Please dive in to this fascinating conversation between two very different genre writers – one a crime-writing native with Norfolk blood and deep roots on the north coast, and the other an author of romantic historical fiction who settled in Norwich 24 years ago. Find out what the Norfolk landscape means to Rachel Hore, a Sunday Times bestselling author many times over, and how she draws the seed of a story from a specific location. Engage with Henry Sutton’s visions of the dark underbelly of Great Yarmouth, and discover characters inextricable from their settings. How faithful should the geography of a fictional place be to a real location ? How much do writers know about where their stories are going when they begin? Why might writing what you know not exactly be the answer? What makes Henry think he might persuade Rachel to ‘come over to the dark side’ and write crime?
I loved rewatching this, and rediscovering a wealth of fascinating ideas and evocative readings. It will make you want to pick up a book to read with fresh eyes or a notebook to write in. Two long-term friends and brilliant writers – who have both taught the arts of creative writing at UEA – playfully turn over the mysterious means by which a place can take hold of the imagination and how our imaginations in turn reshape that landscape.
Three writers with Norfolk roots and three lifetimes of nature knowledge discuss the amazing diversity and endless wonder of the natural world – and the power of words to engage with and capture that fascination. This discussion between Mark Cocker, Matt Howard and Jane Lovell was rich with memorable images and moments. If you didn’t hear it I warmly recommend you turn it on and tune in. If you did, I can recommend a revisit. It made me smile even more second time around.
We’re delighted to be able to share this discussion in which the BBC’s Joe Crowley expertly questioned Jake Fiennes and Tony Juniper CBE about the biodiversity crisis, and what – if anything – can be done to help nature to recover. The UK population is growing; we need food, water and more housing, and all of those demand space and resources, while nature continues to be squeezed out.
Tony Juniper CBE is Chair of Natural England and has spent 40 years campaigning nationally and internationally to save endangered species, drive policy changes and change thinking on biodiversity, recycling, industrial pollution, rights of way and the climate crisis. He has held leading roles in WWF, Friends of the Earth, Birdlife International and the Wildlife Trusts and is also the author of 11 books (with another on the way).
Jake Fiennes’s 2022 book Land Healer brought together 30 years of experience in restorative land management. He is a pioneering and passionate Head of Conservation on the Holkham Estate, including Britain’s largest privately owned nature reserve. On the screen behind this discussion, a slideshow of Jake’s stunning photographs showed the flourishing results of years of hard work.
Norfolk arguably leads the country in both food production and conservation. It was the festival’s privilege to host this honest and urgent discussion about creative solutions to an existential issue.
NB if the red button won’t play this content on your device, please try instead clicking the ‘watch on YouTube’ link in the bottom left-hand corner of the image.
It hardly seems fair that this wonderful woman who encouraged us only a few months ago as we put our first festival together was not around to enjoy it.
We chatted to Daphne at the last event of Sea Fever in May 2003, though she had met Charles at the chalk streams conference in Cambridge. We were all captivated by Matthew Hollis reading from his biography of The Wasteland. It seems ironic looking back that TS Eliot was the focus, given that Eliot came also from that distinguished tribe of anglophile Americans who choose – instead of driving their wagons on west – to turn back east across the ocean, recolonise the place their ancestors left and make extraordinary contributions to British life and culture.
A short while before we met, Daphne’s latest enterprise Hazel Press had published Matthew Hollis’s new collection – Earth House – from which he had also read that weekend, and she was in Wells-next-the-sea to support her star poet. But Daphne already knew our local literary festival. She had had a family place in Brancaster since the early 1970s and used to help Fiona Fraser occasionally when she was director of Poetry-next-the-sea.
Later, when the Suffolk Poetry Trust collapsed in 2016 Daphne had started and run Poetry in Aldeburgh – and filled it, as she explained in her email in January, with ‘simultaneous events, art exhibitions, films, a pop-up cafe, poet artist & social media people in residence, open mic, a schools programme etc. even a small fringe scene developed that included poetry/literary swims which were quite demanding as that festival happens the first week in November.’ She wrote that, ‘it was fun to bring a literary gathering back to life in a new way, somehow we managed to cover travel, accommodation and pay everyone for their events almost completely from ticket sales with a bit of local generosity.’
All that was far beyond what we could achieve on the north coast but Daphne connected us with another of her poets, Jane Lovell, who drove all the way up from Devon to lead an excellent poetry-writing workshop at Literature & Landscape and to read and speak fascinatingly and beautifully about nature with Matt Howard and Mark Cocker. I’m sure that Daphne – farmer, poet, artist, publisher, nature-lover – would have relished that event, and all the others too. That she would certainly have enjoyed the one after Jane’s, when Matthew Hollis interviewed Alice Oswald generously and illuminatingly about her work, and Alice recited to an auditorium completely transfixed by the spell of her words.
I had no idea who I was chatting to back in May 2023, although I was struck by this cool, wry, understated and elegant person with her soft American accent. I think of Hemingway’s iceberg theory in short-story writing – that it’s what hidden beneath the surface that lends the whole its grace and moment.
It wasn’t until first Jane told me of Daphne’s terrible illness and then I found Daphne’s obituary in the summer that finally I got some idea what the rest of the iceberg consisted of – an absolutely extraordinary woman. If you haven’t read it, please have a look. You couldn’t guess:
An amazing person, missed by many, many people not least her family but also weirdly by some of us who barely knew her. What an incredible example of how to grab hold of life. Thank you!
It seems rather gloomy to describe creativity in medical terms. We’ve been hearing such a lot about mental health for a while now that – on the good side – we hope we now have an environment in which people can feel freer and more confident to open up about their secret struggles without worrying they might expose themselves to judgement and alienation. Sometimes, on the other hand, it can seem disconcertingly as if half the population feels overwhelmed and isolated by their own thoughts, is constantly checking its own state of mind, and sliding downhill.
This where creativity is so transformative. It can be as simple as reading a book – itself a kind of creativity in which your mind gets to work building believable worlds out of lines of letters on a page. Creativity takes you out of yourself by giving you total focus on something else. Your attention is directed intensely outwards – at whatever you’re observing and what you’re creating, channelling your conscious and subconscious via a process which translates the subject into the object. You might be hunting for an image to photograph, composing and timing your shot; scrutinising the soundscape for some essence you can turn into words or music; trying to recreate in designs and earthworks a lost marsh landscape or river; controlling your hands and eyes to steadily apply decorative marks on a sheet of paper – all instead of cycling through thoughts that take you nowhere. Once you’ve finished your work you have a new and separate thing that stands for itself, that you can share. This is hard to beat.
We included two workshops in our programme – one for writing poetry and one for drawing with sticks. John Ruskin said that you never really connect with a place fully until you’ve tried to capture it in lines, words, forms or sounds. When you describe it you see it properly. We think this is an excellent point and we invite fans of landscape to try it.
Last term a teacher at a local school mentioned that many of her pupils love creative writing. Over a school career, as the curriculum gets busier and exams appear on the horizon the space that once existed for inventing poetry disappears. In later life the challenges of managing your responsibilities and keeping yourself and family going make it even harder to find the time to write or paint or even to commit to the potential embarrassment of starting all over again.
Why not consider picking up a stick or a pen on Saturday morning and having a go? It will be a lot of fun, you will almost certainly surprise yourself, and you are very unlikely to regret it.
James Cockburn, who will be leading the workshop on drawing with sticks, draws or paints every day. In the blurb for this weekend’s exhibition this is how he summarised his artistic approach: ‘Be positive – life is worth living. See each work as a gift – don’t leave anything out. Bring something new to the party – don’t repeat yourself.’
After the rain had stopped this afternoon, James created this picture of the reed beds at RSPB Titchwell seen from the west-end first hide. He used reeds dipped in Indian ink.
Our poetry competition is in full swing – open to all schools in North Norfolk. We want to hear what our local children have to say about the landscape and wildlife which surround them in this rural coastal strip.
Here is our invitation:
The competition started when our festival was called Poetry-next-the-sea back in the 1990s and has run for a long time, kindly administrated by volunteers like Tim Fisher (who is running our nature workshops this year for schools and the general public). This year we are very excited to be able to announce that global superstar of nature writing and Cambridge professor of English, Robert Macfarlane will be judging the poems.
But there isn’t long to go. Entries must be in by the final minute of 27th September.
Our theme this year is ‘the voices of a river’ – inspired by Alice Oswald’s poetry and in particular her poem Dart – a poem in one whole book which follows a river in Devon from its source on the moors to its mouth, with the river speaking as it moves and changes through its course, using its own voice and the voices of people who live and work in or beside it.
You’ll find our rules here, photos, a summary and some inspiring river images here and a whole page of river poems here to read and think about.
We are all looking forward to reading your poetry.
What is it about a place? It might be vast and open – a marsh, clifftop or expanse of sea – or small and close – a seat by a window, a gap in a fence, a locked box under stairs. Spaces can hold powerful identities. Did something significant happen here once – or does this spot somehow just suggest, or even invite, a certain possible turn of events?
Patrick Rangeley has driven round North Norfolk with a list of some of the settings used in the novels of Rachel Hore and Henry Sutton and taken the photographs on this post (more of which you will see in our first big literary event on Friday 4th October at 6.30). These photographs may or may not be anything like what Henry or Rachel imagined when they built the worlds of their romances, histories, literary fictions and crime novels. (We look forward to hearing!) They may not be what you might imagine when buried in their stories and playing out the descriptions and dramas in the private space of your own mind. But who is right?
And what is it about place?
Rachel Hore has sold over a million copies of her novels which bridge the gap between past and present. As two stories unfold, one in our time and one in the past, a trauma is unburied, confronted and resolved. Henry Sutton, who is Norfolk born and raised, turned his dark, playful wit twenty years ago from literary fiction to noir crime, and now writes about and lectures in crime writing at UEA. We invited them both to Wells Maltings next Friday not only because they are brilliant writers and entertaining speakers but because they have both set stories around here and we want to know…
….do a crime writer and a historical novelist see places differently or the same?
There are still spaces left for their talk and readings at 6.30pm on Friday 4th October. Please join us!
This week’s podcast from Country Life is an interview with the festival organisers. James Fisher is a charming, amusing and expert host, who drilled down into what the festival is all about – the power of literature and art, the natural world and landscapes, and how they inform and inspire one another.
Here’s a link to the podcast on Country Life’s site:
Our walks are selling out but we’ve added a special trip for a dozen festival goers to explore the salt marshes round East Hills by boat for an hour first thing on Sunday morning. This area is inaccessible except at very low tide and even then not safely without specialist local knowledge. Nick Groom, our expert skipper knows the currents in the channel and the right tide times to make the journey. He also has his own regular route through the mazy creeks.
There’s something captivating and almost alien about a landscape of island lumps formed from mud by twisting tides, and dotted with salt-loving plants like shrubby sea blight and samphire, which will be a bright autumnal red by the first weekend of October.
Though wild birds have suffered their own catastrophic pandemic in the past few years we hope their populations are starting to recover. Geese should be arriving to spend the winter here from summers spent in Greenland, Iceland and Siberia, and many other birds have been seen along this coast in past Octobers, including shearwaters, divers, skuas, terns, grebes, gannets, sanderling, eider, scoters and more.
Inspiration for writers, photographers and artists as well as birders and naturalists. Make sure you dress for the weather and get to the quay ahead of time. (Departure will be at 8.30 am Sunday 6th October from the Wells Ferry pontoon – not 8.45 as initially advertised…)
James Cockburn has just texted a cheerful goodbye after his third visit this summer. Two months ago when he arrived it was still raining as it had done all year. James drove round the Holkham Estate with Jake Fiennes and settled on a first view from Great Farm, between Burnham Market and Burnham Deepdale. The sun came out as he began on a painting that looks north towards a distant line of sea under mauve sky. A blonde field curves downhill in soft, ripe, barley fluff above sharp, green stalks beside a broad band of wild field edge dotted with poppies.
The shapes and colours of James’s pine woods at Holme dunes look almost abstract yet at the same time his scene is instantly recognisable to anyone who has lugged buckets and spades over the boardwalk from NWT car park to beach and noticed how peaceful it is under that canopy with a wind whistling through pine needles overhead. Straight dark trunks and jagged branches against a luminous blue; profuse scrubby greens cut by deep angular shadows show where the sand was heaped into lumps by breeze and tide decades before the pines and grasses fixed it in place.
Nine more pictures followed over three visits – all captured out in the field. The re-meandered River Stiffkey under Warham Camp; the ancient Holme oak that grows on its iron-age battlements; the mill at Overy Staithe; the church at Morston; the sluice on the marsh at Thornham Harbour; a hidden ford on the River Glaven which James returned to early one morning after two days of wrestling and distraction, and finally nailed the unique tranquility of the watery space. It takes such skill and such intense observation to be able to evoke moments and places with these easy vibrant sweeps that transport your viewer into a still-unfolding instant.
And yet there is also more than that going on in these paintings.
James immersed himself in reading for this project – books by our festival contributors in particular – from Alice Oswald’s stunning poetry of nature and place to Jake Fiennes’s book Land Healer, which is the story of restoring spaces for nature so that wildlife and ecology can flourish while still at the same time, he argues, we can work to grow healthy food to sustain a growing population. James read and spoke to Mark Cocker too. Our Place, Crow Country, One Midsummer’s Day and A Claxton Diary were all on the table and in the discussion. Mark’s captivating prose, his great knowledge of and curiosity about living things merge together and James was clearly inspired by the mix.
It’s always fascinating to see your place through someone else’s eyes. James lives in Kent, and has lived in Sussex, Berkshire and the Loire Valley. His last visit to Norfolk with a paintbrush was several decades ago, but he has come wielding an artist’s scrupulous gaze, openness and curiosity. Jake commented last week about how by instinct or design James’s painting of the River Stiffkey demonstrates all ages of the history of the landscape.
There is an inextricable link between the care taken to look after this landscape by landowners and conservationists of all stripes for the past century or more and the degree to which that same landscape has inspired people and continues to do so. Conservation and restoration of the landscape feed and inspire art.
If you come to our festival on the 4th, 5th and 6th October you will be able to see James’s North Norfolk paintings on display in Wells Maltings alongside the work of a brilliant printmaker and a celebrated photographer. You may also be able to see and walk around landscape restoration projects which exist only because of a similar combination of scrupulous analytical observation, openness, curiosity and creative vision. These projects are also – in living, three-dimensional, landscape form – art.
Literature & Landscape 