The Wild Every Day

I came to Findings late. Arriving in the post, my second-hand copy slid from the envelope fraying at the edges, bruised and beaten. The previous owner and donator of the book had written their name on the inside cover (thank you, Barbara Campbell), and when open it lies flat, the result of a thoroughly fractured spine. This gave me hope, for the blemishes books bear serve as proof that something wonderous is waiting within.

 

Published in 2005, Findings marks the first book of Kathleen Jamie’s trilogy of essay collections of the same name. The daughter of a clerk and an accountant, Jamie claims a normal upbringing and attended “the most ordinary comprehensive on the planet”. A visit to the site of a Neolithic dig as a child piqued her interest in the relationships between landscapes and the people that inhabit them. Jamie had begun to write “excruciating, terrible” poetry, and when poor grades prevented a career in archaeology, she insisted to her parents that she would still go to university. Studying philosophy, Jamie regarded university not just as a place to pass four years preparing for the world of work, but as eye opening and bohemian. During these years, Jamie left a collection of poems contained within an envelope on the doorstep of publisher Tom Fenton. The resulting pamphlet, Black Spiders, was published when Jamie was twenty and earned both the Eric Gregory and Scottish Arts Council awards. Subsequent poetry collections garnered praise, with 1999’s Jizzen winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and led to a teaching post at St Andrews.

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So why did it take me so long to stumble upon Kathleen Jamie’s writing? In the spring of 2019, I read Amy Liptrot’s debut novel The Outrun, a memoir based on the author’s return to Orkney and recovery from alcohol addiction. At once tender and arresting, it catapulted me into the world of modern nature writing, and towards Liptrot’s fellow Scottish writer, Kathleen Jamie. Jamie herself would chastise me for categorising her as a ‘nature writer’, telling Patrick Barkham, “That’s not serving us well”. Looking her up online, I found several articles listing Jamie as one of ‘new nature writing’s’ most important and admired authors. In interviews, she has proclaimed nature writing as “a bit boring” and coined the phrase “lone, enraptured male” to describe the abundance of white, middle class men that dominate her field. She’s not wrong. Deterred by her acerbic interviews and prolific writing, I was intimidated.

 

After reading snippets of her writing at the recommendation of others, I bought myself the second-hand copy of Findings that sat on my bookshelf for months. In search of a new book to read, I would tentatively pull Findings from the shelves and thumb the pages, rereading its beginning in the following weeks. Finally, one rainy afternoon, I committed myself to Jamie’s writing and hunkered down to crack the spine myself.

 

The collection opens with ‘Darkness and Light’, and in it Jamie seeks the “real dark”, not that metaphor which has come to mean spiritual, emotional or physical darkness. She journeys by ferry to experience an Orcadian winter and visit Maeshowe, a Neolithic burial ground that, at the winter solstice, is host to a beam of setting sun.

 

Jamie describes places much like a painter using oils. Strokes are sparing and precise. Rather than overload the viewer with vivid colour and texture, layers are built up slowly so that landscapes unfurl, much like seeing them for the first time. Adjectives are scarce and adverbs non-existent. Any review of Jamie’s work praises the exactness with which she uses language; not one word is out of place or worn as an embellishment.

 

At first, this may seem to oversimplify her skill; in ‘Darkness and Light’ Jamie describes Orkney in a way that wouldn’t seem out of place in a guidebook. However, without spectacle or sentimentality, she reveals to us the place hidden by the landscape; “The land is fertile, the people prosperous; Norse and liberal”. Jamie isn’t afraid to affectionately tease either; “More and more people are moving from the south to join the islanders, in search of what they call ‘a real community’. There’s that phrase you hear so often: ‘We fell in love with it.’” She has attuned her personal radar so closely to the world she inhabits that it is easy for us as readers to love the landscapes she presents, and see them with her eyes. Greta Gerwig wrote, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”. Kathleen Jamie shows us the heart of a place by devoting her attention to it, in a way that Sarah Crown described as “all eye and no ego”.

 

Love and attention meet most obviously in ‘Fever’, an essay documenting the diagnosis of Jamie’s husband with a rare autoimmune disease. It opens with Jamie observing the spider’s webs lining the gutters of her home: “The cobwebs made me think of ears, or those satellite dishes attuned to every different nuance of the distant universe”. Driving between the hospital, her home and their children’s school, Jamie observes the universe that is her own; the banks of the River Tay, the garden and its saplings, the hill behind their house. These moments of everyday nature may seem like a departure from the nature writing we have come to expect, but soon that may be all we know.

 

The wild every-day is afforded by the reality of Jamie’s life. She is a successful writer, a mother and a lecturer. Glimpses of the natural world come to her during the in-between of everyday life. In fact, when people describe Jamie’s writing, the word ‘domesticity’ is sure to come up. Findings opens with Jamie at a Christmas pantomime. In ‘Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes’, she writes “Between the laundry and fetching the kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic, oyster catchers. In the school playground, sparrows”. In the essay of the title, Jamie muses over a gannet skull that would look good on her desk.

 

Speaking at the Bristol Festival of Ideas in 2015, Jamie said that she felt she had “one foot in the city and one foot in the hills”, the result of growing up on the outskirts of Edinburgh. It is this idea that makes her writing so compelling. Jamie’s work borders the land between common experience and escapism. Accessibility and excursion. Her personal introspection is frank and reflective, formed by the landscapes and people she observes. Perhaps we should call Kathleen Jamie a ‘human nature writer’, for the people and places given to us in Findings are not spared their problems, and their virtues are documented without fanfare. Mary Oliver wrote that attention without feeling is just a report. Findings is a collection of essays laced with truth and tenderness, the consequences of Jamie’s captured attention.

 

When The Nature Library, a reference library for works based on the natural world, posted an image of Jamie’s latest essay collection, Surfacing, on Instagram I told them I was ashamed to have only just discovered her writing. ‘Not at all,’ they told me. ‘If anything, you’re lucky to enjoy it for the first time’.