Thinking in Landscape

My story for Floodgate’s latest anthology, Night Time Economy, came from a tiny bit of very strange land near my home. Where strange things fuse.

I’m a landscape writer. That’s how I like to think of my work and defines my process quite precisely. My poetics begin with place and draw out from the slippery, beautiful, messy, dangerous, bright, dark, mappable, unmappable, personal and collective layers of particular locales. It’s the flow and friction, the clashes and connections between the webs of signs, symbols and apparatus of places that get me excited and creatively energised.

To be more specific, it’s the Black Country landscape. It’s the off-kilter coagulations of past-present, absence-presence, green-grey, real-unreal that REALLY gets me going. My homeland is built of vital geological significance – here’s where they dug the Dudley Bug from the Silurian Limestone and revealed deep coal seams. This geo-heritage paved the deep time way for what the region is most famous for – The Industrial Revolution – where makers of steel, nail, chain and glass flooded the little site west of Birmingham with soot, smoke and incredible engineering feats. In the same way the geology honeycombs the industry, the industry enabled idiosyncratic community and culture: dialect, food stuff, humour, ways of being. The same people who worked together, played together and prayed together too. A rich vein of placemaking for any self-respecting landscape writer.

In the modern Black Country, all these relics, ruins and residues are ever present as haunting reminders of who we were and who we are – taunting us with our own Mark Fisher-esque delayed or failed future. Despite this, there is beauty. Off-kilter beauty, but beauty nonetheless. Take the regions nature reserves and sites of the UNESCO Black Country Geopark. For example, where I live and where my story, Halieutic, is set. Walk through the housing estate and down to the canal and you quickly find yourself in a landscape outside of normal time-space: a site lush with these geological, industrial and natural signifiers; a site of joy-giving green but also litter, drugs and clandestine activities.

A perfect example of this is the place which inspired my story. A real place, but one that feels unreal. Just off the main path is a fisherman’s trail that runs up the route of the disused railway line. It’s rewilded with weeds, nettle and wildflower. If you look carefully, you can see the sleepers and rail cutting through the area. It’s a haunting, liminal space right on the edge of the everyday – perfect destination for ghosts and subversive weirdness.

Are you in? Grab yourself a copy. You can get a taste of this alongside an array of West Midlands idiosyncratic humour, beauty and strangeness throughout this truly excellent anthology.