Slugs & snails & puppy dogs tails

(mostly molluscs)

If you have heard me speak about nature, books, and how I started writing, I may well have cited one of the first books that resonated with me, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey (Green Books). It’s a small but perfectly formed book about a year in which the author was ill in bed with an energy limiting illness. Disconnected from the world around her, Bailey was gifted a pot plant, on which travelled a small wild snail. Instead of asking her friend, who had brought in the plant, to take the snail back out to the garden, she asked them to bring in a terrarium. From there, the author learned so much about her new companion perched on her bedside cabinet, that she went on to write scientific papers about them. Nobody had before lived in such close proximity with a wild snail. The book unfolds with parallels and comforts the author experiences as she witnesses this life, watching for its preferences and habits, and traces its life cycle through the course of the year. You can read more on my thoughts, on this book and others, in a piece I wrote for The Polyphony in 2020. Prepared as I was planning the anthology, Moving Mountains, it offers some background and context.