Q&A with Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
M: "Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear," you write early in the book. I was so moved by this passage, particular as its audience--in part, though not in whole--is children coming up in this age of new extinction. How does this play on your mind as you write?
R: EO Wilson coined the idea of the 'Eremocene', the 'age of loneliness' which we are creating and entering, in which we have so depleted the world of its wondrous more-than-human diversity that we're left solitary, unsurrounded by the company of other creatures... What a chilling idea that is. Robin Wall Kimmerer memorably calls it 'species-loneliness'. The Lost Spells, though--like its big sister The Lost Words--approaches this possibility not from a perspective of fear and threat, but rather by celebrating the glorious convivium of nearby nature, the calls, cries, voices and languages of the trees, plants, animals and birds with which we share our daily lives, and which lift our hearts and shape our dreams, hour by hour, week after week, whether or not we notice them doing so. More prosaically, my children--now 17, 14 and 7--have also been among the first readers of the spells, and they've been rigorous testers of how the language falls upon the ear of the young. My 7 year old in particular--whose spirit animal is surely a wolverine and whose name, appropriately, is Will--has been ruthless in his indication of interest or boredom with regard to the spells. My most merciless editor...
M: There is so much I love--and fear--in this response. (And: I fully believe in the power of child editors!) I was equally moved by the fox's assertion "Red is my fur and red is my art, / And red is the blood of your animal heart" in answer to the question "Why do you need me?" What was the guiding principle or arc as you worked and ordered the book, and did you know right away you wanted to start with the fox's plea?
R: The fox strolled into my mind in Scotland in the late-winter of 2019. I was climbing in the mountains of the far north-west, and on a sunlit rest day we went to a deep-cut river gorge near Glen Cannich. I sat for an hour or so on a boulder by the river, and--in a notebook already illustrated with foxes by Jackie --our 'bold as brass' fox appeared in words. The spell speaks at once to Jackie's art ('the tip of a brush'), and to the boundary-crossing, category-collapsing presence of the fox in our landscapes and cultures ('garbage-raider, space-invader'). At the end of the spell, the fox looks piercingly out of the page at the reader, and turns language back on the reader too: 'red is the blood of your animal heart'. We are creatures too, and our forgetting of this is at the root of much of our calamitous hubris.
M: Jackie, how did you decide beforehand which words from the natural world you would bring to life? Does it usually begin with the word or poem, or do you sometimes feel inclined to paint something in particular, and go from there?
J: Sometimes there’s a desire to paint a creature. Some, for The Lost Spells, came before there was an idea for a book. I had hoped to work on an exhibition with Robert, with him writing over my paintings. I still want to do this. But also, there was a Barn Owl, for Suffolk Wildlife Trust, who gave copies of the book to all schools in Suffolk. I asked Robert for a Snow Hare. Birch began because we both love birches and Rob knew i loved painting them, but took months to settle into its lullaby form. Gorse I think came from Robert, and Thrift, but both are found richly around where I live. And Red Fox, the spark that lit the tinder for the book, came as a result of The Lost Words Prom (Prom 49, BBC). It was commissioned as a very obvious creature that links the wilder landscape to town, village, and city.
M: Many of these poems are acrostics (by stanza rather than line) and seem to quite literally embody and enact the compulsions of the living creature described (the swift poem/images behave like swifts!). How did you come to poetry, and which, if I may ask, is your personal favorite creature or plant in the book?
R: Thank you! Well, as anyone who reads The Lost Spells or The Lost Words will detect, I have drunk deep of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins, drawing on Duns Scotus, forged a philosophy of 'haeccitas' or 'thisness' which was his version of what you finely call 'compulsions'. So there is something of that in each spell--a wish to allow the spell's subject to perform itself in language, to be conjured somehow to presence in ear-sight or eye-shot by the speaking aloud of the spell. My favourite creature in the book is, I think, the curlew; that's who I'd be for a day or a year, I guess. Bird of shore and moor, sea-crosser, world-girdler, and a high, bubbling cry that sends an eerie shiver down the spine. But my favourite spell? I think that would probably be Jackdaw, and here we are back to theconvivium again: these sociable, chattery, noisy, unruly tremendous corvids have kept me company in many landscapes and times here in the UK and beyond. I love them for their good cheer.