One of the highlights of my summer is usually Birdfair – a festival of talks, workshops, art, books, travel inspiration, fundraising, socialising, cheese straws and a celebration of all wildlife (winged and otherwise) hosted at Rutland Water. Sadly, the real-life experience was cancelled this year but the organisers pulled off an excellent virtual version. You can read articles, enjoy the art gallery, watch video lectures on the website, donate to their charitable work and catch up with some of the live sessions for the next three months – including one of my favourites: Nature Writing Beyond 2020.
Amy-Jane Beer facilitated this fascinating chat with Kathryn Aalto, Jini Reddy and Dara McAnulty that I’d encourage anyone to watch to get some different perspectives on the wide variety of writing around the natural world. All the speakers mentioned notable names and texts so I’ve rounded them up into the following reading list. (Where particular texts weren’t highlighted I’ve tried to indicate the context, forgive me if you find such categorisation disagreeable!)
- Kathryn Aalto – Writing Wild
- Jini Reddy – Wild Times, Wanderland
- Dara McAnulty – Diary of a Young Naturalist
- Leslie Marmon Silko – Storyteller
- Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk
- Jan Morris – travel writing
- Melissa Harrison – nature fiction
- Rob Cowen – nature fiction
- Saci Lloyd – cli-fi (climate fiction)
- Richard Powers – The Overstory
- Delia Owens – Where the Crawdads Sing
- Cheryl Strayed – Wild
- Eleanor O’Hanlon – Eyes of the Wild
- Alan Garner – The Owl Service
- G.E. Patterson – The Natural World (poetry)
- Camille Dungy – nature poetry
- Helen McDonald – H is for Hawk
- Ursula K. Le Guin – speculative fiction
I’m really hoping we can get back to Birdfair next year but not necessarily ‘as before’. I’ve got my fingers crossed it will return reinvigorated by the break so we can hear more of these fresh perspectives.