View from (well, near) the corpse road at Mardale |
I have a new addiction, one I recommend for any writer. It’s Robert Macfarlane’s Twitter feed.
You may not have heard of Robert Macfarlane, and I’m not quite sure how to describe him — and when you’ve finished this blog, you’ll understand how important choosing the right words is. Put most simply, he’s a writer and an academic whose subject is related to the landscape. (I’m sure there’s a word for that, and one far more specific than the obvious ‘geography’). I’m halfway through his book The Old Ways and am enjoying it, though i have to confess I’ve ground to a halt. There’s only so much word-richness a girl can digest at once.
On holiday in the Lakes recently, I popped into Wordsworth’s birthplace, where the National Trust had an excellent exhibition curated by Dr Macfarlane. It was on the theme of what he (I presume) calls ‘word-hoarding’ — gathering descriptive words for the landscape and for the weather and so on. Each word was accompanied by some sumptuous photos. It’s right up my street — words and the landscape, two things I love.
A 'moon road' |
I’d have loved to have a book about the exhibition, but there wasn’t one, so I headed for Twitter. And here we go. Each day Dr Macfarlane posts a word or phrase and a picture to go with it.
Some of the words I know and use — fluting, for example, or corpse road or Helm wind. Others I know but don’t use — the simmer dim (for the midsummer dusk/dawn in the Northern Isles) or siege for the place from which a heron launches itself on unsuspecting fish. Others are completely new to me — summer geese, which he describes as “steam that shimmers up from the land when hot sun follows brief rain”, or today’s offering, stubble-stag — a folk name for a hare.
Best of all, his many followers join in, with their own experiences, their local or remembered dialect words, their photographs. Long threads of word-magic spring onto my computer screen, punctuated by pictures of woods, or summer evenings, of silver lakes and cloud-shadowed mountains.
Twitter can be a grim place, pitted with elephant traps for the unwary, but the daily threads I find here are as wholesome as home-made apple pie. Go and follow @RobGMacfarlane. I promise you won’t regret it.
Jennifer Young
I love his writing but I know what you mean - The Old Ways is like a fruit cake; you want to make it last. Off to Twitter!
ReplyDeleteYes - and I do love someone who understands the Earth. Robert Fortey is another one, though he's more a geologist.
DeleteHad never heard of him but he is now added to my 'favourites' Twitter stream. Thanks Jennifer!
ReplyDeleteI can guarantee that he'll be an oasis of calm in the midst of a Twitter storm...
ReplyDeleteGreat post Jennifer. His tweets are a lot more interesting and educational than most. :)
ReplyDeletehe's such a fabulous writer but I hadn't known about his twitter words so off to sign up. thanks for the post
ReplyDeleteWow! What a post! I really enjoyed it .... something a bit different for us all to get our teeth around, as it were. We use a word here in Devon, dimpsey, which means dusk, that moment when it's not quite light and ye3t not dark either. I put it in a short story once and my editor said, 'Dimpsey? Eh?'. But she let it stand because it was obvious from the context what it means.
ReplyDeleteStarted following @RobGMacfarlane on Twitter, Jennifer - thanks. I love inspiring and creative Twitter feeds, and a tiny peek at Rob's tells me he is both. Thanks for the recommendation. : )
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