Sparks

In October, I returned to Oxford to celebrate fifty years of co-education at Hertford College, and to speak about my time as a student.

I took the train from Southampton, as I did back then. When I arrived in Oxford, I proceeded to take a roundabout route to college (as I also did, back then). It has always been impossible for me to ignore the draw of the wild places in the city, and I found myself retracing familiar paths: past the river, where I’d jumped off my narrowboat the Bonny Moorhen in a heatwave; across the orange paths in Christ Church Meadow where I’d taken ‘shortcuts’ to tutorials and turned up with muddy boots – and along New College Lane, where the walls are grown over with moss and ivy-leaved toadflax.

I don’t claim to be the only person who has noticed the little wildernesses in Oxford, but I know that it was unusual among my cohort to wander so widely and not be in a hurry somewhere.

Retrospectively, it makes complete sense. I’m a writer now – and almost everything I write has some connection to the natural world.

Looking back, there were a lot of clues at the time. When writing about Shakespeare, I hunted for references to plants. Victorian Literature had me enamoured with depictions of moorland landscapes. By my final year, all of my research gravitated to examining writers’ relationships with non-human nature – from John Clare’s records of Pine Martens, to Benjamin Péret’s depictions of volcanoes in Mexico.  

The most telling, perhaps, was my interest in Philip Pullman’s depiction of craft as a bridge between the world of stories and our tangible reality. His work is full of descriptions of making things – like the Amber Spyglass made out of pine resin. He’s also hugely influenced by the way William Blake described the physical process of engraving and print-making as a way to look differently at the world around us.  

We all find topics that resonate with us when we study –  or help us to better understand the world we live in, or the way our own minds work. During my time at Oxford, I began to understand that I was not only interested in stories – but their connection to the very tactile world around us.

But it took some time after graduation to really understand that – in fact, I think it was only over the course of the decade that followed that I consciously joined the dots.

I spent a long time after graduation muddling through different jobs alongside writing. I tried working in bookshops and working in schools – but found that these worlds constantly drained energy and focus from my creative work. It wasn’t until I tried something different that I found my own creative work flourished. I worked on sheep farms and had a go at lambing and cheese-making. I went to work with rescue horses and relished the physical work of mucking out. Then I found a long term placement with the RSPB, who taught me to drive tractors and use a chainsaw.  

My writing thrived, because I fed it the raw materials of the landscape where I worked. In The Map of Leaves, I write about a girl who is determined to defend the lesser-loved wild plants that grow in her garden. In A Ship in the Dark, I look at the impact of light pollution on bird migration. All my stories for children feature characters who make things like ink or herbal remedies, who sew, who fix things with nettle fibre or animal hide.

Exploring these ideas in my creative work ultimately furthered my academic interests too. I’m now especially interested in writing by women who work outdoors – writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, Rachel Carson and Tove Jansson. With a recent diagnosis of ADHD, I’m also exploring how neurodivergent writers interact with non-human nature.

I’m now deliberately researching and writing about this material world as part of my residency in the New Forest National Park – writing poetry about the coincidentally named Hartford Wood in Beaulieu – the oldest managed woodland on record – where I get to join in with traditional practices like coppicing and hedge-laying.

But I think it was only as I was putting together the PowerPoint presentation for this talk at Hertford – and retracing my own steps to college – that I really understood how all my interests entwined.

There are sparks of things, during our studies, that perhaps we should pay attention to – sparks that tell us something about the kind of person we are and the kind of things that we care about. I think these sparks can often be found in the pages of the books we read – the people we speak to – and the essays we write. But I think they are also hiding around the streets of Oxford – tucked away down the lanes, or in the parks, or by the river. Even if you are not a writer or an ecologist – I think you might find something of value in those places too.

Yarrow ‘Millie’ Townsend (English, 2009) is an author and poet whose published work focuses primarily on environmental issues in natural landscapes. Her first novel for young people, The Map of Leaves (Chicken House, 2022) was Sunday Times’ Children’s Book of the Week in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award in 2023. Described by judges as ‘mesmerising’, the story centres on river pollution and the importance of weeds and has been translated into Turkish, Czech, German, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. Her second novel A Ship in the Dark (Chicken House, 2024) was shortlisted for the Peters Children’s Book of the Year, and looks at the impact of light pollution on seabird migration. She is currently the New Forest National Park’s first ever Writer in Residence.