On losing my hearing, I tried to grab the last sounds before they disappeared.
Before becoming too afraid to leave home, I set about observing trees, to capture their distinctive rustles and record them on the page. I made obsessive daily visits to woods, forests, copses, stand-alone exemplars sinking into bogs, and I looked up every arboreal descriptor in dictionaries, along with all the aural ones.
I wanted to know the sound of trees in their bare-leafed winters, to be able to compare them to their heavy, summered selves. I wanted to memorialise their sounds on windless days, and on wet ones. I wanted to identify different species simply by listening.
There is nothing simple about listening through hearing aids, nothing simple about recreating sounds for a hearing world through written words when much of what you hear is a distortion.
Gradually, sound characters formed in overstories as I became more familiar with the noises coming from the trees I studied. I could determine species, their quantity and location, and seasons by the sounds of weather flowing through branches. Albeit my versions of sounds, delivered through my technology. I could not know the many notes which had already escaped me, the registers and frequencies evading capture.
I had always known the elusive nature of noise, and that locating its source was not an exactness in the absence of hearing. To do so calls on other skills. For me to detect the direction from which sound comes requires visual acuity, background knowledge, the weighing of probabilities, and guesswork. Sometimes just feeling. I was relying on the latter when I stopped on the bog road one day to attend to the domed body of a slain badger. Scrubby trees to my left, cutaway peat stretching horizons to my right.
Cars could only come from two directions. But I knew that on some days, the wind comes in low across the flat landscape and takes all sound with it. On other days, the wind twists acoustics and turns up quick at my ear. Some days the mist swallows it all. It was none of those days, just an ordinary confusion of noises competing to be heard, coming from anywhere. I toed the badger gently, fearful it still held breath. I thought of teeth snapping and TB, of bloody froth and tics. I looked for cars in both directions. I looked at the badger’s ears which too had missed the traffic and looked at what had become of it. I looked in both directions while shuffling it over to the verge.
Slowly nudging its sloppy body, I wondered why it had roamed to the edge of nowhere and not stayed in the thicket, in its oasis of birches and willows. In its home territory where soft-footed trees had self-seeded in impossibly barren places, where long grasses swept over ridges of cut turf, and streams softened machine-cut channels. The brown industry of extraction had been abandoned and greenery spread sanctuary about, and yet the creature had ventured out, unafraid to leave home. It had not looked in both directions.
Were cubs left behind? Were there cries of ‘Mama!’ through root and branch, never to be heard again? I strained to listen, for the smallest of babies. I knew the radar of motherhood did not need ears to hear a child’s call. I hear my eldest, of 30 years, and still I hear her move at night. I hear her cry sorrows into pillows two thousand miles away and I laugh when I sense she is smiling. You don’t need ears to hear your child, you know when they are weeping.
I followed instinct through the undergrowth, along well-worn passages, from scent to scent and circled scat. And I crouched as I walked and I knelt and I crawled and I thought who does this and for what? A badger I am not, I cannot save all the babies.
And so I turned and followed the sound of birches instead, to bring me to the road again. Their full-leaved rustle was unmistakable and drew me back to the verge. I looked in both directions.
I have heard a bit more since then, when a hearing aid upgrade resulted in greater clarity, but I had already written my book What Willow Says about a fictional deaf child and her grandmother learning how to communicate through their shared love of trees. By then, I had already realised that sound does not matter and that the trees are just a lovely catalyst. I had discovered that it is safe for me to wander from home and that what matters is the essence of communication, that atmosphere and feelings transcend sound, whatever the medium used to share them.
It is no surprise then, that after setting out to record the sounds of trees, I ended up celebrating love in What Willow Says. It is emotion which captures my readers and holds them on the wind-blown bogs of which I write, it is life and loss and all those messy feelings in between. It is us in our sign language, foreign languages, as Gaeilge, all our unsaid words and badger calls, and in the susurrations of leaves.
And if you need to venture into the woods for epiphanies, then that is where you shall find them.
What Willow Says is published by époque press
Climate writing with a difference
Ireland’s first Climate Writers’ Group is part of a world-wide grass-roots movement addressing climate change by cultural means. Established by author Lynn Buckle on behalf of the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, the initiative encourages fiction writers to engage readers in issues affecting the planet and their role in the Anthropocene. But this is climate writing with a difference.
It is time for authors to go beyond nature writing to affect change. With the climate crisis upon us, it is insufficient to merely elicit a love of nature through books, to describe it as a salve for wearied minds, or to mourn the loss of habitats. It is not enough, either, to simply warn readers of dystopian futures by writing post-apocalyptic scenarios.
We know what is going to happen. Yet we continue to do nothing. Crisis-fatigued, we fall into inaction. From a psychological point of view, it makes sense then to include positive solutions in these novels, for writers to normalise and popularise the actions needed to elicit positive change, to avoid further climate disaster. What would a speculative fiction novel look like if we were to do what it takes to avert, rather than create, climate crisis?
Current non-fiction climate writers like Jonathon Porritt, naturalist Dara McAnulty and activist Greta Thunberg understand the value of sandwiching bad news with hope. Fiction writers are slow to catch up. Richard Powers, K Stanley Robinson and Amitav Ghosh are among the few who broke the trend by including positive climate solutions in their novels The Overstory, The Ministry for the Future and Gun Island.
Lynn Buckle admits to only recently addressing the climate in her own writing, quietly introducing domestic re-wilding in her latest novel What Willow Says and weaving larger climate solutions into a series of short fictions. Despite the popularity of fiction which is nature-based or climate-themed, only a handful of novels, short stories, or poems actually contain the positive climate solutions required to halt climate change.
To counter this, Buckle has been training a cohort of writers and tutors at the Irish Writers Centre, and at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, to carry messages of climate hope in their fiction, whatever their chosen genre.
Whether they write fantasy novels or historical fiction, crime thrillers, or romance, all writers can play a part by including some positive solutions, large or small, in their stories. By re-imagining how to put the planet in their prose, authors are creating new literary visions of what climate action looks like.
Lynn Buckle is founder of the Climate Writers Group at the Irish Writers’ Centre. She represents Ireland as Unesco City of Literature writer in residence at the UK’s National Centre for Writing.
