Nature Writing: Karen Lloyd & Mark Cocker, Guest: Linda Cracknell

Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 30th Apr - Sat 5th May, 2018
All Day

Location
Moniack Mhor, Kiltarlity, Inverness-shire , IV4 7HT

Transcribing the Tangible

Nature writing involves filtering your feelings for the life around through your observations and knowledge. But how do we observe and what do we look at? And how can those experiences then be turned into poetry or prose? The aim is to explore not just nature and wildlife, but also language and the ethics of writing about a world we have so diminished. Come with your boots and binoculars, and a yen to go outside, to write and discuss all these issues in detail.

Due to a family bereavement, Kathleen Jamie is unable to attend the course. Her place will be taken by Karen Lloyd. We would like to extend our deepest condolences to Kathleen at this time. 

Karen Lloyd is a writer of creative non-fiction and poetry based in South Cumbria.
Her first book, ‘The Gathering Tide; A Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay’ (Saraband 2016,) was included in The Observer’s top books of 2016 and won the Striding Edge Productions Prize for Place and was runner up at The Lakeland Book of the Year Awards 2016. ‘The Blackbird Diaries – A Year with Wildlife,’ published by Saraband in 2017 is a nature diary that also explores current issues around land use. Karen is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, ‘The Nature of Abundance.’
http://karenlloyd-writer.co.uk/

Mark Cocker is an author, naturalist and environmental activist who writes on nature and wildlife in a variety of national media including The Guardian, New Statesman and Spectator. His ten books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His latest are Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet and Birds and People, which have been shortlisted for six literary prizes. Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and won the New Angle Prize 2008. His new book Our Place is an examination of the British environment and comes out just a few weeks before the course starts.

Linda Cracknell’s writing has a strong concern with place and landscape. Her last two books are Call of the Undertow, a novel about a freelance cartographer who exiles herself to a sparsely populated coastal area in Caithness and whose fate becomes entangled with an unusual child, and Doubling Back: Ten paths trodden in memory, a book of essays about walks she’s taken which evoke former stories, walkers and ways, described as ‘a winning combination of memoir, travelogue and literary meditation’. She writes regularly for the WalkHighlands website.
www.lindacracknell.com
A place on this course is an option for the winner of the Katharine Stewart Bursary.

Bookings