Re-visioning #10: A conversation with Sarah Thomas
This is the tenth in a roving series of conversations, which began in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of those times, I found myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations have been part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
This will be the last in the series, and it refers back to an exchange between the writer and documentary maker Sarah Thomas and myself, which took place in April 2021. One of the key things that I’ve taken from the slow process of these conversations is the value of circling back, of re-treading ground, of unearthing things that didn’t appear first time around. Another has been the curious insistence of birds to be part of the dialogue — they just keep showing up! It feels good to come full circle by foregrounding their presence, since it was artist Simon Withers’ relationship with swans that gave me the idea to start these conversations.
Sarah Thomas is a writer and documentary filmmaker with a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies. She is committed to work that explores our entanglements with the living world. Her films have been screened internationally. She has been a regular contributor to Dark Mountain journal, and her writing has also appeared in the Guardian and the anthology Women On Nature edited by Katharine Norbury. In 2020 she was nominated for the Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award. She was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. Sarah’s debut memoir set in Iceland, The Raven’s Nest, was published by Atlantic Books in July 2022.
ST: When we spoke I was in the middle of what was actually a really shit year. Having graduated from a PhD a year before, I had some really exciting residencies planned, then the pandemic came along and upended everything. I was hit with a triple whammy of not having work, not having anywhere to live and not being eligible for any Covid support. It was frightening. I couldn’t ground myself anywhere. Things kept morphing and re-arranging themselves. If you showed me a course offering the opportunity to live an untethered year, to see how we might test our resilience, I’d be all for it wouldn’t I? But this was different.
IN: I wrote in the early days of the pandemic about a sense of having become untethered, it was that word that made the most sense. For me it was a result of three factors — the death of my father, the UK’s exit from the EU, and the onset of the pandemic — all of which happened within a month. My sense of belonging had been shaken.
ST: For me belonging is about connecting and feeling, weaving yourself into the rhythms of a place. During the PhD, I had gone through a divorce from my Icelandic husband, sold our home in Iceland, and returned to the UK to live in Cumbria. While I was there, the Lake District became a UNESCO world heritage site and was descended upon all year round. Suddenly there were coaches getting lost and stuck down the tiny lane where I lived. Cumbria experienced a huge flood in 2015 and we watched the neighbouring house burn to the ground in 2018. Finally, a beautiful beech tree outside my window from which an owl hooted at night was cut down by my landlord, with no notice given. I’m quite sensitive so when something happens to a tree that I’ve formed a relationship with, I feel it viscerally. I was feeling overwhelmed every day by all these changes, violated even. I had to leave, and that’s how I came to Scotland.
IN: You mentioned resilience and it’s actually something that caught my eye reading your piece ‘What Remains?’ about the fire where you lived in Cumbria. You write that ‘resilience is to listen and thrive in a relationship with all things’. That feels close to some thinking of mine that has come out of a pilgrimage I finished recently, and is currently taking the form of a collective deep listening practice. What does it mean to you?
ST: I think in that piece I was mulling on bindweed, and its tendency to climb, stifle and grasp, or however I put it… how some might understand that as resilience, but to me the earth itself is the site of resilience, holding the root systems and everything else besides. To really live somewhere, to be rooted, is to build resilience. It’s a dream I’ve had since I was eighteen and I had it to some degree in Iceland — being part of an ecosystem, or network of exchange and belonging. In some ways, everything since then has been a quest for belonging. But the reality is that it’s an increasingly difficult thing to do, at least in respect of a particular patch of earth. The housing crisis is really bringing that home.
IN: Ok, so let’s talk about the forms that belonging takes. We’re here having this conversation to some extent because we got chatting about avian connections in our work. I’ve just finished a film called Grief is a Shapeshifter using footage I shot of a starling murmuration in the Peak District, and you’ve recently published a book called The Raven’s Nest. When we started exchanging in the first lockdown you were also visiting a heronry every day and making recordings, some of which you sent me. What does belonging mean to you in the context of those relationships?
ST: I think the roots of that question goes way back. I’ve been an environmentalist since I was a kid, but always in the sense of being in love with nature, defending nature, but still calling it ‘nature’. In Iceland, we lived in this steep sided valley, and there was a raven that used to come and knock on the roof if I forgot to put bones out for it in the winter. So the raven stopped being ‘nature’ and started being an individual in my world. I had never felt so continuous with nature before.
IN: You’re talking about the living world entering into your sense of yourself. My experience of being on pilgrimage is something similar, although what I feel is more like the self flowing out into world, the ego dissipating until I’m just a body moving through the landscape. Invariably there is some kind of ecstatic response to that, a moment in which I become less human.
ST: I know the experience you’re talking about because I once did a 2 month long walk, and if I’m lucky it can happen on shorter ones. I know another way to become less human, too, which is to go and hang out with herons for three months! The heronry you mentioned was twenty minutes walk from where I was living during the early part of the first lockdown. In April I started by visiting it every day on my morning walk, and kept going back for longer and longer each day, because I noticed that when I was with the herons I felt very very different to how I was feeling when I was in the house. Their cacophony articulated the chaos for me, and in doing so was calming. There was a hammock under the spruce trees there made out of fishing net and so I just took some food and my laptop and spent my days there. I made a desk out of a discarded pallet and some logs. By June, I wanted to be there when they woke up so I took my sleeping bag down, and it was incredible. I was woken at 3.30am with dawn rising in pink light over the tidal estuary, with the mist rolling off the fields into the river, which by this time had become like the Styx, like a mythical version of itself. During my PhD I had been an intellectual world that concerned itself with questions of multi-species belonging, but we were all communicating with each other from our offices, so it felt really right just to be in the presence of these other beings. When sitting beneath those trees day in day out, I found that if I am really open to the world around me, even if I’m not writing about that place or those beings, it lends a quality of attention to the work, a commitment of sorts, a sense of listening to the polyrhythms at play, so that writing just becomes one of these multiplicities that emerge when you weave yourself into a place.
IN: I’ve found my work gravitating towards practices of listening. I’ve been spending time recently with a text by Pauline Oliveros called Quantum Listening, in which she talks about listening simultaneously to more than one reality, in fact listening to as many as possible. She talks about changing and being changed by the listening, and that really seems to be another way to talk about being continuous with the living world that you describe. I like the slow determination of weaving yourself into a place.
ST: It is slow, and it’s incremental. Learning about place expands you. It becomes second nature. And to get back to this question of how to cultivate a sense of belonging, I find foraging is another deepening of that. To begin to get into a rhythm that is in sync with natural cycles, to eat of the place and drink of the place, and eat certain things at certain times of year… there’s medicine in that. The first thing a bear eats when it comes out of hibernation is wild garlic, to shake out the winter bear, and get that fire in the belly going.
IN: That’s great, I didn’t know that. I associate more with walking than foraging this kind of deepening. I found that as I walked round and round the woods near our house in Sheffield during the various lockdowns, which happen to be full of wild garlic, I began to notice and listen to the environment more deeply. I found that I was also deepening neural pathways that were maybe becoming associated with walking those routes, and so, like a thread on a screw, going deeper with each revolution. I enjoy how that activity of walking round and round in circles, and finding deeper layers of engagement with place in doing so, was woven through those months during which the linear progress of capitalism was temporarily halted.
ST: I think if you drew a map of all those walks it would look very much like a nest. And eventually, a nest can contain life.
IN: My work, which includes these conversations, often feels like a process of building some kind of architecture that could hold a collection of things together for a while.
ST: I think that’s what my practice tries to do — to sit with these threads and fragments and try to bring them together in ways that aren’t tidy but somehow honour the multiplicity of realities. The title of my PhD was Making Worlds with Raven in Rural Iceland: Entangled Memoir for the Anthropocene. I was very pleased to have got that into the academy. In my memoir The Raven’s Nest, which was the creative component of my PhD, Raven comes up in this recursive way, and each time it plays a slightly different role. And the structure of the text is inspired by a raven’s nest: it holds together many threads which I didn’t attempt to reconcile or resolve. It contains rupture and repair. It’s written in a way that it can be started at any point, it’s cyclical like that. And in referencing nest architecture, it’s a challenge to the way that we talk about words as ‘building blocks’, which feels like we’re talking about a book as a house. I wanted to be writing my way into a more multi-species metaphor for containing life than ‘house’ because a house is also walls that keep the rest out.
IN: And also how you describe the process of nest building as pulling in all of these objects and artefacts towards this purpose of holding life. And that’s true of most birds of course.
ST: Sure, except smaller birds wouldn’t include a rake as a building material, which this raven did!
IN: Is there something too about transience as a form of resilience?
ST: Transience in the sense that something can withstand breaking and remaking over and over is resilience, certainly. Transience in terms of never being in one place for a long time, I’m not sure anymore. Gyre Falcons have used the same nests, or rebuilt them, over thousands of years. I thought it was about bringing things back to a home base and periodically reconfiguring it to see what’s there. But in a world that’s changing so quickly and so unknowably, many of us are being forced to adopt a ‘fugitive’ mindset as Bayo Akomolafe would call it. In the West, especially those in my generation (40s), we are on the cusp of a massive shift in expectations as to what dwelling/ belonging might look like, and therefore what forms resilience might have to take.
IN: I enjoy how you refer to different species of bird to support your points.
ST: I didn’t go out to seek birds as my muse, it just keeps happening. Historically they’ve been important in augury. I don’t know why birds keep foregrounding themselves in my work, but it’s only through writing it, and finding the right way to write it, that I can find out what it’s really about.
IN: There was a moment I wrote about when I was walking earlier this year, approaching Rye at dusk, and a cormorant flew down the tidal river there, and it was the harbinger of that moment I described, where I fully drop down into the experience of the pilgrimage, out of the thinking about what I’d left unfinished, whose emails I hadn’t responded to, and into Deep Time.
ST: There’s this very concrete surface reality in which we try to achieve things, and then there’s Deep Time. Tyson Yunkaporta, whose writing has affected me the most over the last couple of years, talks about the transition that we’re in taking over a thousand years until we achieve some kind of balance again, because that’s how long it will take for old growth forests to re-establish themselves. So the transition will vastly outlive the outcomes of all these things that we think we’re concerned with. I found that incredibly powerful, because it didn’t take away any of the urgency or my commitment, but it did help me bear the weight of personal responsibility across a much broader span of time. It connected me to a web of many actions that have happened, are happening, and will happen in the future, because what else is there to do other than be in service of leaving a more healed planet than when you arrived?
IN: I’m interested in how this thinking shows up in your work.
ST: The idea of making work is shifting for me, prompted by the question of what is our role as artists. We are culture bearers of some kind, but I see that the idea of culture is also shifting to encompass our relationships with all of the beings that we’re living amongst. I think that the role of the artist is to do that deep listening, and to model the behavioural change that’s needed — which includes, on a profound level, how we relate to one another — humans and not. I think listening to the narrative that’s unfolding is what artists do best. We’re often the first to pick up on things.
The Dark Mountain Project is a good example of that: it was vilified in the early days as being too cultish and doomy, even by people like George Monbiot, and now those ideas, of the need to navigate and cultivate a creative and cultural response to collapse, are becoming reasonable to many. More prosaically, I would love to see Universal Basic Income brought in so that we can really think about and experiment with how to live, rather than about what we’re producing, and then works would emerge out of that mode of being, or would be deeply entangled with the ways of being. I never intended to write The Raven’s Nest when I was living in Iceland. It emerged out of an exceptional experience of living differently at 66 degrees North, and I hope to bring some of that difference to people as the book wends its way into the world, not only in the form of the book itself.
IN: You’re on tour at the moment, doing readings from the book inspired by a practice of kvöldvaka. Let’s wind up by asking you about how that practice relates to what we’ve been discussing.
ST: Kvöldvaka (‘the evening wake’)is an Icelandic tradition of reading aloud to a household while they do handiwork, dating back to a time when the majority of Icelanders lived on farms, in small turf-roofed houses in which a single attic room formed the communal living quarters. As I have taken The Raven’s Nest on tour, most often rather than doing Q&As, I have given an extended reading and invited audiences to bring their knitting and mending projects to do as I read. Reading for half an hour or more is truly transportive for the audience, and I can feel them drop into a very different psychological and felt space. Being read to calms the nervous system, which is as important a thing to do as any in these jangly times.
For me, the simplicity of kvöldvaka speaks to the possibility to always access and share worlds beyond your material reality, for culture and ideas to be carried through stories, even with the scarcest of resources: one book, one lamp, and a gathering of people. For a short time, it creates a place that you can weave yourself into, and the reader and the menders are weaving that place together. And hopefully you can each carry some of that place away with you, and light a lamp for others where you live. In a time where everything is so unstable, perhaps this is one form belonging and resilience can take.
Twitter @journeysinbtwn
Instagram @journeysinbetween
