The 5th of March saw the launch of Betty’s Bay’s new writing group, Out of the Box.
The theme was Literature of Place, hosted by Candy at her home in Senecio Circle facing the Blesberg Nature Reserve – a fitting venue for nature writing!
Debbie, Jacqui, Lana, Lien, Marguerite and Tilla came with their wine and their notebooks.
Allan scattered the table with scrumptious things to pick on, everyone kicked their shoes off, settled down on comfy couches or cushions on the floor, and got stuck into the first workshop!
An article by Barry Lopez described what the real topic of nature writing is about.
“The key, I think, is to become vulnerable to a place. If you open yourself up, you can build intimacy. Out of such intimacy may come a sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.
My question-how to secure this-is not meant to be idle. How does one actually enter a local geography? Many of us daydream, I think, about re-entering childhood landscapes that might dispel a current anxiety.”
An example of this longing for childhood landscapes is described in Katherine Mansfield’s “Letters and Journals”
“Now, now I want to write about my own country, Yes, I want to write about my own country till I simply exhaust my store. Not only because It is ‘a sacred debt that I pay to my country because my brother and I were born there, but also because in my thoughts I range with him over all the remembered places. I am never far away from them. I long to renew them in writing.”
Pablo Neruda writes about a his longing for the land he left behind in his poem “Lost in the Forest”
Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.
Something from far off it seemd
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.
Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up through my conscious mind
as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.
An article written by Bonnie Costello, “Nomad Exquisite” about the nature writer Amy Clampitt describes how she takes on a different angle. Clampitt views nature “not for its eternal outlines but for its restless, even violent vitality, which brings forth, in beholder and poet, a comparable restless vitality of the imagination. Such an imagination, beholding the world for its “gold sides” its metaphysical beauty, and its “green sides” its sensuous beauty, responds with fiery forms. But while an “exquisite” nomad concerns herself with beauty, she does not build mansions to it. For she is “exquisite” in the other sense as well: she “searches out” and finds a home in motion.
She finds the sublime not by staring at the sun but at a bog of insectivorous plants, in “The Sun Underfoot among the Sundews.” But her “wilderness swallows you up” and the ground is not stable, this sinking is entirely conscious and real. Clampitt needs no surrealism to experience mystery; the world already turns itself upsidedown. There is plenty of depth in surfaces, so much, in fact, that “you start to fall upwards.”
The Sun Underfoot
Among the Sundews
An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum
lined and shaped like a teacup
A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder- deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce – hirizon hinting
you’ll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they’re set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand unbelieving,
a First Cause said once, “Let there
be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve
made their way tere unaided
other than by that backhand,round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.
A photographic slideshow on “Macro Botanicals” was shown to encourage spontaneous, on the spot writing and Tilla read a piece of her own work about “Bluebottles” or otherwise known as “Portuguese-men-of-war”
The evening ended with Lana reading a story about Candy’s sense of Place – “A farm at the edge of the world”.
OHhhhhhhhhhhh this is just so exciting! Thank you Candy for a wonderful evening and for creating Out of the Box.
I was deeply moved by Barry Lopez’s words on place. To have a sense of place, to feel that one belongs to a place is a beautiful thing. Reading your piece on your childhood in Magaliesburg stirred up so many memories. How amazing to think that we shared the same place in our childhoods and now, all these years later, we’re experiencing Betty’s Bay, a new place, together!
Please would you post a link to the Lopez essay you read to us Cand.
Also, just a note that Candy gave us a show of her botanical photographs which served as a prompt for a 10 minute free-writing session.
PS. Thanks to Alan for the delish snacks!
xxx
What a scintillating event to be part of OUT OF THE BOX and to engage with all the scintillating writing-ones and bread/music-making One.
I look forward to each hostess sharing of themselves in this way – and we should all be pleased to be different, and on different aspects of the wirting Road.
I, too, have a deep Spirit of Place in a Karoo ancestral farm that is still in the family , inherited by my brother. So I have been going there since before I was born – and it is such a wonderful blessing to have a place that is home and that one has been part of for my entire life! I am much more connected, and feel, its ‘Spirit of Place’, than my brother who owns, farms and lives in/on/with it
Shalom to you all
Marguerite
Thank you Marguerite for giving us a glimpse of your ‘Spirit of Place” Lawrence Durrell would approve of the ‘title’ for your ancestral home. Would love to hear more about it. Perhaps we will when you host one of our evenings!!
Love Candy