This week I am very happy to return to more creative thoughts, and I am thrilled to share that not only is Moving Mountains now available in paperback in the UK and Ireland, but that it is due for release in the US and Canada next month (6th May) and Australia in June too!
To help it sail its way across the Atlantic I thought I would start with some reflections on who and what is in the book. Last week I spoke to
about me and how the book came about (and a lot about my own journey with illness and my creative practice - you can watch back on this link) and so I wanted to turn outwards in the next posts to tell you a little more about who else has helped to make this the beautiful anthology it is.The anthology is loosely grouped into thematic sections, developed in response to the work that came in, rather than having any prescriptive idea of what the book should look like. The first section I titled Water, although there are themes of water throughout the work - from the ocean to rain, rivers and ponds. Having just read
‘s recent post on her book Weathering, I am also dwelling on the quote she’s shared from the poem The Way In by Linda Hogan. In particular the line: “To enter stone, be water.”Abi Palmer recently wrote, of her first book Sanatorium, that making the book was a way of her trying to be water. She was writing about a rehab trip to Budapest where she bathed in sulphurous waters each day, and then returned to an inflatable bath tub in her London flat. She wrote deliriously (and deliciously) of how she would float in the water and in pain, rising to the ceiling or collapsing on the floor in the puddles from the overflowing tub.
‘To enter stone, be water’. There is something about living with fluctuating disability and chronic illness that makes me feel this physically, a wish to be water, a need to be fluid, running through and over and into the often difficult terrain we find ourselves in (see my last post for more on this). Abi’s piece in the anthology is not in the section titled ‘water’ but she does go on to invent the weather (and makes rain) in Moving Mountains. In parallel, Polly Atkin’s piece, another author who writes about her love of being immersed in water in her book Some Of Us Just Fall, writes about the difficulty of rain on her body in the anthology.
To be water is to dissolve, to be dissolved and to absorb something of what surrounds us, or to flow right across (and through). This is often one of the challenges I have, not to absorb too much into myself, to find edges. Again, water is drawn to the edges, it fills a space finding all the ways in and ways out.
In the first piece in the anthology, Sally Huband [Sea Bean] writes ‘Field Notes’. It is a gorgeous reflection on the shore of Shetland, and the many ways Sally finds her bodymind scrutinised by the wind and the wildlife that also make their home there. Sally’s lyric writing and powerful use of metaphor bring colour to words and feelings that are difficult to capture.
One paragraph in particular has stayed with me and I am reminded of it often. It is titled ‘Octopus’ and Sally is writing about a local fishing competition, of an octopus and mackerel having been caught and put in a bucket, with an attempted release after being weighed, the octopus spilled out of a plastic bag, a small audience watching to see what will happen next:
“The octopus is the vulnerability of a sedated bodymind on an operating table. The extruded swim bladder is pain removing the ability to speak. The oar is the touch of transgression of men who work in the medical profession. The twitch of the mackerel is the barely suppressed pain in each waiting room.”
[video shows an only just moving tideline of shallow waves in the centre of an image of blue sky reflected in the wet sand]
Isobel Anderson [CHALK/FLINT] follows ‘Field Notes’ with ‘Not Healthy, Never Healed’, a moving account of her walking the River Ouse in the South Downs, living with chronic pelvic pain and thinking of the water as both a place for release, as a final resting place (as it was with Virginia Woolf), and then a space for healing - how walking away from can also be walking towards.
Isobel is a musician and singer songwriter who runs the brilliant Girls Twiddling Knobs - one of the most important feminist voices in music technology, with regular courses on helping women start up and develop their career in music, from field recording to self production. You can listen to her on the regular podcast of the same name.
Next in the anthology is Jane Hartshorn’s [Tract] stunning poetry, ‘Sequences of the Body’. It is set out like water, drifting and shapeshifting across the page as it considers the experience of living in a body on land and submerged in water, and the minutiae of detail that we might consider and notice when living with pain and fatigue, how every part of our bodies can make themselves known in multiple ways.
Water is so often a relief for those of us living with pain and fatigue. If we’re able to access large bodies of water, like lakes or pools or the sea, the feeling of floating is one of my favourites. To have your body entirely supported by something else, not having to hold it up, the release of pain and the lack of effort involved can be a giddying delight.
Jane is a poet, editor, and educator based in London, although her writing in Moving Mountains takes the reader elsewhere, as she travels to and from London through Scotland, to Ayr, Ben Chonzie and Colonsay. Jane is currently a Lecturer in Poetry, Memoir, and Chronic Illness, with the University of Southampton.
To close the section, is Victoria Bennett’s On Becoming Ocean, which brings us full circle, and yet even more ambitious - not just on becoming water but becoming ocean! I think of all the chronically ill people becoming water, that between us we are an ocean.
[All My Wild Mothers] writes about her move away from the mainland of the UK and her home that was the Lake District, to Orkney, and the perils and pains of making such a journey - the risks involved in uprooting her and her family. It is a challenging physical and emotional leaving, crossing water to a new life on an island. She finds there’s a new level of instability and vulnerability for her to adjust to, not just of her body, but also of being able to cross the water at all, the reliance on good weather for ferries to be able to sail. Vik also references Khalil Gibran at the top of her piece: “The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.”Vik is also the creative force behind the Wild Women Salons - one of which I was fortunate to contribute to when Moving Mountains was first launched, speaking with Polly Atkin, Victoria Bennett, and Alyssa Graybael [Floppy] last year as we discussed wonky bodies and writing memoir - Alyssa is also on substack at
.You can order Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness & Disability from all good bookshops, online, and your local library.
Moving Mountains is now available to preorder in the US, Canada, & Australia.
