How to be an anthologist

‘Editing anthologies is an unsung art. An anthologist balances story selection, story editing, story arrangement, and central concept ...'

This quote comes from an article, Anthologists Discuss their Craft in Clarkesworld magazine. OK, their territory as 'six of the most accomplished and innovative editors working in the fantasy, science fiction and horror fields', is a little different to my own, but the principles seem similar. Anyone considering taking on the editing of an anthology might do well to read this fascinating discussion which Philippa Johnson of Literaturetraining, in her role as professional development adviser, alerted me to.

As I read all the words Two Ravens Press have called in from writers of 'wild places', a fascinating process begins to unfold. The selection is a curious and complex task, and a great responsibility. It's not just about selecting for the quality of writing, but for the diversity of what is said in relation to the theme, the way it is said, the places that are evoked. I go for a walk in the tug and sun-splash of this April day, afraid that all the words will gust out of my head. Instead, the individual pieces start to jostle against each other, talk to each other, set up chimes and frictions, and I return to my task excited. I begin to see how a gathering of 'stories' could muster to become more than the sum of its parts in A Wilder Vein.

wayside interpretation

Here's a great idea. Last week I walked a stretch of disused railway line, now a path, between Haddington and Longniddry in East Lothian. Along the way were these panels, with some helpful and fun suggestions for what to see provided by Longniddry Primary School.

From late April I'm going to be walking and writing along a new long-distance footpath in Dumfriesshire, the Annandale Way, which follows the Annan river from source to mouth for 52 miles between Moffat and Annan. I'll be working with five schools along the way to write some wayside interpretation and accompanying literature for paper. So the Haddington example was good to see.

The Annandale Way is new territory for me but already I know that it will pass through some fascinating story territory - reivers, the site of the discovery of an ancient bow, medieval land-use systems and even Merlin is said to be buried in a hill near Moffat. Atlantic salmon run the river and there's a famously tragic Burns song about Annan waters. We will have plenty to set our pens walking.

The path opens on September 12th.

John Muir Trust and wild writing

Last Wednesday myself and co-judge Hamish MacDonald announced the winners of the John Muir Trust's wild writing competition at Fort William's fantastic Mountain Festival. It's the third year I've been involved in some capacity and the way that JMT has joined the Festival in developing a creative response to mountains and wild places in our lives has been fantastic and creates more and more interest each year.

For the full results, see here but Tom Bryan of Kelso was the overall winner with a beautiful reflection on his relationship with Suilven, the iconic Assynt mountain that follows one's eye, shape-shifting as it goes, around that part of north-west Scotland. Alan Gay of North Berwick took second place with a mysterious poem called 'Deer Path' which for me made the visible and invisible worlds of the mountains touch for a moment. There were three runners up - all prose pieces - from Kate Blackadder, Stephen Busby and Jenny Holden.

Joyce Carol Oates criticised 'nature writing' for what she called its "painfully limited set of responses: reverence, awe, piety, mystical oneness." We may have found those responses amongst the entries but we also found exhilaration, confusion, boredom, coldness, joy and grief.

Congratulations to all!

Meanwhile, if you get hold of a copy of the latest JMT journal (46/Spring 2009) you will find an illustrated extract of my piece 'The Beat of Heart Stones' about a walk along a dry stone dyke on Schiehallion this time last year.

The persistence of feet and water

The train from Nairobi to Mombasa travels to its own timetable, its hours unpredictable. When children in the nearby villages and homesteads hear it, they come running across the fields towards it, specks at first, full pelt with shoulders leading, until they stop with wide grins for the daily spectacle. Whistles, shrieks, waves greet us. The embankments are trailed with paths. The beat of feet have found the most direct way down, identifying the line and then reinforcing it over and over, up and down, wearing it smooth, stone free, curving. The feet have worked with natural features - soft or hard rock, contours, just as a stream would.

In Hell's Gate National Park, close to Lake Naivasha, I was told a story which combines feet and water in the formation of a deep gorge . The Maasai used to herd their cattle between the high plateau and Lake Naivasha. The route they wore attracted running water in the rainy season, which worked with the pathway over the years to gouge a deep indentation in the land. The herders continued to use the route, fairly dry except during the rains, and the gorge deepened to its dramatic formation today. Whether or not this geography is accurate, I like the story of cooperation between human and animal movement and the aggressive momentum of water.

In the gorge, the Maasai found boiling water spouting and falling, they thought of it as someone below them, cooking. They were then convinced this ravine led to Hell.

The Maasai and their animals are now settled there, no longer nomadic. But the tracks of wilder animals persist, overlaying each other on the same routes, ways that converge into the only water hole, to lay out a massive spider of paths.

Yesterday I walked across the valley near my home. The valley bottom is now a golf course but it had previously been common-land and people walk their dogs or themselves there as if it still is. By and large walkers and golfers cooperate. Over the years the greenkeepers have made efforts to re-direct feet by closing gaps in walls where short cuts emerge onto roads or other pathways. Yesterday I noticed that one of the former ways has re-asserted itself over the non-golfing winter - a thin line has been worn in the grass leading to a small but determined tumbling of the wall.

Baring our soles

Our feet are unique. Making moulds of them in wool certainly showed that (see post below), but so do footprints on a beach. Look at these two. One gouges a great hole with its long toes and heavy front pad, drawing a great archless slab. The other seems almost impossibly pointed at its toes, the body it bears balancing precariously above an arch hovering high over the ground.

This beach in Kenya carried a transient record of the collision of different peoples, trajectories and times. Kenyans and Europeans; fishermen and strolling tourists. Sometime between two high tides the two feet above kissed, mingling forms into one, when their owners might not have ever knowingly passed each other, locked eyes, nodded a greeting. Promiscuous feet. Then the tide washed in, removed the evidence.

How often do we walk barefoot? Perhaps the only time for many of us is on a beach, enjoying the granular massage of sand on soles. But what do we deny ourselves by not baring our soles more often? My friend Philo Ikonya, whose village walks I shared, talks about removing shoes as removing barriers, 'like talking between feet and the earth'. She talks about the enlivening effect on the senses as if contact of the foot on the land makes her alive right up to her forehead. Barefoot rambling enthusiasts are also keen to point out the health benefits of escaping the strains footwear puts on the biomechanics of our gait.

Three of us tried it, a walk of a few kilometers between Philo's mother's home, the river where she used to fetch water, the church which she attended every Sunday, the school where she taught for thirty years, where a pair of shoes were kept in a cupboard to be put on when she arrived. I bared my winter-soft feet, and the other two bared their city-shod ones, and we walked, careful of sharp rocks, occasional glass, our feet warming to the journey, spreading onto the soft red sand of slopes worn above the river by repeated climbs and descents. Young girls strained uphill with barrels on their backs, their toes active, rising and splaying slightly from the pad, the foot solid and supportive.

Women walking barefoot around these village paths and roads is nothing unusual. We met an old lady who told us she would gladly walk the 30km from Nairobi barefoot. She could afford to buy shoes, but why would she want to wear them, when she had the freedom to walk like this? I agreed with her, but at the time I was hopping from foot to foot, as the sun-glossed earth scoured my soles. A white woman walking barefoot was a little unusual and did attract comment. What power did my companions have over me that they could make me do it? Was I being punished for something?

It was a sensual experience, made me measure each footfall, appreciate the texture of soil, sand, pebbles, tarmac, the cool damp crumble of a valley-bottom path, the crazed maps of baked earth. And when we reached the church, and washed the red soil from our feet under a tap, replaced our shoes for the return journey, I felt a new aliveness in my feet, a tingle, as if they had been more properly exercised. I enjoyed, in the days that followed, a slight callousing on the soles. The natural weathering of well-walked feet.

I came home to a deep fall of snow and then a fast thaw, bundled my feet in damp wool socks and boots to walk across the re-emerging grass of the golf course. The soft snow had melted, but it left behind it islands of impacted ice, foot-shaped, stamping their lines across the grass like floating reminders of journeys made in an ice age. With the incoming tide of warm rain, rising temperatures, they too will soon be gone.

walking in wool

Yesterday, three of us spent a very happy few hours making 'felt feet' by walking in wool, using a method being promoted as an artistic activity by Dartmoor-based felt-maker Yuli Somme.

The idea came about on a long walk I took with her in Norway in 2004, following her father 's account of his escape across the mountains from the coast to neutral Sweden during the war, having been arrested for photographing a torpedo station for the resistance movement. Yuli cared for her feet on the rough walk by placing small pieces of wool fleece inside her boots, wrapping the toes to protect them from each other. She was intrigued and delighted (as a textile artist) to discover at the end of each day that the action of compression, damp, heat, had felted the wool into little molds of her toes.

Since then she has experimented with wrapping the whole foot, and created a sequence of her own felt feet. She planted them on Dartmoor at the midwinter solstice 2007, and is now documenting their return to the land. As she says: 'Wool is born of the land we live in and will ultimately return without trace, to feed the soil and in turn provide nourishment for the sheep and wildlife'. It's worth getting one of her 'feet felt' kits in order to not only get the instructions and fleece you need to do it yourself, but also to watch the inspiring film she's made of her project, and the wool feet, furred with frost, walking their eerie parade across the moor as the sun rises.

The method is simple but important to get right. And it's good to have a friend to 'dress' your feet rather than trying to do it yourself. It's a sensuous experience despite the cold drips, the smell of lanolin. You cover the wet wool in plastic, put on your boots and take a walk. When you come back you slip off the most beautiful moulds of your feet, highly personal, and strangely beautiful artefacts.

Hamish's map

I love maps. There's something about the combination of line, image and sparse text that appeals endlessly to my imagination in conjuring landscape and places. As part of my walking and writing workshops, I've often asked participants to sketch a 'map' of the walk we've just undertaken.I keep instructions to a minimum so that each person can approach it in their own style. Mine tends to be a mixture of image and word generated by landscape features or by incidents that happened in specific places, my own names for places, and a sense of the shape of the walk. But other people see the walk as a continuous straight line, or ripples of words expressing sensation experienced and observation almost as if they are contours. Rarely have people come up with a very literal or schematic expression of the place.

Hamish Ashcroft, a friend's son aged six, has made this extraordinary map of Aberfeldy, transferring his observations from one dimension to another. It amazes me that a six year old can make this conceptual leap. It is a highly accurate representation including key landmarks, the river Tay, the curve of streets and crescents in relation to each other, and is also a very beautiful object.

It can be seen on proud display in the Aberfeldy Watermill. I'm sure any cartography commissions can reach him c/o their address!