Writing Wild Issue 9

Words from the Wild Women Writers' Salons

Hello, wonderful wild ones! How is it that we are already at Salon 10? What an amazing journey it has been so far, with so many inspiring conversations and beautiful connections. Thank you all so much for your support and your continued creative community.

I hope you can join me and guest authors Cal Flyn (Islands of Abandonment), Wendy Pratt (The Ghost Lake), and Annie Worsley (Windswept) on 29 August (online, 7 p.m. UK time) as we explore our creative (and human) relationship with landscape and place.

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A Look Back…

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves — Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Thank you to our July salon guest authors, Polly Atkin, Alyssa Graybeal, and Louise Kenward. Together, we explored what it means to come home to a chronically ill body, how reclaiming and retelling our stories can be an important part of learning how to belong, why it is so important to make visible the different ways we experience the world around us, and why being kind to ourselves is a cornerstone to creativity.

As four authors living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, hearing each other’s stories was particularly moving, and feeling them held and heard with such generosity in the salon space was a gift that will last a long while. Thank you.

Additional author-recommended resources:

The Literary Kitchen — Online writing workshops (good for all levels) with Ariel Gore

London Writers Hour - free online support and writing space

Want more from our authors? Catch them here…

Louise Kenward - Substack

Alyssa Graybeal - Substack

Polly Atkin - website

(Remember, you can access all salon recordings on the 2023-24 programme by upgrading to our paid subscription.)

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Coming Soon…

Wild Women Writers’ Salon 10

Trace: landscape, place, and belonging

Thursday 29th August, 7 pm BST (GMT +1)

Online

Join us for Salon 10—Trace: landscape, place, and belonging.

We will take a deep dive into the landscapes that surround us, the human and non-human traces that shape them, and the intimate relationships we form with the places we call home.

With guest authors Cal Flyn, Wendy Pratt, and Annie Worsley.

Thursday 29th August at 7 pm UK BST/GMT+1 (Online)

The event is recorded with English subtitles and has captions enabled.

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Introducing our Salon Guests

Cal Flyn

Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland.

She writes long-form journalism and literary nonfiction, and her work has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and other publications.

Her debut non-fiction book, Thicker Than Water, explored the life story of a distant relative, Angus McMillan – an explorer and pioneer of colonial Australia, now believed to have led brutal massacres of the Gunai aboriginal people – and posed the question: Have we inherited a responsibility to atone for our ancestors’ sins?

Her second book, Islands of Abandonment, has been a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Wainwright Prize for writing on global conservation, the British Academy Book Prize, the Richard Jefferies Award, the Highland Book Prize, the Scottish Nonfiction Book of the Year, and won her the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year title in 2022, and the John Burroughs Medal.

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

Exploring extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – Islands of Abandonment gives us a glimpse of what nature gets up to when we’re not there to see it. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Chernobyl to Detroit, Cal brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?

Wendy Pratt

Wendy Pratt Wendy Pratt is a poet, creative nonfiction author, and editor living on the North Yorkshire coast. She is the author of six poetry collections, including When I Think of My Body as a Horse (winner of the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition 2020). Her next collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2024. She is the founder and editor of Spelt Magazine, whose mission is to validate and celebrate the rural experience.

Her nonfiction nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake, was long-listed for the Nan Shepherd Prize in 2021 and is published by Borough Press (August 2024).

The Ghost Lake: a memoir of grief, nature and ancestry in rural Yorkshire

Paleolake Flixton is an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. Human occupation of the site dates back thousands of years to prehistoric times. Over the millennia, the vast lake disappeared, turning to wetlands and peaty fields. Today, all that is left of it is a watermark.

Wendy Pratt brings the reader on a pilgrimage around the ghost lake to locations that have acted as journey markers in her own life. While traversing forests and fenland, she reflects on finding belonging in nature as a woman who exists in a series of liminal spaces – as a working-class writer, an infertile woman in a fertile world, and a bereaved mother in a society focused on children.

The Ghost Lake is a deeply personal, lyrical, and stirring meditation on local history and changing landscapes that intertwines nature writing with an exploration of grief, belonging, and the lives and legacies of rural working‐class people.

Annie Worsley

Annie Worsley is a writer, geographer, grandmother, and crofter who lives in North West Scotland.

A physical geographer interested in spatial and temporal relationships between people, landscape, and the natural world, Annie’s doctoral research in the New Guinea Highlands in 1979 was life-changing and led to a passionate love for nature and wild places.

After a career break raising her four children, Annie returned to full-time academic life in 1999. She investigated long-term environmental change in the peat bogs, hills, and coasts of North West England and the spatial and temporal history of pollution and its effects on human health in urban environments. Annie was awarded a Personal Chair in Environmental Change by Edge Hill University. She left full-time academia in 2011.

Having left full-time academia in 2011, Annie now makes her home at Red River Croft, an agricultural smallholding of 11 acres on the western coast of Ross-shire in the North West Highlands of Scotland. She documents these experiences in her blog of the same name.

Her first book, Windswept, was published by William Collins in 2023.

Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands

North West Scotland is a land of unquenchable spirit and severe wildness. In the Highlands, life is ruled by the great elemental forces – light, wind and water hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits, and what grows. It also dictates how its people live.

In Windswept, Annie returns to prehistory to tell the epic story of how Scotland’s valleys were carved by glaciers, how rivers scythed paths through the mountains, how the earliest people found a way of life in the Highlands – and how she found a home there millennia later.

Introducing our Salon Host — Victoria Bennett

Victoria Bennett is a disabled writer, carer, and mother. A firm believer in everyone’s right to write their own story, she has dedicated much of her working life to nurturing spaces where people can do just that, founding Wild Women Press in 1999. When not juggling writing, care, and chronic illness, she can be found close to where the wild things grow, tending her new apothecary garden in Orkney.

Her debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers: motherhood, loss, and an apothecary garden, was published by Two Roads in 2023. An intimate memoir of motherhood, grief, and care, it offers a testimony to the love and radical hope that can grow in even the most broken places and, in doing so, holds a quiet manifesto for a changing world.

Nautilus Book Award Winner 2024.

‘A treasure map back to 'living' for those who have been away too long…’ — DONNA ASHWORTH, author of WILD HOPE

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What are the Wild Women Writers’ Salons?

The Wild Women Writers’ Salons are on the last Thursday of every month (except December) and include day and evening events. This programme focuses on memoir and creative nonfiction and runs until December 2024 (please note, the date for the December 2024 salon will be different due to holidays).

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.

Remember, ticket sales and paid subscriptions help value and pay all the fantastic people making these salons possible—from behind the scenes to the fabulous authors!

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Be part of the growing Wild Women Writers’ community

Why Upgrade to Paid?

The salons are entirely unfunded. All paid subscriptions support the work behind the scenes to make the Wild Women Writers’ Salons and the newsletter happen. In exchange for your support, you receive access to:

• access to recordings of all the salons;

• additional interviews with our guest authors on their writing and inspirations;

• further reading/resources and book suggestions from our guest authors;

• writing prompts from our guest authors;

• you can submit your writing questions to our guest Author Agony Aunt. One will be picked to be answered in each issue;

• listed opportunities and courses;

• the chance to be part of a nurturing community of creative practice!

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

Writing Wild (Wild Women Writers' Salons) is a reader-supported publication. By taking out a paid subscription, you support the work behind the scenes to make this project possible. Thank you.