Findings

"Good question! I was writing a series of columns for Caught by the River, a nature writing website, and I think I’d already done the first four and my friend Morag said to me, ‘Have you read any Kathleen Jamie?’ and directed me towards Findings, which I just gulped up. It was interesting to discover that she was operating in some of the same territory that I was trying to—in an extremely skillful and much more developed way. And a little bit of me was like: ‘Damn you Jamie! Back off!’ “I spent two summers being out every night, looking and listening for corncrakes” But I’ve gone back and looked at this book recently, and realised how influential she has been on me—just by showing what can be done with the nature essay. I think she’s wonderful. She’s a poet, which you can just see in her work, in her tight descriptions. She describes the weather in Orkney as there being ‘frequent scraps of rainbow,’ which is just right. So yes, it wasn’t like I read Jamie’s stuff and thought I’d go and do something similar, but during the writing of The Outrun, I came across her near the beginning. Yes—I spent two summers being out every night, looking and listening for corncrakes, and I only ever saw one of them. They almost became a sort of phantom, or symbol, or a way of allowing me to see the island as much as find the bird. There’s a lot of mythology and theory associated with them. It was something that I randomly applied for, got the job, and working for the RSPB opened a lot of doors for me. That was the beginning of my deeper interest in the natural world and realising, through writing and also through reading people like Jamie, that it was something that I could write about. I’ve given this book to a number of people and recommended it to more. She’s a poet, but she’s also a realist—she talks about details of modern-day Scottish life, the people that she meets, and a little bit about her own daily life: she has to be back to pick the kids up from school, things like that. And she’s just really smart, in terms of the research that she does and sometimes, not in a too heavy handed way, but the way she relates it to wider ecological issues. “They almost became a sort of phantom, or symbol, or a way of allowing me to see the island as much as find the bird” The title essay, “Findings”, is about beach-combing and the things that she finds. I like how she describes, on the same poetic level, the gannet skull that she finds but also the unusual plastic objects she finds washed up, which is obviously about the pollution of the seas. Her tone is really well judged and her beautiful, clear-eyed descriptions show the reality of what’s going on on the coastlines. I think she’s fantastic and a worthy winner of the Saltire Book Prize last year."

"Findings , and her later books of essays, are suffused with wit and insight, conveyed in prose so clear, subtly balanced, and powerful that I often put down the book, temporarily stunned. Then I start reading again, with a huge smile of appreciation and admiration. She is renowned for careful observations and reflections that erase the boundaries between the so-called “natural” and human worlds. This erasure—or blurring—is especially important in Scotland , a nation that writers from elsewhere have repeatedly described through a romantic naturalist lens, seeking “wild” refuge and even claiming the landscape as their own. She regards this view as “an affront to those many generations who took their living on that land”. Reading Jamie’s essays is like being a needle in a growing tapestry, our path determined by a skilful and sometimes playful weaver. Through precise and colourful language she dips and lifts us through the many layers of story that comprise human and nonhuman life in place, gradually building a whole whose overall effect is surprising and inspiring. They are all brilliant. But the opening essay of the book, ‘Darkness and Light’, is magnificent. It opens by situating us at the “still point of the turning year”. Then: “Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light over the Black Craig”. We have not yet left her kitchen, and already the rhythms of the cosmos are present, another planet shines, local history and language are manifest, and the echo of T. S. Eliot is dimly heard. And so it continues, but the essay is utterly lacking in pomposity or self-regarding literary fireworks. Instead, with wry humour and a keen awareness of the meanings of darkness she takes us into ancient and modern experiences of winter’s dark, a marvellous integration of personal narrative and keen-eyed reflection."