...where life grows

writing a forest of surprises and transformation

Every book is like birth. It’s exhilarating and exhausting, it’s a delight to see something new emerge and yet feel full of fear for this fragile being out in the world. And every time, I think there will not be another one. Every time, after the burst of creativity, I emerge from dwelling in the universe of a particular sequence of poetry or prose narrative and wonder where this new creature came from. Did I really do that? And if so, how? Clearly it won’t happen again.

I know a lot of writers feel like this and part of the explanation is that when we are deeply in flow our brains cycle differently and we drop into unconscious parts of ourselves to do the work. And another part of the explanation is that we have been raised in cultures that have taught us to internalise imposter syndrome. Even great writers feel this, as this passage from John Steinbeck’s Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath highlights:

My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were. This success will ruin me as sure as hell. It probably won’t last, and that will be all right. I’ll try to go on with work now. Just a stint every day does it. I keep forgetting.

But I think another part of the explanation is that, again like childbirth, writing changes us. If we are digging deeply then we emerge from each project a little transformed, with a perspective that has shifted. So we can’t simply go back to the old story of who we were and start another writing project from there. We have to begin from this new place, this new story, and that’s both a little disorienting and also a sign of growth and new life in ourselves.

I launched two books in 2023 — at world’s end, begin, a poetry pamphlet that charts the first full year living in a forest in Finistère, and The Messenger of the Ground, the final book in a trilogy set in a future Wales, UK and Brittany, in which an authoritarian tech-based regime threatens human and humane life and where the light comes from a small community of renegades in North Wales whose own stories mirror the archetypes of the Arthurian myth cycle. They emerged from different but vital aspects of my own journey. One as a way of really paying attention to the land I had moved to. One the culmination of a love letter in speculative fction to a place that sheltered me for nearly 20 years, and to its mythology and the reslience of the people I knew there.

When the writing and editing was over, when the books were launched to make their own way in the world and become different stories themselves as they get interpreted by those who read them, what could possibly come next? In the summer I had a chance to block out some time to simply write. It was a precious, intense few weeks and I didn’t have a single idea in my head.

Sometimes my writing emerges from life events that are then sent in new directions by acts of imagination. This was certainly the case with the previous two books and with the whole of The Standing Ground trilogy. Soemtimes my writing emerges from a fragment in a dream or from a character who appears in a dream. Over three decades ago, a few days after the birth of my younger daughter, I dreamt a whole new structure for the PhD thesis that I was due to defend six months later. And one of the two main characters in A Remedy for All Things, Selene Virág, appeared in a dream, starting the process of transforming the stand-alone novel, This is the End of the Story, into the Casilda Trilogy.

Viola appeared in a similar way. She’s the daughter of Saoirse from Saoirse’s Crossing, which is a stand-alone novel set in the world of the Casilda Trilogy. She was utterly new to me yet fully formed and so smiling at grief in a forest where life grows began in a studio flat in Prague. It’s the fastest I’ve ever written. With Viola came the location (just a few miles from my home in Finistère),a time period (the whole novel is set on one day — Summer Solstice 2065) and a community that quickly built up around her in a forest hamlet. I went from being certain that I didn’t have any notion of what to write or even what genre I should dive into, to a story that unfolded itself as though I was channelling it, no doubt because my passion and intuition were completely on board with the writing. I began writing on May 23 and by May 26 had a map of the hamlet with all the charachers and relationships and a host of voices in my head.

The protagonist’s name gave me the beginning of the title, borrowed from Shakespeare:

She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Twelfth Night, II.iv.111–114

But the title didn’t feel complete. Then I saw a photograph in an exhibition at the Hungarian Photogrphy Centre in Budapest. The piece was a large portrait of a woman’s face — beautiful and plump, pale-skinned with high colouring and red hair and blue eyes that were so alive and gave the impression of being deeply contented. It was by a young artist, Ladocsi András, and there was something mesmerising about it. The legend with the photograph read, ‘There is a big river, in which there is a big island, in there is a lake, in which there is an island, in which there is a small house, where a life is growing in a womb.’ The river, island, lake and house were not in the image. And the image of the woman was taken as a close-up of the face. The rest was all implied. I was fascinated by the image and also loved the layering of how this close-up image was situated in a context that I had to image. The face looked so like my dream image of Viola and prompted the full title: smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows.

The core story was a delight to write — Summer Solstice 2065 and, awake before dawn, Viola knows that all her ghosts are with her as she sets off into the forest to forage the last of the ingredients for the Solstice feast that falls on her 40^th birthday and on the birthday of Isabelle, the oldest member of the tiny hamlet, at 93.

It’s sixteen years since the pandemic that wiped out huge swathes of humanity only to be followed by the collapse of the structures of daily life that once seemed unassailable. Tucked away in the forest, the inhabitants of Restidiou Vras have their herbalist, Viola; they have skills and animals, homes and loved ones. But they carry their ghosts into an increasingly uncertain future and, as the inhabitants of the surviving twelve households gather for the longest day, they bring stories of loss, their resentments and fears, their hopes and secrets. Thirty-three adults and eleven children who know that a single day can change everything.

Along the way it was full of surprises — I knew the beginning and the end and suspected something momentous that might happen to one of the characters, but, as with any novel I’ve ever written, the characters took things in their own directions. At the turn of the year between 2022 and 2023 I wrote in my journal that I wanted to be more surprised by my writing. Viola and the other characters in the novel did bring surprises and the third person stream of consciousness that begins in Viola’s perspective in all but one chapter and then passes to other characters gave me a fresh perspective onto the story.

But the forest in this novel needed to be more than the context of the human activity. It’s alive and has its own consciousness and this led me to wanting it to have its own voice in the story, without falling into anthtopormorphosising. I set myself the challenge to set the human story in a central panel running through the book and then to add panels above and below — the voice of the forest above and below ground. The voices of the forest are in colour — largely green above ground and brown below, but there are also flashes of other colours as every herb and plant and tree in the book has a unique colour within the main text which links to the colour in the top and bottom panesl. The story of the forest moves between registers and forms — from a litany of lost species to broken haiku, from stream of consciousness to symbols. As I wrote, surprise and transformation were happening.

In her cover recommendation, Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun, writes:

Jan Fortune's new novel is an intriguing exploration of our human connection to the earth and to each other. In a future that feels like the past, a group of forest dwellers grows beyond the trauma of social and environmental collapse, to find wisdom not only through each other but through the plant life that surrounds them. While bleakly prophetic, the novel holds out the possibility of redemption through nature, in human stories interwoven with the subtle scents and secrets of the herbalist's knowledge, lore, and craft. A book to savour for its wide botanical erudition and wise heart.

It was important that the forest in the novel had its own voice, distinctive and rooted in a different kind of consciousness.

We are living in dark times and the time depicted in the novel has become even more harsh on a global scale. A more devastating pandemic, a life without any of the comforts we are so accustomed to, the trauma of loss on a huge scale. But there are people in the world right now living in situations worse that those I depict in a post-apocalyptic future — those living (adn dying) in extreme poverty, those enduring conditions of slave labour, those terrorised by occupying forces and conflicts that inflict the most suffering on the innocent. We are also living in a time of mass extinctions. The carnage we are inflicting on other species is immense.

smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows is a work of fiction. I’d like to hope it is not prophecy, but we all know where we are headed when we dare to think about it. I do hope that it is also a work of truth — about the possibilities for community and trust, about the interconnectedness of all life and about why we need new models of what we mean by consciousness.

So I want this book to be read. I spend a huge amount of my time editing and promoting the work of other writers and I love it. It’s a delight and a privilege. But I’m generally terrible at promoting my own work. It feels more awkward — imposter syndrome and self-doubt rear their heads here too. But I believe in this book and the small impact it might have and I’d love it if you felt you could support it too. That might be with a subscription to the this newsletter or by pre-ordering a copy to help Cinnamon Press fund the print run — or both if you have the means. If you have already susbcribed or pre-ordered — a huge thank you. It means a lot.

smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows will be launched on Summer Solstice 2024 and I’ll let you know details of the live and online launch. Copies will be available and posted during May.=