Viva Lewes Issue #148 January 2019

ON THIS MONTH: TALK
Animal magic
Nature writer Miriam Darlington
First, we had Otter Country, in 2012, a narrative
journey on the trail of one of Britain’s most
elusive mammals. Then, last year, Owl Sense
came out.
When Lewes-bred author Miriam Darlington
gave a talk about her second non-fiction book,
last February at the Linklater Pavilion, I had
an obvious question to ask her in the Q&A
session afterwards. Which animal, I wondered,
was she going to ‘do’ next?
“The albatross,” she replied. What a great
subject, I thought: all that symbolism; all those
romantic narrative possibilities. And what a lot
more I’ll know about albatrosses after I’ve read it.
But it turns out that life isn’t that simple.
I’m talking to Miriam again, down the phone:
she’s speaking from her kitchen in Totnes. She’s
soon to return to Lewes, to give a talk at the
Literary Society about what it’s like being a
woman in a man’s world, writing about animals.
“When Otter Country came out, I was an
oddity,” she says. “Nature writing was very
much a male domain. I felt like I was a bit of
an imposter.” So she wrote it in a way entirely
her own. Not that it wasn’t full of otter facts;
it was. But it was led by curiosity, rather than
expertise. She started stalking otters, then
she swam where they swam. She imagined
how it would feel to be an otter. It was oddly
mesmerising.
And Owl Sense is much more than a book about
owls. “I researched it for five years, and I got to
know a lot about owls,” she says, “even if I had
to feign ignorance every time I asked an expert
– always a man – for information. But while
I was writing it my son Benji fell seriously ill,
and it went beyond being just a nature book;
it also became a book about trying to stop a
family from falling apart.”
She’s been criticised in the national press for
bringing her personal life into the story, but
she defends that choice. “It’s not for me to say
whether it was a memoir, or not,” she says. “But
it was a story I felt I had to tell. And, anyway,
nature writing needs to broaden its appeal or
its current bubble of popularity might burst.”
So where does that leave the albatrosses?
On hold, it seems. “I was saying to people ‘I’m
off to South Georgia soon, I may be gone some
time.’” But then, for one reason or another, she
“felt like staying at home for a little longer, and
somehow a lot of poetry started tumbling out.
Poem after poem after poem. So my next book
– like my first – will be a collection of poetry.
Whatever I write will have nature in it. But
I’ve realised what I need to write about now is
the wild nature that’s inside people.” Alex Leith
Lewes Literary Society, All Saints, 15th Jan,
8pm. lewesliterarysociety.co.uk
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