Our Time Is A Garden Series

(Workshop welcome page with a leaf graphic, the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and IASH logos on a teal-grey background. There is text that says “Our Time is A Garden” in white text. There is text that says “On A Scots Dictionary of Nature with Amanda Thomson.” in black text. There are two narrators: Alycia Pirmohamed (who opens the video) and Amanda Thomson.)

Alycia Pirmohamed: Welcome to Our Time is a Garden, which is a series of nature poetry workshops for women and non-binary writers of colour based in Scotland.

Our final workshop was titled On A Scots Dictionary of Nature and was co-facilitated by Amanda Thomson.

Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who  is also a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, and makes work in and about the Highlands of Scotland.

Her creative non-fiction has appeared in The Willowherb Review, Gutter, for the online Aerial Festival, the anthology Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie, The Wild Isles, an anthology of the best British and Irish Nature writing, ed by Patrick Barkham, and Gifts of Gravity and Light, an Almanac for the 21st Century.

She’s recently read an audio essay on BBC Radio 4. She earned her doctorate in interdisciplinary arts practice, based around the landscapes and the forests of the North of Scotland, in 2013.

She lives and works in Strathspey, in the Scottish Highlands, and Glasgow.

Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, is published by Saraband Books, and a collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder, microbursts, a collection of lyrics and intermedial essays was published  by Prototype Publishing in February 2021.

Her second book be/longing will be published by Canongate in Summer 2022.

Amanda Thomson: That’s lovely. And so I’m just going to share a screen to show some images so that you have something else to look at apart from me. But yeah, I’m really delighted to be here and speak with you for about 20 minutes and I’m really just going to talk about my work in place.

And hopefully, we’ll have a really kind of interesting kind of discussion after it. Don’t think I’m jumping ahead yeah. And I’m going to start kind of talking about A Scots Dictionary of Nature but also kind of just go on to talk about my other work as well.

Really focusing on my practice as a writer who makes work about Scottish Highlands, landscape and the environment but more I suppose I’m really interested in how we come to know place, how we may articulate places given their multi-layered histories and possibilities. 

But I’m also really interested in how we bring the kind of confluences of different knowledges that we might have and our own experience, and how that kind of impacts and how we read interpret and make sense of place.

And, and it’s interesting, I’m invited to come to you to speak as kind of about eco-writing because I’ve never quite seen myself as an ecological artist or a writer particularly my  trajectory comes from loving birdwatching, loving hill walking and being in the outdoors, and it’s really rooted in personal experience.

And I don’t necessarily have a specific message in mind, either, I suppose, like, we’re all really aware of the Anthropocene climate crises and things like that, but that’s not I suppose that’s not something central to what I want to write about. 

But I think as time goes on, fundamentally what I’m interested in is quoted as to pay attention and what it is to care how we might care, and how important noticing is for caring and that kind of things, I suppose at the root of my work. 

And from then perhaps other layers start to begin to form and but having a way of working that explores the nuances of place hope places are made, in a way in the work/ I suppose I see it as being ongoing. I see it as being late place unfinished, you know, so what I find is that everything I’ve done is just building and building and sometimes it feels stops. 

And sometimes there’s kind of discrete things I’ve written that for me, builds into this ongoing kind of exploration. And so it’s also often dependent on what I see and what I learn from repeated visits and different days, at different times with different people.

And also the different elements of place of where I am that come to the fore at different moments. And sometimes it can be due to do with memories that are triggered either of previous visits or how one thing can have sparked something else in my head. And but I thought I’d maybe start  by reading just a couple of paragraphs from building which is going to be the the book  that’s coming out. We can get him in August and it’s changed its title. It’s belonging: natural histories of place, identity and home.

On a walk with my ecologist friend counting regeneration of Scots Pine trees in an area of moorland browsed by deer. 

We finished the last transect at dusk. As dusk was falling suddenly almost almost imperceptibly, it became hard to see when I was walking, or even what was underfoot, a place that had been somewhat familiar and daylight became uncanny.

The contrasts and separations between sky and air and solid became indistinct As night fell as you will back eventually in near darkness to where the car was parked. It was only in the last 10 minutes that I realized where I was, and the quiet anxiety that had been building within me, in proportion to the feeling light only became apparent with relief I felt when I knew where I was again once at a symposium I had a conversation with someone who mentioned the conference on black women artists. 

And my first thought was that work about birds and forests and trees wasn’t about being a black woman artist,  though as this is what I am, of course it is. So for context, for years now, my work has mostly been about the Highlands of Scotland, where I did my PhD and what my PhD was about, and it’s where I stay. It’s a place for those of you who don’t know, that holds the largest area of ancient Native Scots pinewoods and just to the south, lays the highest range of  mountains and Scotland, the Cairngorm plateau it’s a nature reserve is the National Park  is incredibly beautiful and it holds many rare species dependent on this kind of habitat. 

And it’s also a layered place where social, natural and ecological histories I’m trained and in part my writing came as a way of sewing together the complex threads of this place. Writing’s gradually come into my practice as an artist and now I really do think it kind of sits in balance.

I started off as a printmaker so making etchings and lithographs, and I’ve never, never ever stopped to printmaking. I’ve always looked  for the best ways to articulate whatever ideas as I’m working on. So sometimes it’s been Prints like an etching. Sometimes it’s been an artist book.

And sometimes it’s a collection of pieces that need to come together to speak to the different layers and stories I want to tell about something I’ve never been one to have one thing that does everything, somehow. 

And I think probably taking that same approach to writing as well now. So you’ll see I’ll talk about word lists, there’ll be some kind of really kind of small, almost flash nonfiction pieces. There’ll be other pieces that are longer and more contained, but have different elements that come into it. 

So I have, you know, there’ll be other elements where you know, when Alycia talked about the book that I co-authored with Elizabeth Reader in that book, which is really about her parents illnesses and death and grief. 

A lot of the stuff we were looking at in that book was actually the form and how you could play with the space of a page or you could play with images of a page that you could play with the format of the words in each page, as well. 

So there’s always that kind of way of experimentation within even writing the best form that works for what it is you want to  do. And quite often I find there’s a Spark where one thing leads to another and hopefully we’ll be able to show you that with how I write and what I’m writing just now. 

And there’ll be little side tracks and there’ll be little culs-de-sacs there’ll be a little kind of outline of projects or perhaps emerge. And whenever things kind of comes together again or seem together again it can take another whole will form another whole

And what I really love about the potential of Art and Writing in all its forms is its ability to open doors and trains of thoughts and to connect seemingly disparate thinking, but also for its capacity to ask questions  without necessarily providing answers. 

Or to ask different questions or provide different answers from the ones that you’re perhaps expecting. So I have these questions maybe that we could think about later, but I probably hold myself.

This is about how might we use what we do or what  we know to draw attention. Whether it’s how we embody or use our bodies in space, whether it’s how we make links to the past.

This idea of hauntings and what the past  may conjure up to the present how we might meet deal and make sense of the treaties that  have gone before perhaps enlivening. them, and how we make use metaphors  poetry, the poetics of space, our creativity to do that, but also what might our own skill sets, bodies and knowledge add.

Being open, receptive and also just gathering without necessarily knowing what will come of it, I think is really important, as well. So I think you can never know what will spark your attention or what will grab you or make you want to make work. 

And my first book came out or a chance encounter in a second bookshop with an old 19th century Scots dictionary. I’d already been aware of the unfamiliar language,  some ecologists and foresters I was walking and talking with in relation to my PhD we’re using  they’re using words like browsing. 

To describe how deer nibble at new growth. We watch transects  there’s a lovely, slightly disturbing word called called grallic, which means to remove the intestines and innards Of a deer that’s been stalked. 

So coming across as an 18th century Scots dictionary  really kind of created a new direction for me and I’m going to read an introduction so apologies if you know the book and how I’ve read it but the genesis for a Scots dictionary of nature started in 2010, my second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh when I came across an old 19th century Dictionary of  the Scottish language compiled by John Jemison, published by John Johnson and published in 1846. 

In opening random pages of this dictionary, they come across words such as Temer bricks, timber choses meaning coffin, and deer shack the sound made by a woodworm in houses so called for its clicking noise, and vulgarly supposed to be a premonition of death. 

I love these words, and there were so many of them that related to place landscape and  being in the world, words that had a resonance and a particular feeling to them that was sometimes poignant and affecting, and sometimes can read a prosaic descriptiveness but nonetheless spoke of close connections, and an attentiveness to Nancy’s landscape. 

What it contained how he moved through it. And even specific times of the year, I came across words like break back, the Harvest Moon, so called by the harvest laborers because of the additional work entailed, and who, the warmth of an hour in the warm day of summer. This whole dictionary made me begin to wonder a bit loose  connection to the land in place, and perhaps even ways of seeing and being in the world. 

And I began to wonder what they also might find There was a found offered access to Lost Worlds. I suppose, and had a real they had a real kind of poetic visual and imaginative appeal, but  also a connectivity with a different time and a different generation in the generation of my grandparents and your siblings.

And so I started to gather these words in relation  to land, water weather words, walking birds, and and actually they started off as a collection of these are the dictionaries.

They actually started off as a collection of handmade books made by typing them out transferring them into InDesign, which is a design  programme, and then just printing them through just an ordinary photocopier and hand stitching them using a pamphlet stitch really, so a really simple kind of handmade set of books that eventually became A Scots Dictionary of Nature. 

And I was really interested in how words tell us stories. How when we look through the book, we find links from words that sit separately, but that reveals so many histories, lives and ways of being sometimes that we no longer have that sometimes.

That we actually still have but we just don’t take the time and space to look and realize.

I was aware there is a danger of becoming nostalgic and sentimental.

But there’s some words that take us away from that. So there’s words like bearscape, which means very poor land yielding little, really little return for labor, or sour Land, land when it’s left until it becomes worthless with too much moisture, or produces nothing but says grasses are worthless aquatic plants, striferigs, debatable ground parties of land that are common to all but may

I suppose may include some fighting about who owns what and who can use it and how.

And herezell which is the best in the land, which was given to the landlord on the death of a tenant. There’s also descriptions that are incredibly beautiful, like leither, which means a yielding sky, when clouds undulate or certain, which means to emit a plaintiff cry, some birds do. 

And there’s also words that reveal an even more kind of everyday connection with the press and natural faintergrun to ground which is ground in passing over, it’s deemed necessary to have a bit of bread in your pocket to prevent fainting. 

So it really interesting for me how the words also began to take on a different narrative when they were taken out the context of a dictionary and placed with or near associated words. And one of the things I’ve started doing and it’s been really lovely to do is to kind of create almost word poems or word lists, including one which is 62 words for rainy weather.

 I’m not gonna read the whole thing just know but there’s words like sapless,  which means rainless and dry. Lunky which means sultry denoting the oppressive state of the atmosphere before rain or thunder heavy hearted, which means the sky is low and threatening rain.

Scouthery means abounding, flying showers. Land lash is a great form of rain. Accompanied by a heavy wind. And what the dictionary’s going to do is we’re going to talk a little bit of going from the dictionary to where else have gone because it really made me think about movement in place, but also that slowing down and time.

So I’m just going to read an excerpt from biding, which was a piece that was published in the Irish pages that was written during lockdown.

Let me see how we’re doing for time. I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. Perhaps it’s because it’s been because for the first time in ages,  I’ve been in one place for an extended period in the spring to summer of 2020. I’ve watched the first birds and the larches and alders seen a thin film of yellow pollen from Scots pine cover every – sorry, seen the thin film of yellow pollen from the Scots pines cover every surface and the end of me and waited for and watched for swallows.

And Martins return. And these long summer hours of daylight, my understanding of duration alters and in old Scots language dictionaries, I find words and phrases for the nuances of light and how a northern thread of it lingers from the end of one day to the end of the next at the head of the dim mid summer. 

Twilight between sunset and sunrise. Greyish – the first appearance of Dawn grey of the morning, Dawn of the day, day sky, the appearance of the sky and the break of the lengthening dawn. 

Morning moon increasing daylight between the sun in the sky. The interval between daybreak and sunrise.

In a sense, it speaks to the importance of time and taking the time to slow down. Listen and look and see what comes to you so that question and what happens it comes to us when we sit and watch for a year and a half or so.

I sat my camera in a corner fence post pointing towards this tree. It was occasionally two or three times a day it was occasionally once a week and sometimes it was just once or twice a month.

But the resulting work reveals a slow and shifting changes of seasons late and time passing. Are is a Scott’s word for older but also includes notes from a shared diary of recorded sightings.

Or if it was the first flowers. Or migrant birds that were seen. Or heard cuckoos house mountains geese, primroses, anemones, tormentor a lot of the writing kind of spoke to what was simply notice that was there in the course of the day, but over time, they build a picture of the changes of seasons and  time and weather when birds arrived or they don’t the dates the first flowers bloom, but over time, that also becomes a record that perhaps is there as a resource that you can pull on and bring to become something else. 

So you have this kind of retrospective kind of gathering. And at the time when I was filming at the time, I was just making notes of what was seen and didn’t have it in my head. at all about what it might become. 

But actually just having that information, having the ability to notice and gather and record was really important for something that became something else and this idea of looking and pausing. 

And thinking and noticing becomes important, I think for me because there’s also something important about the unseen in nature. And what happens when you start to see things and record things that maybe perhaps other people don’t and you start to bring them to the attention. 

I’ve just finished having an exhibition in the CCA which  was a bit moths and moth trapping, the moths are a really important part of Scotland biodiversity. 

There’s over 1300 species of moths recorded in Scotland and they’re incredibly important part of the ecosystem and indicators of the health of the environment. But for a while it took me a while for them to come into focus as being something I suppose cool and important. 

This is one of the images from the exhibition at CCA. And while, it was really interested in the ecological significance of moths. So I was  really interested in the kind of uncanniness of moth trapping, which is a more of a bright  light that is set in a forest and pulls moths to them. 

And then the next day the moths are kind of gathered and counted and named. And that’s going to result in another essay which I’m not going to read here, but I also made a sound work and you  can see people kind of listening to the sound work as they’re in this kind of more  immersive space. 

And but the sound work kind of lists the names of moths which themselves are incredibly poetic and beautiful. And there’s also information about the kind of different food plants that the moths are drawn to as well, but then from this human side, how the humans engage with the same plants in relation to kind of folklore and medicinal material reasons. 

So this gathering of these different things may also create other forms. But there was also a wall piece that listed the names of moths, which themselves are beautiful, poetic and complicated in their own way because they start to consider what it is to name things as well. 

But you’ll see here on the right hand side, there’s asterisks which actually some moths are called immigrants or suspected immigrants. And that immediately takes you to a completely  different place and what we mean by that language.

And so, being able to jump from moths and nature to actually a consideration of where they are and who they serve in relation to courts named what we mean by immigrant who loaded that word immigrant as even though we see it in a neutral, neutral or kind of beautiful nature and who looking for poetics of how moths are named, but where that word kind of leaves us and takes us to as well.

And I think I really like and I’m interested in  how you can have that starting point of nature, but then it can start to pull in these  other themes. And how am I doing for time?

Yeah, you’re totally fine for time. You can take a little bit more or you can pause. Yeah. So this kind of question, I think about how you combine narratives and stories and connections. I think it’s just something that will always keep convincing back to in the book, Colours of Nature, Culture identity in the Natural World. 

Lauren Issa Hoya and Alison each Deming ask what it is to write from your fingertips, your memories, your emotional and sense of beings.

They talk about writing cross threads of identity that are around and within us. Those defined from within those impulses from a quote to understand more fully are placed on air and connections with each other. 

How might we bring in and combine other narratives experiences that are perhaps personal, perhaps social, perhaps historical, sometimes whole mix of things?

A piece I wrote about Crows, which was published in the Gutter in a magazine edition you’re talking about and delicious started from observing how crows gathered at dusk called warming, and then I made a video I made after watching and filming crows and play, but in the essay I was able to contextualize crows in a much more layered way. 

Than the video was able to convey the so I’m just gonna read a couple of excerpts from the essay as well. Rooks pair for life and research and on rooks seems to show that they remain in the sites where the breed. 

Some rookeries are many decades old, and they often nest in the colony where they were born. Such reliability and loyalty to place may explain why the first Sunday in March used to refer to as crow Sunday. 

The day crows were traditionally supposed to start nest Building, which takes me back cross Sunday is something that I found in the 19th century. Scots language dictionaries I was talking earlier or as the Gilmore wrote in 1873 D when crows commenced housekeeping for a year.

What I found and we’re starting to write this though, is that nature can be this way into other connections which may be apparent to us and less upon to others. So this is another excerpt from that same essay about crows. Still, there’s more to what draws me to these birds.

Perhaps it is the very blackness and their othered yet connectedness. Crows have always spoken to and had a close relationship with us humans, they speak to our humanity and their connections to nature.

When I look at them, they see their intelligence, their cooperation and their power, how they control the air and wind currents of other standard cheese. 

But I’m also aware of their association with the means more disquieting and unnerving. That is, after all an unkindness of ravens. A Murder of Crows language of cruise pulls us into a myriad of different eras, frames of reference, attitudes and realms both everyday and pet are natural to the facts and fictions of them and how they continue to speak and crow to us. 

So where do I want to finish? I suppose it’s about the details you observe which aspects you want to bring out. For me taking time close slow looking and a slow percolation to get the final form feel really important. 

And you always have at the back of my mind the question of what it is to care what it is. To take care and to be careful. 

And what are the myriad ways each of these considerations intersect in our lives. In my own work, I have become even more interested in the personal and personal history and how personal history and other aspects of self and family has come into view. 

And for me, the essay form has been an important method of being able to combine a myriad of different approaches knowledges and perspectives. 

But also, I think it’s helped me to think about how much of myself I want to bring into view how much you can rely on metaphor, or the metaphors within nature, or the stories of nature to bring to light these other kind of questions that all of us carry and a lot of us have and how might we bring in these different knowledges and knowledge is a think of words and language of place and experience.

But how important the micro can be for kind of pulling out these kind of questions that are much bigger without necessarily feeling you have to know everything about these kind of bigger problems or questions that can almost feel overpowering and overwhelming. 

You know, I think there’s a lot to be said for just the smallest details that can just kind of start to bring these questions to light I was going to read one more piece from Gifts of Gravity and light U wrote about walking up in the Cairngorms plateau. Would you like me to read it or do you want to? 

Yeah.

So I don’t know if people know this is this is a picture taken in winter of the Cairngorm plateau. There’s a vastness to this landscape. And even if there’s a steady stream of workers, you’ll see some sometimes just the tiniest speck on the horizon line. 

You’ll have to look twice to see if they’re there people, deer or rocks you’ll see bright dots of red blue mustard, purple Gortex, a couple of miles further on or behind and congregations form at cairns where people stopped to catch their breaths or tracks  converge total wantings ptarmigan and mountain here are so infrequently seen. 

It’s usually it’s usually a movement out of the corner of your eye that alerts you and even then, once they’re at rest, you really have to peer to find them.

Sometimes you have to stop and scan the landscape crouch down below any horizon line so that you to become for a time part of the land. Dato can sit So still going their mottled plumage is exactly matching the grassy tussocks and shadows and light  of the Heimer ptarmigan blend with granite and grasses and the last dirty patches of snow and it’s  so easy to listen if we stand stockstill the mountain hare is just another  mound of snow until it bounds away.

Rocktime again are found only in the highest parts of Scotland, specialists of tundra and sub Arctic alpine vegetation and habitats. They have the capacity to survive the most extreme conditions.

They molt three times a year with the seasons to adapt to the habitat to better evade detection by predators that rely on sight. They’re mottled brown in summer and turn white in winter with a grey face which Scottish birds keep for longer than other subspecies on these pursuits build mountain heroes which also change their clothes to suit the season. 

When I do see a ptarmigan on a mountain hare. It always feels like a gift, they are of course, striking creatures, but I love how they hide in plain sight and that it’s these most inhospitable of habitats without to be found.

Growing up in Scotland, it’s been easy to feel both visible and invisible, sometimes at the same time, here, like elsewhere, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, can all come into play.

But I’ve never felt this strange from the country, 
the countryside or from getting out into nature.

Quite the opposite. In fact, I feel much more at home living in rural north of Scotland than I ever felt in all my years of central belt city living any hesitancy and getting out into nature, as related to longer routes and remoteness and is entirely totally sensible. 

These places can be scary and dangerous, and I try not to treat being in them blithely. Vulnerability is a strange thing. There have been times even when I’ve known exactly where I am at and hills, but I still felt exposed and just too far away. 

And there have been times that I’ve been out in Glasgow, London, Chicago, walking home, wherever that may have been sometimes at night, sometimes during the day, but I felt an instinct of bodily fluttering to that’s a different kind of vulnerability altogether.

And we’ll stop there.