{"id":446,"date":"2015-12-02T16:34:19","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T16:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/?p=446"},"modified":"2015-12-02T16:00:07","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T16:00:07","slug":"rob-cowen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/rob-cowen\/","title":{"rendered":"Rob Cowen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rob<\/a><\/p>\n

Rob Cowen<\/b> is an award-winning journalist and writer. He received the\u00a0Roger Deakin Award for his first book\u00a0Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild, <\/i>and read for us this week\u00a0<\/i>\u00a0from his second,\u00a0Common Ground.\u00a0<\/em>He began with a reading ‘from the beginning, which is a very good place to start.’ His\u00a0reference to\u00a0Alice in Wonderland<\/em>\u00a0set us burrowing\u00a0into his own wonderland that was to follow, of March Hares (male and female, not male and male),\u00a0Tarka the Otter<\/em>, anthracite hills and silvergold sunrises.<\/p>\n

\"Reading<\/a>

One<\/p><\/div>\n

Common Ground\u00a0<\/em>is a book about the liminal, circling around\u00a0Bilton, a patch of edge-land just outside Harrogate. It also seeks\u00a0the subliminal, excavating\u00a0layers of existence: \u00a0the human layers of railways, royal hunting grounds and redundancy\u00a0in the recession, in a ‘world where fractions of other fractions being bet against other fractions by guys in a glass tower in Canary Wharf’; of watching a fox and documenting its smells, movements, and\u00a0motivations;\u00a0of lying in a hollow,\u00a0senses alive to sunlight and sound, eroding the distance between human and nature in a visceral, fragile moment of connection with a roe deer;\u00a0of discovering, through becoming a father, that the distance between the green of ‘nature’ and the pink and red of flesh and blood is non-existent.<\/p>\n

\"Fox<\/a>

Two<\/p><\/div>\n

Seeking a place of retreat, Cowen ranges off to ‘relentlessly’ explore his edge-land; not to journey as a pilgrim, nor as the writer of a field guide, stating the density of\u00a0hair follicles\u00a0on an animal’s fur, Latin names for plants, or specifying\u00a0species, but as a forensic investigator of place, as if divining by sense and words what had flowed through there\u00a0before. He wrote, he said, 150,000 words of notes before even beginning the book. In this next reading, we hear him tracking a fox on a cold January night.<\/p>\n

\"Huntsman\"<\/a>

Three<\/p><\/div>\n

Following the fox, the map became ‘cluttered, complicated and different.’ Cowen talked\u00a0with enthusiasm throughout, from comparing the paired “Twit” and “Woo” of Tawny owl calls reverberating around hills to ‘something from a Phil Spector record’, to seeing the land as a ‘prism’ through which to view ‘different times and human conditions’ of life past and present, whether it be animal, shrub or person. This merging of of viewpoints draws ‘new maps’ of connections between\u00a0people and nature, and Cowen finds these by going through\u00a0the edges, whether psychological, geographical or historical. \u00a0His final reading enters the realm of humans-as-animals and animals-as-humans,\u00a0while rejecting a ‘Disney’ anthropomorphism; he enters the mind of the deer that jumped his body, and then allows that deer, in turn, to embody the\u00a0man that hunts it. The book goes beyond the classifications of genre (something of a running theme in this term’s Reading Series), blurring the bounds and edges between memoir, fiction and non-fiction.<\/p>\n

Afterwards there was time for questions and Cowen explained how, in\u00a0Common Ground, <\/em>he was looking to ‘pull about’ the dividing line between man and nature. He pointed to plant pots, paintings of landscapes, and nature television programmes to demonstrate a need to be close to nature and of how the line is not finite and concrete, if it even exists. He repeated his desire to write a ‘sense of place’ rather than a guide to viewing it. He went to extemporise on Hares, Easter eggs, land legislation and the birth of his child.<\/p>\n

Cowen described the difficult process of reducing words down, of chiseling at them with hard work to make them into the final book. He finished by talking of the metre of a line of text, and of how if it doesn’t deliver a sense of the place it is describing, it has no purpose.\u00a0This desire to communicate a rich and textured sense of a place\u00a0is what energised his prose and his energetic, informed and passionate discussion of the book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist and writer. He received the\u00a0Roger Deakin Award for his first book\u00a0Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild, and read for us this week\u00a0\u00a0from his second,\u00a0Common Ground.\u00a0He began with a reading ‘from the beginning, which is a very good place to start.’ His\u00a0reference to\u00a0Alice in Wonderland\u00a0set us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40918,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[128503,128502,128501,49762,21640,128504,49732,49778,128505,46589,49726],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40918"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}