Writing Wild Issue 4
Words from the Wild Women Writers' Salons
The Wild Women Writers’ Salons made use of the ‘extra day’, leaping into conversation with guest authors Gail Simmons, Phoebe Smith, and Jade Angeles Fitton. It was a wonderful afternoon salon exploring what it means to be ‘in silence’ and our creative relationship with solitude. Together, we word-walked along the pilgrimage paths, explored wild spaces, and took a deep dive into what it means to ‘walk alone’.
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If you want to follow more of what our salon guests are up to, here are a few dates to look out for…
27th March - join Phoebe to celebrate the launch of Wayfarer at Stanfords, London (pre-order your copy of Phoebe’s beautiful memoir now)
8th May - Join Gail to celebrate the paperback release of Between the Chalk and The Sea - Waterstones Canterbury
10th May - Join Gail in conversation with the wonderful Folde Dorset
18th May - join Jade for a morning writing workshop on writing from solitude - The Power of Solitude at Barnstable Library, and in conversation in the evening at Bude Literary Fest
Keep reading to find out what’s coming in Salon 5 - March 28th 7 pm GMT
Coming March 28th
Wild Women Writers’ Salon 5
Salt in our Blood
Join us for Salon 5 to take a deep dive into the ocean, exploring connection, creativity and climate change with authors Easkey Britton (Ebb & Flow: Connect with the Patterns and Power of Water), Hannah Stowe (Move Like Water: A Story of the Sea and Its Creatures ) and Lisa Woollett (Lost to the Sea: A Journey Round the Edges of Britain and Ireland)
Introducing our Salon Guests
Easkey Britton, Hannah Stowe, and Lisa Woollet
Easkey Britton
Easkey is the first Irish woman to be nominated for the Global WSL Big Wave Awards but there’s more to Easkey than surfing. A scientist, academic and social activist with a PhD in Environment and Society, her work is deeply influenced by the ocean and the lessons learned pioneering women’s big-wave surfing in Ireland and the sport of surfing with women in Iran, featured in the award-winning documentary film, “Into the Sea”. Passionate about facilitating creative & collaborative processes, she founded Like Water, a platform to explore innovative ways to reconnect with who we are, our environment and each other through water.
Easkey draws on the sea as an active metaphor to dive deep into the power of presence and embodiment of natural cycles, delivering international summits and global leadership programmes specialising in experiential learning, nature connection, immersive embodiment practices, community engagement and social impact, including the annual Wavemaker retreat in Portugal and Move Like Water retreat for women.
She is the author of several books on our relationship with water, including ‘50 Things to do by the Sea’, ‘Saltwater in the Blood’, and most recently ‘Ebb and Flow: Connect with the patterns and power of water’.
Ebb and Flow: Connect with the Patterns and Power of Water
An exploration of water’s power to heal us, inspire us and offer us spiritual meaning. This is a feminist reimagining of the meaning of power through the lens of water. Easkey offers a range of wellness practices to encourage the reader to connect with water as healer, restoring a relationship of care
“We need this book now more than ever. We need its urgent, delicate truths; its insistent call to action – for the good of the feminine, mothering, nourishing waters – and all we share them with.” — Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author - Cacophony of Bone
Hannah Stowe
Hannah Stowe is an artist, writer, sailor and scientist. Born and raised on the Welsh coast in a ramshackle cottage next to the sea, she spent her formative years exploring a landscape and seascape that blur into one another on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the sea.
She has worked as a sailor and studied to be a marine ecologist, and now combines art and science, exploration and adventure together with the spirit of the Renaissance.
Through her work, she wants to bring the world’s oceans to you to hold in your hands and connect with all their powerful majesty and subtle fragility.
Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea
An inspiring, heartfelt hymn to the sea and a testament to finding and following a dream.
The seas cover over two-thirds of our planet, yet most of us live our lives on land, creatures of a different element, at once fascinated and terrified by the beauty and power of these great bodies of water. There are some, though, who go to sea, who get to know its many moods—the tranquil and mirror-like, the raging and ripple-swept—and who bring back with them their stories of wonder and warning.
As a young girl, Hannah Stowe was raised at the tide’s edge on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, falling asleep to the sweep of the lighthouse beam. Now in her mid-twenties, working as a marine biologist and sailor, Stowe draws on her professional experiences sailing tens of thousands of miles in the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic Sea, and the Caribbean to explore the human relationship with wild waters — and what might the water around us be able to teach us?
Braiding her powerful and deeply personal narrative and illustrations with stories of six keystone marine creatures—the fire crow, sperm whale, wandering albatross, humpback whale, shearwater, and barnacle—we are invited to fall in love with the sea and those that call it home and discover the majesty, wonder, and vulnerability of the underwater world.
This is a book that will sweep you away from the shore into a wild world of water, whales, storms, and starlight…
‘…a sensuous book, more felt than described, more described than explained, more painted than penned: part memoir, part journal and … part natural mystery tour…’ Carl Safina — The New York Times Books Review
Lisa Woollett
Lisa is the author and photographer of several award-winning books, and Rag and Bone (John Murray 2020) won the Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-fiction. Lost to the Sea is out with John Murray in May.
A beachcomber and mudlark, Lisa grew up by the sea on the Isle of Sheppey at the mouth of the Thames. Her grandfather was from a South London family in the ‘scavenging professions’, and she spent much of her childhood fossicking along the island’s shores, collecting—among other things—fossils, sharks’ teeth and old bottles.
After leaving the island, Lisa was a documentary photographer for 12 years. Past clients include the Independent on Sunday, Daily Telegraph and Observer. For the last 20 years, she has lived with her family and a lurcher in Cornwall in a house shared with buckets and boxes of shore finds.
Lost to the Sea: A Journey Round the Edges of Britain and Ireland
Medieval kingdoms. Notorious pirate towns. Drowned churches. Crocodile-infested swamps.
On a series of coastal walks, Lisa Woollett takes us on an illuminating journey, bringing to life the places where mythology and reality meet at the very edges of Britain and Ireland.
From Bronze Age settlements on the Isles of Scilly and submerged prehistoric forests in Wales, to a Victorian amusement park on the Isle of Wight and castles in the air off County Clare, Lisa draws together archaeology, meetings with locals and tales from folklore to reveal how the sea has forged, shaped and often overwhelmed these landscapes and communities.
Lost to the Sea is an exhilarating voyage around the ever-shifting shores of the British Isles, and a haunting ode to our profound relationship with the sea.
‘A haunting evocation of vanishing places. Meticulously researched… and a timely reminder of the transience of our coasts.’ - Philip Marsden
Introducing the salon host…
Victoria Bennett is an award-winning disabled poet, author, carer and founder of Wild Women Press. Her debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers: motherhood, loss and an apothecary garden, was long-listed for the Nan Shepherd Prize and won the New Writing North Northern Debut Award.
All My Wild Mothers: motherhood, loss and an apothecary garden
At seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett learns her sister has died in a canoeing accident. At that moment, her life is changed.
Five years later, and struggling with the demands of motherhood, grief and full-time care, Victoria and her family move to a new social housing estate in rural Cumbria. Here, in the rubble of a former industrial site, she and her young son begin to grow a wild apothecary garden: daisy, for resilience; dandelion, for strength against adversity; sow thistle, to lift melancholy; and borage, to bring hope in dark and difficult times.
Stone by stone, seed by seed, they discover that sometimes life grows, not in spite of what is broken, but because of it.
All My Wild Mothers is an intimate memoir of motherhood, a handbook on survival and a testimony to radical hope.
‘A beautifully written and wisely laid out memoir . . . a treasure map back to 'living', for those who have been away too long…’ — DONNA ASHWORTH, author of WILD HOPE
What are the Wild Women Writers’ Salons?
The Wild Women Writers’ Salons are on the last Thursday of every month (except December), and they include both day and evening events. The programme, which focuses on memoir and creative nonfiction, runs until November 2024.
With a treasure chest of excellent writers from across the globe, these are different from your regular Zoom sessions or author events. Together, we're creating a welcoming and inspiring space to gather and engage in meaningful conversation and reflection, where writers can share and explore their inspirations and writing journeys.
Each salon will feature three (and sometimes four!) fantastic guest writers. Here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect:
Dive deep into the world of words.
Hear authors share their works.
Get a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process.
Real talk about publishing highs and lows.
Engage in some heart-to-heart during the Q&A session.
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A Peek Behind the Scenes
with Salon 4 guest authors: Gail Simmons, Phoebe Smith, and Jade Angeles Fitton
In an age where life seems to move at extraordinary speed, encouraging us to move from one experience to the next in a perpetual swipe and scroll — the act of stopping, listening, and being witness — is perhaps one of the most radical acts we can embrace.
However we do this — whether it is a small moment captured between the hours of care, a cracked-open window on a bright early spring day, listening to the birds wake, or a slow walk on one of our ancient paths — can all help to remind us of the wild silence we carry within, and the deeper things that connect us beyond our the busy-ness of our human lives.
Because there is always so much more to talk about than the salon time allows, I continued the conversation with Gail, Phoebe, and Jade to learn a bit more about their writing lives behind the scenes …
Q: How much research did you undertake to write your books, and how much was picked up afterwards from clues, pointers or discoveries made on the road?
Gail: A book like Between the Chalk and the Sea, which involves a lot of history, also involves a lot of research. Whilst I needed to do some research before I set off on my journey, I find that too much prior knowledge gets in the way of being in the moment. So I prefer to make the discoveries on the journey itself (as people have done throughout history) and then find out more information later. In this way, I hope the factual information is woven in more naturally.
Phoebe: I did some research to find the pilgrimages and look into the areas of the country I wanted to visit or discover more before I went. A few times, it happened when I was on assignments and stumbled across a pilgrim path.
I did take a few notes and observations during and after the walks. When I knew I was putting this into a book, I revisited every pilgrimage apart from the Camino de Santiago. I did this so that I could experience it with a much clearer head, and could notice more about the landscape or wildlife that perhaps I hadn’t noticed as much before.
Jade: I had done a fair amount of research just living it, without realizing I was researching – the concept of ‘the outsider’ being an interest of mine. I’ve found in life that, often, the most interesting people are on the peripheries. So I had a few of my subjects—like Hope Bourne—before I even knew I was writing a book. Saying that, when I wrote the book, I started researching quite obsessively, so much (about 70-80,000 words) didn’t go into the finished draft. A fair amount of research was done just to write the proposal and get a good idea of what topics I would be covering (now I’ll always try to think of the proposal as a blessing and a bit of a gamble). And then, before I started writing, I was voraciously reading anything that might be of interest. The first draft was very research-heavy as I was afraid to write my story. So, for me, the art was in sifting through everything and selecting only what was relevant to this one book. It’s also knowing that once you start writing, you will naturally be alert to what might be relevant to your book, and life will throw a lot of interesting information your way, so to be open to that rather than dogmatically reading every book on the subject. And knowing when to stop (which I didn’t manage), or at the very least slow down!
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