“If you want to write with absolute truth and with the ease of a natural function, write from your eyes and ears, and your touch, in the very now where you find yourself alive wherever it may be. Carry your paper and book with you and conceal yourself in the fields. Watch and be in what you see or in what you feel in your brain. There is no substitute even in divine imagination for the touch of the moment, the touch of the daylight on the dream.”
- Margiad Evans, Autobiography (1943)
I AM a Scottish nature writer. I was born in Dundee on July 6th, 1947. My parents’ corporation prefab was in the last street in town. It stood on a wooded slope of the Balgay Hill, there was a view to the Firth of Tay and there were fields across the road. From the crest of those fields the view north was to the Sidlaw Hills, from the hilltops of the Sidlaws the view north was to the mountains of the Angus Glens, from the summits of the Angus Glens the view north was to the Cairngorms. Such was the hill-going tradition that claimed me. The preferred direction of my life has always been north.
And from the summit of all Dundee, a centerpiece hill called The Law, the view extended from Schiehallion in Highland Perthshire to the Bell Rock Lighthouse, a North Sea landmark to passing whales and migrating geese and swans. So nature has been my friend for life. It colours my earliest childhood memories and it has enriched my writing life ever since.
I left school at 16 to train as newspaper journalist, and at 40 I resigned from staff journalism to write my books, the first of which (St Kilda, a collaboration with photographer-publisher Colin Baxter) – was published the following day. More than forty books have followed.
Mostly I write non-fiction, a term I dislike. Imagine defining a genre of literature by what it is not, rather than what it is. It’s like calling jazz non-classical, or abstract art non-figurative. As it is, poetry and elements of story are forever hovering around the surface of my “non-fiction”, and there have been two novels. A life immersed in the limitless creative scope of nature is food for all thoughtful writing.
I am often asked about nature as a source of inspiration, but that’s not how it works for me. Nature provides raw material, not inspiration. This nature writer’s job is to fashion that raw material into a piece of work that advances nature’s cause to those who read it. What inspires me is the example of predecessors and peers from Burns and John Muir to Mary Oliver and Kathleen Jamie, among others. The writer I read and admire most is Orkney’s George Mackay Brown. He may be no-one’s idea of a nature writer, but nature is such an omnipresence in Orkney that his instinctive sensitivity to it permeated everything he wrote.
Inspiration has also come from artist friends who have taught me new ways of seeing, new ways of interacting with landscape. And my love of music constantly insinuates itself into my work in unexpected and enlivening ways.
Finally, I would ask you to consider again those words by Margiad Evans at the top of the page. I cannot over-emphasise the effect those few lines have had on me. To this day, my most thoughtful work is written outside when the touch of the moment and the touch of the daylight illuminate the dream.