LINDA CRACKNELL
About Linda Cracknell
Linda Cracknell has published two collections of short stories, Life Drawing (2000) and The Searching Glance (2008). She writes drama for BBC Radio Four and received a Creative Scotland Award in 2007 for a collection of non-fiction essays in response to journeys on foot. She teaches creative writing in workshops across Scotland and internationally. In 2002 to 2005 she was writer-in-residence at Brownsbank Cottage near Biggar, the final home of Hugh MacDiarmid. She lives in Highland Perthshire.
An interview with Linda Cracknell
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I started writing short fiction over ten years ago, encouraged by reading great Scottish short story writers such as Ali Smith and A L Kennedy. I’ve now had two story collections published, and although I’ve also written in other genres including radio drama, short fiction feels like ‘home’.
I became aware of a growing preoccupation in my stories with characters and landscape leaching into or provoking each other. This, and a lifelong interest in walking, led me into a new non-fiction project, which, wonderfully, won me a Creative Scotland Award, to write a collection of essays in response to walks. During this period in 2007-8, I read mostly non-fiction, and discovered superb writing on place and our relationship to landscapes by the likes of Barry Lopez, Jessie Kesson, Iain Sinclair, Tim Robinson, Kathleen Jamie, and Raja Shehadeh. I also had the privilege of abridging Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places for BBC Radio 4.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
When Sharon asked if I’d be interested in editing a new anthology TRP was proposing of non-fiction in response to the wild places of Britain and Ireland, I jumped at the chance. This was my first experience as editor of a book-length work, and I’ve found the process enjoyable, challenging, and very rewarding.
An anthologist’s role involves selection, editing, arrangement, and central concept. As I read all the pieces we had invited by open submission, a fascinating process began to unfold. The selection was a curious and complex task, and a great responsibility. It wasn’t just about selecting for the quality of writing or a good range of locations evoked. I was looking for diversity – for the poets, travel-writers, natural historians, anthropologists and novelists to give us many ways of looking, and varieties of writing.
There was some pain involved in what was left out, but ultimately the individual pieces talk to each other, set up chimes and frictions, and A Wilder Vein became more than the sum of its parts. It’s what the book says about our perceptions of and relationships to ‘the wild’ on these apparently small, cluttered islands, that’s important. The writings introduce us to some remarkable landscapes, but collectively they speak at least as much of what it means to be human at this point in our history, and of how we seek reminders of our place in the world.
Unlike a book that I’ve written, I feel a vicarious and unembarrassed pride in this one, love the look and feel of it. I can now enjoy again, within one cover, the texts I’ve grown so familiar with.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
After a long period with my head in non-fiction, I’m indulging myself in novels – this year I’ve loved Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, The Road Home by Rose Tremain, and Margaret Elphinstone’s Light. Sarah Salway’s story collection Leading the Dance was also very memorable. I do a lot of driving and nearly always have a library audio-book on the go. Latest discovery is Henning Mankell. I love all that cold, mist and harshness seeping between the land and the characters.
Unsurprisingly as a walker, I’ve developed an obsession with maps. Starting a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Stirling University recently has given me access to a wonderful library, and at present I’m poring over the first maps of Scotland, put down by the great walker, Timothy Pont, in the late sixteenth century. It’s a wonderful bedfellow to Guy Browning’s very funny Maps of My Life.
http://lindacracknell.blogspot.com
http://walkingandwriting.blogspot.com
