be/longing intersperses the


historic folklore of certain areas of Scotland, weaving Thomson’s experiences and family history with walks taken in Mingulay— the second-largest island in the Outer Hebrides—and Abernethy Forest in Strathspey, which features in much of her artwork. The book started life as a drawing inspired by the importance of dead trees (“snags”) in a Highland Scots pine forest, though the title is taken from a print she created in 2005. “I hadn’t even remembered I had made that print, so maybe the idea of what home is is something that has been working away in my head,” she says.


Growing up “a ‘mixed-race’ girl in a white family, a white town,” she joined a hill-walking club while at school in Kilsyth, north- east of Glasgow. It awakened a love for the Highlands and gave the sense of “rootedness and grounding” she sought as a teenager. “Reading Jackie Kay or Audrey Lorde or bell hooks or Toni Morrison, you always have an awareness of identit and what makes you who you are,” she says. “But hill-walking... you can’t say what it is that grabs you. It made sense for me.”


Both Munro and Thomson


wrote their books off the back of a PhD, and wanted to convey the truth of their experiences in a more holistic way. Prior to the PhD, Munro was living in Glasgow, trapped in “an endless cycle” of badly paid temp jobs. A friend’s wedding on the Shetland Islands prompted a change. “Everything about the place, the people, the landscape, the wind— it felt like an awakening, being somewhere different. When I got back to Glasgow I really felt I needed to be somewhere different,” she says. Born in Edinburgh, and growing up in various parts of south-west Scotland, “being outside always felt like home” to her. “When everything else was changing, being able to go out and see the same flowers, the same seasons, picking things up


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on the beach... home for me, up to a point, was outside.” Now an anthropologist specialising in animal-human relationships, she moved to Shetland with her husband. Her book explores the life they built there as initial outsiders, and the connections they forged with the people through Munro’s work with Shetland ponies, which were the focus of her thesis. They also played an important part in finding a sense of connection and personal healing, following a miscarriage, which she explores in the book.


“[Aſter the miscarriage] when I was siting with Sugar and Yukon [two ponies], they just seemed completely different with me because I was upset,” she says. “It was being alone without being


alone. I wasn’t having to think about what to say or pretend or do anything, I could just sit, and have someone with me—and the landscape around me was such a healing thing. There seemed to be empathy there.”


Branching out Both writers see their work firmly situated in the nature writing genre, but question how the space can be broadened,


“It’s not such a ‘one man on an adventure’ genre any more... we are beginning to bring in different voices, different types of bodies”


Catherine Munro, author


and how it continues to evolve and encompass the personal narrative. “It’s not such a ‘one man on an adventure’ genre any more,” Munro says. “There’s not enough of it, but we are beginning to bring in different voices, different tpes of bodies in different environments. “Domestication is oſten thought of as a disconnection with nature. I’m trying to look at it as the way people are engaging with nature and the landscape through the domestication of the relationships. Maybe it’s less of a sweeping romantic thing, but it may be more of a realistic thing that people can engage with and recognise, and expand what we think of as ‘nature’ and ‘natural’.” Blending genres in nature writing has been popularised in the memoir form, with titles such as Expecting by Chitra Ramaswamy (Saraband) paving the way for writers like Munro.


AMANDA THOMSON WILL BE PUBLISHED BY CANONGATE IN AUGUST


Thomson sees her work as part of a movement to broaden what may have traditionally been considered nature writing. “People are writing about pregnancy, mental health, and nature maybe sits at the centre. But you can pull in all these other things that relate to nature and to you, the past and the present, all these different things.” In recent years, nature writing has seen a resurgence. As the world locked down in 2020, Scotish publishers and agents reported a trend in submissions focused on nature and conservation. The surge in the popularit of nature-writing titles is something both authors feel was compounded by the pandemic. It brought a new appreciation to “local nature”, Munro says, which is having a lasting effect. “People paid more atention to the signs of the changing seasons—you would see it all over Twiter. You don’t have to be in big, wild [areas] to notice the effect it has on people.” “There was a lot of time to care about and notice what was in the immediate environment,” Thomson adds, recalling a blackbird that “seemed to sing all day and all night” outside her home in Glasgow. “You don’t need to be seeking extremes or new places to get that—to take pleasure in the everyday, to connect with the space around you.” She adds that nature writing provides an increasingly important space, and a lens through which writers acknowledge human vulnerabilit in relation to the wider world—a point that seems particularly acute aſter a global pandemic. “So many things get in the way of understanding our vulnerabilit, whether it is race, class, gender, secularit or religion. I don’t want to sound ‘floofy’,” she grins, “but we are all fundamentally human, and there is something so wonderful when you get these rare moments in spaces where you think, ‘I can just be myself’. I think that can be a feeling of what home is.”


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