Authors Electric

Oikology - when we need to look after our home In February last year I was  preparing  to teach a poetry course to my WEA students and I wrote this introduction. The course was cancelled after two sessions and I was left with a large file of unused poems. Never one to throw anything away and looking back over an extraordinary year it seemed an  appropriate juncture for me to give the piece, if not the poems, to a wider audience. “Record heat in world’s oceans is ‘dire’ warning on climate crisis.” This was a newspaper headline recently and as I write there is a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, attended by American President, Donald Trump, and 17 year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, whose book,   No One is Too Small to Make a Difference , sits on my desk. Indeed, there is now so much information about the climate problem that it is difficult to pick out one particular aspect that should command our attention.   However, as this is a course about p...

Eco-writing is the new buzz-word, an exciting genre for the times we live in when the word 'endangered' seems to turn up in every media article.  But what is it exactly? Field Work - photo Harriet Fraser  'Poet in the Meadow' If you go on the internet and search for a definition it will probably tell you that it's what used to be called ‘nature writing’, ( as in Gilbert White),  except that it has broadened out and now embraces a huge field of ecological, environmental and biological material.  But it isn't just scientific observation, it's a vast body of literature, non-fiction, fiction and poetry, that deals with human engagement with the landscape, flora and fauna of the natural world. It is often very personal, narrating one human being’s relationship with it. Eco-literature is a very popular genre at the moment, (there's even an academic field of Eco-criticism!). An Eco-literature magazine open to submissions The first literature I came ...