here know grief. And if […]
What do you think might be the role of writers in the Anthropocene? I’m not sure writers have much of a role in the world we inhabit now, or that we ever did: literature is wildly overrated; remember Auden’s ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? I say this with sorrow and anger and disillusionment, not triumph. […]
The next revolution – World War III – will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in […]
Read More… from Read: Tufton Street – Fiery Words Under a Police Helicopter
Charlotte Du Cann
I first got involved with Extinction Rebellion when I was researching a novel set in 2030. As I read the science, waves of emotion crashed over me: anger, dismay, grief. I had a lot of questions: why hadn’t I heard any of this before? Why wasn’t the crisis on the front pages? Why, too, […]
What do you think might be the role of writers in the Anthropocene? X: the implications of the anthropocene are huge. We writers should help to provide a change of vision about our place in the world, on this planet. But if we are reaching the final stretch of anthropocene, then the writers are […]
I lost my heart in Leafless Year. I like the sound of that phrase, and it’s very nearly true. Her name was Emmanuelle. Everyone called her Nelly but I preferred her full name and she let me use it, every Saturday in our afternoon drama club. She was very slender, with brown hair cut […]
Let’s take a moment, this moment, to reflect upon where we are and why, before we launch into the urgent matter of September. Why ‘Extinction Rebellion’? Because when your government is driving you and your family over a cliff, it’s no longer a legitimate government. Rebellion against it is permitted – indeed, it’s required. […]
Read More… from Read: Now and never: a note of reflection for the September Rebellion
Rupert Read
Rebel diary — October 2019 This is for my children — and your children too. Love like you have never loved before. Rebel for life. It doesn’t take many people to take a bridge and we took it quickly. But we didn’t have infrastructure, the police had taken it all the day before in a raid on a nearby […]
Read More… from Read: Rebel diary: for my children
Woodford Roberts
I did my GCSEs last year, a few weeks after the April Rebellion. I just scraped through – when you’ve spent two weeks on the barricades watching people being carried away by the police and hearing scary facts about the future of the planet, exams don’t seem that important. Why do I care how […]
Read More… from Read: I dropped out of school to protest the Climate Emergency
Blue Sandford
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 Alps
Natasha 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 winner
John 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 Woods
Amy Caitlin Pritchard
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 Dissent
Clare 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 […]
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 Canton
James 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 […]