In Conversation with Laura Pashby

Laura Pashby is a writer, photographer, and part-time bookseller based in the Cotswolds. She is the author of Little Stories of Your Life: Find Your Voice, Share Your World and Tell Your Story (Quadrille, 2021) and Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud (Simon and Schuster, 2024), our winter 2025 Book Club pick. The book is a quiet, haunting meditation on what hides behind the cloud. Reading it we’re drawn into mist-shrouded valleys, places where we might lose ourselves, get pixie-led, or find our ‘fog-self’. From the London Fog to the Scottish haar, it paints a picture of an altogether murkier side of nature. Steeped in folklore, grief, and meaning-making, this is the perfect reading for a cold winter day. We spoke with Laura via email about writing, photography, and weather.

Image © Jules Williams Photograph

Elizabeth Kim What was on your mind when writing this book? 

Laura Pashby I suppose I was thinking about the lost — in terms of those who get lost in the fog, and also the collective sense of loss that we are all currently experiencing in regard to weather and climate. But as I travelled deeper into the fog, I began to realise that fog is also somewhere that unexpected things can be found.

EK Your work spans different mediums. When do you reach for your camera and when do you read for your pen?

LP If I am out, my phone functions as both camera and pen. I use it to snap photographs of things — moments, colours, textures, patches of light — that I want to remember. I also record voice notes. When I return to my desk, I use these notes and photographs as prompts and reminders to guide my writing. My DSLR camera is heavy and I only take it out with me if there’s something specific I want to capture — usually a foggy morning!

EK Tell us the story behind one of your fog photographs.

LP I took this photograph on the most beautiful morning I experienced in the whole two years I was working on the book. There had been a thick hoar frost, which dusted everything with white. The woods were foggy, but the sky above was clear, with the ghost of a waning moon. I noticed a hole in the hedgerow that framed a view of the dark, misty woods. In the writing of the book, I’d been thinking a lot about fog as a portal and here the swirl of the hedge created an actual portal! I took the shot, and stepped through into the fog.

EK Nature writing often focuses on the sunnier, effervescent, and colourful aspects of nature. In Chasing Fog you pursue the murkier, more mercurial side of it: the unknown, nothingness, and, sometimes, danger. When and why did you first feel drawn to fog? 

LP It was through the lens of my camera that I learned to see fog — in my work as a photographer, I have been capturing fog for eight years. I became fascinated not just with the look of fog but also the physical experience of it — the way it makes me feel, and the person I become when I am in it — fog is my muse. When my vision is obscured and the world contracts to my next step ahead, I am forced to exist in the moment — surrendering to uncertainty gives me unexpected clarity of focus, almost like meditation.

EK Fog, in ghost stories, folklore, and also your personal life feels like a haunting. Why do you think this weather, in particular, lends itself to ghost stories and tales about memory? 

LP It’s the flicker of the unknown that calls to me in the fog. I think the fog is a place where we can find something we have collectively lost — the acceptance of mystery, a recognition that not everything can be clearly seen or completely understood. Time feels different in the fog — more fluid — when fog falls and the landscape is transformed, the past feels closer, almost tangible. Ghosts and memories draw in.

EK Which folk tale, for you, best encapsulates the essence of fog? 

LP I am fascinated by the stories from the Welsh mountains — of the Grey King (Brenin Llywyd) and the Hag of the Mist (Gwrach-y-Rhibyn). When I was on Cadair Idris, their presence felt close by. But the foggy folklore I love best are the tales from the East Anglian Fens that I absorbed in childhood — Tiddy Mun the mist-whisperer, and the poor dead moon.

EK Over the holidays, my flight from Romania got cancelled due to severe fog, a reminder that sometimes bad weather feels more like a nuisance than something personally meaningful. A lot of the brushes with fog in your book are transformative. Does meaning always come to you in the moment or with hindsight? 

LP Weather is often something incidental to our days: we may only notice fog if it interferes with our plans. In many ways, it’s a luxury for me to go out walking and deliberately immerse myself in fog. I am open to weather and so I experience it quite intensely. Before visiting each of the places in my book, I researched the stories of the location’s particular fog, which gave the landscape layers of meaning. But often it’s not until I’m back at my desk that I find the narrative thread.

EK You write of seeing beauty in the bleakness, and how fog taught you to not fear emptiness. I love the idea of this, and of leaning into these feelings, but still, there are parts of nature that can feel existentially dizzying. How do we befriend these more unsettling aspects?

LP I think it’s good for nature to unsettle us. I don’t see the wild as distinct from us — I think we are part of it. Sometimes it is delicately beautiful, and sometimes it is raw and dangerous. I think that is as it should be. The same can be true of us.

EK What have you been reading lately?

LP I’m currently re-reading Sharon Blackie’s brilliant If Women Rose Rooted, which looks at the role of women as guardians of the land. I’ve just finished Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin, which was a delicious treat of a novel, and also a proof of Pathfinding by Kerri Andrews, an upcoming non-fiction book about walking and motherhood which I found fascinating.

EK And which other works – books, art, film, etc – do you keep going back to? 

LP I love the work of painter Kurt Jackson — I visit his gallery in the book. On the wall above my desk are several postcards of his seascapes, and also two paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi. I saw an exhibition of Hammershøi’s work in Copenhagen and I adore the tones, the mood, and his use of light. The books I tend to re-read most are writing guides  — Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and Beth Kephart’s Handling the Truth, also Ann Patchett’s essay The Getaway Car. I recently re-watched the Merchant & Ivory film Howard’s End at the cinema and I was completely captivated by the opening shot — the train of Ruth Wilcox’s dress slowly swishing through cow parsley. Films that inspire me most capture light and detail in a way that stays with me afterwards.

You can follow Laura on Instagram @circleofpines and on Substack. Chasing Fog is published by Simon and Schuster.

Images © Laura Pashby, unless otherwise stated

In conversation with Cunning Folk

As we draw close to the deadline for Sound & Vision issue pitches, editor Elizabeth Kim and art director Kaitlynn Copithorne reflect on the similarly themed Spiritus Mundi and the links between the occult and art.

Kaitlynn Copithorne: How did the idea of Spiritus Mundi first come to you?

Elizabeth Kim: I spent a few years volunteering at Treadwells books in London and attending lectures and workshops and in most disciplines of the occult, magic so often seems to aid—or is synonymous with—creativity. I already knew about some of the writers and artists who drew inspiration from the occult, like Sylvia Plath, David Bowie, William Burroughs, and Hilma af Klimt; I learnt spirituality was important to many other writers and artists. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an 19th-century secret society, and the theosophical society. One of his most famous poems, "The Second Coming” (also probably one of the most pillaged poems for titles: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe—also the title of Jon Ronson’s podcast on the culture wars—and Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion) features this concept of the Spiritus Mundi, world-spirit, that crops up again in other poems, such as in “Byzantium” where we have this image of the “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” that mirrored my whale-torn dreamscape. Yeats conceived the Spiritus Mundi as a sort of universal memory and the source of poetic inspiration, though the idea existed earlier, in the writings of Renaissance philosophers, including the German polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and the Italian Platonist Marsilio Ficino. I thought this naturally lent itself to a collaborative kind of book about creativity as a spiritual practice and should include works made in the spirit of experimentation. We live in a time where you can ask writers—new and established—to observe the moon cycle, scry into obsidian and consult the tarot—what a time to be alive really. Is your artistic practice in any way occult inspired?

KC: It is definitely occult inspired. I've been interested in the visual language of the occult since I was too young to know what that phrase means, haha. I grew up fairly rural and isolated on a cattle ranch in Western Canada, so the vast majority of my young life was mercifully spent a bit feral, outside in fields and forests and rivers. For me, an interest in the occult came partly naturally from this upbringing, where it was normal to look for signs in wildlife and plants. When I was young, maybe 8 or 9, my dad bent two welding rods at 90 degrees, showed me how to hold them, and took me out in a field to see if I could find water under ground like his own dad could. No one would have referred to these activities as occult though, it was just farming.

EK: Your background is quite similar to mine but also totally the opposite. I think both our mums are folk musicians right? I also grew up in the countryside but not in Canada, rather in the West Country in England, and as a vegetarian—not in a cattle ranch! I relate to the feeling like my upbringing was feral though—more raised than cats by humans at times ha—and hyper aware of the trees, birds, seasonal herbs and flowers, tide times etc.

I think this is where the words occult and folk becomes categories that are useful for talking about a way of thinking that is different to the mainstream but can be quite limiting. A lot of people associate the word occult with dark and macabre things—and folk with folk horror — they can be that, and these are also parts of the word. But a lot of it is also paying attention to beliefs, practices and ways of life outside the mainstream.

KC: Yes, very very similar! There was an unspoken rule at our house that if we didn't go inside we didn't have to go to bed as kids, so sometimes my siblings and I stayed outside for what felt like days and nights on end. We spent much more time with horses and cats than we ever did people. And for sure, I think either term would have offended my parents…

EK: At the moon festival in London several years ago, Margaret Atwood talked about how in rural Canada she grew up seeing the moon and from there led to a discussion about Robert graves and the triptych goddess which I thought was interesting. I think that sort of upbringing makes you see reality somewhat differently.

KC: And makes it a bit harder to get on in mainstream society!

EK: Haha yes.

KC: My approach to art is really the same as  "farming". Once I have the concept in mind there is a lot of being quiet and still (preferably outside) and just paying attention to what comes up in my mind or around me physically. Sometimes a whole image comes to mind, but it's usually more bits and pieces that trigger other seemingly unrelated bits and pieces until I have enough to build a whole. There's also a lot of physical sensation involved in the process that I don't really know how to explain well. There's an unease in my stomach that gets relieved when the right image or idea comes. Have you always used occult methods in your own writing?

EK: I think I have a similar process. It’s quite cat like and tallies with being raised by cats. I’ve been working on a couple of books in the past couple of years and some of them less actively writing so much as letting percolate. I’ve definitely thought of writing as a spiritual practice—actually I don’t really use the specific occult techniques mentioned in the book myself—they are easy to follow techniques and intended to help move the mind away from being too self conscious—but in the end specific rituals and ways of doing things are like coloured candles—you can take them or leave them but following guidelines can help move your mind away from its current patterns and conditioning. I do appeal to dreams, keep an eye on the moon, have tried querying things with the spirit world etc. A long time ago I wrote my thoughts on writing as a magical practice on the CF website—they probably still resonate.

KC: Yes, I also call this phase percolating. Which came first for you: writing or the occult?

EK: The occult, oddly. I grew up in a retreat centre with an occult library and was vaguely aware of lots of different schools of thought, and remember going to school and telling people we had two witches staying with us and they were like, witches aren’t real. But I suppose writing came early to in the way of make believe stories I played by myself while roaming the woods. And then I was obsessed with writing lists and kept a live journal I naively thought was private for a while unto people started commenting

KC: That must have been a surprise, haha. And that's such an interesting and unusual environment to grow up in.

EK: A lot of people in (I should say, in some pockets of) the West Country are into this kind of thing.

KC: This is so interesting to me. It must be that more people were interested in the occult and folklore here when I was growing up than I thought, but I really never heard of places like this.

EK: It feels like the sort of place where (in a romantic flight of fancy) you could believe the return to magical thinking is a survival of old beliefs rather than something new. Parts of rural Canada are interesting culturally though right? Lots of folk musicians and circus arts seem to come out of there.

KC: Certainly! Lots of musicians. I think eastern Canada must export more circus performers/acrobats per capita than anywhere else in the world! How did you choose authors to approach for SM?

EK: I wanted to work with people whose work I liked—some who obviously are interested in the occult (eg Rebecca Tamas and CAConrad) and some who aren’t—I think it gives permission to the rest of us to be a bit more out there.

KC: I would have loved to be a fly on the wall while the authors worked with their prompts.

EK: I think for these reasons this book has been a bit of a weird one to market and place. I’ve seen it in mind, body, and spirit sections, in gallery shops and in esoteric shops. I think it could sit well with anthologies and with books on writing

KC: I agree. I think a lot of people don't know what to do with the word occult.

EK: People have at least agreed it’s really beautiful. We work together for Cunning Folk but it was nice to do something a bit different. It’s quite unusual to have a book like this made by a company that primarily makes tarot decks but I think few publishers invest so much in illustrations so Liminal 11 was a natural choice?

KC: Yes, I love how beautiful their books are! In my biased illustrators opinion, more "grown-up" books should be heavily illustrated, haha. SM is an odd and intriguing book, and I think the cover treatment from Liminal 11 suits it. It was the first book I've illustrated and my first time working with a publisher outside of CF, so I was excited but also anxious about how different the process would be. L11's art direction was very open, and I think I asked your feedback on almost everything, so it ended up feeling like an extension of our work on CF to me.

EK: We also had Michelle Harrison sub-editing, who worked on the first 5 issues with us (now she’s a tattoo artist).

KC: Thinking about the forthcoming issue, who are your favourite creators of sounds and visions?

EK: I’m going to dump a load of names here and hope it works as a vibe board for people interested in contributing in future:

Shirley Jackson, Mikhail Bulgakov, Cormac McCarthy, Sally Rooney, George RR Martin, Susan Hill, R F Kuang, J R R Tolkien, Charles Baudelaire, Edna St Vincent Millay, Anne Rice, Annie Ernaux, Charlotte Brontë, H. D., Mary Oliver, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Koji Suzuki, Ted Chiang, Leo Tolstoy, H G Wells, Benjamín Labatut, Svetlana Alexievich, Daphne du Maurier, André Aciman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marguerite Duras, James Baldwin, Gustave Flaubert, Bret Easton Ellis, Emma Donoghue, Richard Yates, Milan Kundera, Vladimiri Nabakov, Le Compte de Lautréamont, Tove Jansson, Carmen Maria Machado, Anton Chekhov, Haruki Murakami, Ryu Murakami,  Margaret Atwood, Kate Elizabeth Russell, Madeline Gray, Alasdair Gray, Maud Ventura, Caroline Kepnes, Agustina Bazterrica, Samanta Schweblin, Jeff VanderMeer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sayaka Murata, Damien Chazelle, Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, Yorgos Lanthimos, Celine Song, Alan Ball, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Robert Kirkman, Junji Ito, Hayao Miyazaki, Éric Rohmer, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Robert Eggers, Bong Joon-hoo, Leonard Cohen, The Smiths, Nico, Asha Bhosle, Serge Gainsbourg, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Bob Dylan, Neutral Milk Hotel, Dengue Fever, Noir Désir, Amadou & Mariam, Bill Monroe, Billie Holiday, Fleetwood Mac, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, The Broken Circle Breakdown Bluegrass Band, Mirel Wagner, Metric, Hilma af Klint, the Limbourg Brothers, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cezanne, Toulouse Lautrec, Claudine Doury etc.

Yours?

KC: Okay, so this list is constantly changing, but some constants for me are: Joan Baez, Gillian Welch, Linda Ronstat, Ian Tyson, Nick Drake, Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Leonard Cohen, Fleetwood Mac, ABBA, Sarah Jarosz, Mountain Man, Ola Belle Reed, Dolly Parton, The Del McCoury Band, Rhiannon Giddens, Glen Gould, Pat Benetar, The Stampeders, Paul Simon, Loreena McKennit, Hildegard of Bingen, Haruki Murakami, Timothy Findley, Edgar Allen Poe, Federico Garcia Lorca, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Richard Adams, William Morris, Himla af Klint, Harry Clarke, Ivan Bilibin, Kay Nielsen, Eyvind Earle, Tin Can Forest, Francisco Goya, Aubrey Beardsley, Andrew Wyeth, and dozens more who’s existence I forget the moment I’m tasked with writing it all down…

EK: Of course! Lots of overlap there. I want to say one more thing about submissions: we always receive a disproportionate number of short stories. I keep submissions open as we have occasionally published things from the slush pile but most poetry and short fiction we publish is solicited, and we only publish 1-2 short stories per issue. I’m mainly after strong non-fiction ideas. Buying a copy of Cunning Folk from our online shop is the best way to see what sort of thing we publish.

Spiritus Mundi features writers including Alice Slater, Jen Campbell, Wanjiku Wa Ngugi, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Naomi Ishiguro, and Sharlene Teo, among others, and is available to purchase direct from the publisher, Liminal 11, and from all good bookshops. Read more about our forthcoming issue and what we’re looking for here.

In conversation with Neil Philip

Neil Philip is a writer, folklorist, and poet. The Watkins Book of English Folktales is out on October 11th, but you can read an excerpt from it here, concerning Legends of Sir Francis Drake and his possible dealings with the devil. Among Philip’s many other books are The Cinderella Story, The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, The Tale of Sir Gawain, and The Adventures of Odysseus. Neil has also written for stage, screen, and radio. His work has won the Aesop Award of the American Folklore Society, multiple ALA Notable Children’s Book honours, and the inaugural Literary Criticism Book Award of the Children’s Literature Association. CF editor Elizabeth Kim spoke with him via email.

Elizabeth Kim Folk tales, as you acknowledge in other words, have a slippery quality to them, for want of a better word. They are told orally so many times by different people that they change. How did you go about finding these stories, and deciding which versions to commit to the page?

Neil Philip That’s a really interesting question, because ideally you would be recording oral narrations, or reprinting faithfully recorded oral narrations—but as I explain in my Introduction, that’s not feasible in the English context, because the oral tradition that was still thriving in Shakespeare’s day (he makes many references to folktales, and obviously expects his audience to know the stories behind them) had pretty much died out when scholars, inspired by the Brothers Grimm in Germany, started looking for them and trying to record them. And many of those early folklorists didn’t understand the importance of recording the actual words of a telling, rather than just the story. Not that words are the only important element—there are all kinds of subtexts to oral narration, such as intonation, tempo, gesture, performance, and audience reaction, all quite hard to capture on a printed page. So what I looked for was often the earliest version of an often retold story, or the one that seemed to show the most respect for the narrator.

EK And why is recording folklore important? 

NP I think storytelling is a fundamental part of what makes us human, and has been since the dawn of time. In one of the stories in The Watkins Book of English Folktales, “The Small-Tooth Dog” (which is a tale of the Beauty and the Beast type), a merchant who has been rescued from robbers by the small-tooth dog tries to dissuade the dog from asking for his daughter as his reward by offering him various wonderful gifts. One of these is “a mirror in which you can see what anybody is thinking about”. It seems to me that folktales are mirrors in which we can see ourselves clearly. Folk narrative is my thing, but all of folklore—customs, beliefs, superstitions, cookery, crafts, folkspeech, folklife—is crucial to a culture. You can look in it and see what anybody is thinking about.

EK You have read and compiled many story collections to date. What, if any, universal tropes do you regularly see in folklore, and perhaps myth? And what might these tell us about human hopes, fears, struggles, and dreams?

NP That question may be too open-ended to answer satisfactorily! Folklorists have long categorised fairy tales by international tale types (now known as the ATU, Aarne-Thompson-Üther, Index). This enables you to trace stories with similar plots, themes, and elements across different cultures—Cinderella, say, or Beauty and the Beast. And we find that many of these stories do repeat and echo across historical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. That doesn’t mean the stories are the same—each story is complete in itself—but it does mean that there is a shared human interest in their content, which is the individual drama of growing up and the shared drama of family life.

EK Your book, published in 1992 as the Penguin Book of Folktales, has now been revised and re-published as The Watkin's Book of Folktales. What changes did you make to the text, and what can we expect to see in this beautifully presented new edition?

NP Watkins have completely revamped the book, so it feels entirely new and different, but the essential book is still the same. I could have done a thorough revision, but I think the book stands up as it is, and trying to do things such as replace the AT references in the original with the newer ATU ones only risked bringing in errors and confusion. I wrote an Introduction to the new edition, and an update to the Further Reading, and Neil Gaiman kindly wrote a new Foreword. Apart from that, I replaced one short story from the first edition, “The Sale of a Wife”, with another, “The Hedge Priest”, and added one new story at the end, “The Dead Moon”. I regretted that I had not used more of the weird and macabre stories collected in the Lincolnshire Fens by Marie Clothilde Balfour, because I doubted their authenticity. But those doubts have been disproved, so as there was room, I added another one. I chose “The Dead Moon” because it is a great story, but also because it’s Neil Gaiman’s favourite. Otherwise it might have been “Yallery Brown”, another marvellous tale.

EK Which story within the collection is your favourite, and why? 

NP I suspect the answer to that would change every time I answered it! I do love “The Small-Tooth Dog”, and various of the English Romany tales such as “Sorrow and Love” and “Doctor Forster”. I think today I would veer between “Tom Tit Tot”, which is one of the English stories on the Rumpelstiltskin “Name of the Helper” theme, and “De Little Fox”, a version of ATU 708 The Wonder-Child collected from Wasti Gray in 1892 by John Sampson. I’ve always loved the concept of stories-within-stories, and “De Little Fox” comes to its climax when the little fox of the title, who is born to a princess through the spells of an evil witch, tells the assembled company in the king’s hall everything that has happened. The old witch tries to silence him, but the rest of the company urge him on, “’Speak an! my little fox.’ ‘Well tole! my little fox.’ ‘Werry good tale, indeed!’”

EK As you mention, this collection has inspired the likes of Neil Gaiman and probably others. Can you tell me more about that connection? 

NP From the very beginning I wanted English Folktales to be a source book for poets and storytellers, and so it has proved. I knew Neil Gaiman liked the book, because he has often mentioned it in interviews and introductions, and on Twitter. His connection to the book goes quite deep, as his Foreword makes clear. He bought it when it first came out 30 years ago. Tales he found in it have inspired a story in Sandman, “The Flyin’ Childer”, and the macabre short story “Snow, Glass, Apples”. As he writes, reading Traienti Lovell’s narration of “Snow-White”, “changed the inside of my head”.

The story in English Folktales that had the most profound influence on Gaiman is “The Pear-Drum”. This time he did not retell the story so much as transform it completely. “The Pear-Drum” is another unusual and terrifying tale, with an interesting provenance, because it started out as a literary fairy tale, “The New Mother”, published by Lucy Clifford in 1899. It haunted the imagination of the historian of children’s literature, F. J. Harvey Darton, who wrote that, “Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation.” J. Y. Bell contributed an orally transmitted version of the story, now called “The Pear-Drum”, to the journal Folklore in 1955. When Neil Gaiman read that, with its ghastly new mother “with glass eyes and a wooden tail”, it lodged in his mind as Lucy Clifford’s had in Harvey Darton’s. And along came Coraline, and her equally scary “other mother” with big black button eyes.

What I hadn’t quite realised—because it’s been out of print for a quarter of a century—is how the book had quietly achieved a kind of cult status among those who know about such things. I was really humbled by all the lovely comments from scholars such as Jack Zipes and Marina Warner, and writers such as Philip Pullman and Gregory Maguire.

EK The term Folklore has been trending in recent years. We often receive emails from people asking if we can recommend a good introductory book to folklore. Aside from pointing people to wonderful collections such as your own, the motif index of folklore, and the Twitter hashtag #FolkloreThursday, I'm often at a loss as to how to reply; I see folklore and folk culture all around us, even if they have seldom enjoyed the prestige of myths; folklore often evades categorization or standardisation, changing with each teller and across regions or communities rather than nations—even if some folk tales are embraced and standardised as part of a particular government agenda. How might you recommend readers connect with the folklore of their region, or from further afield? And why ought we be interested in folk cultures? 

NP I think we ought to be interested in folk cultures because folk culture is the bedrock of all culture. To ignore folklore is to ignore a crucial element of our humanity.

There are quite a few good primers now which explain and explore what folklore is all about. I’d recommend Jeana Jorgensen’s Folklore 101 and Fairy Tales 101, Lynne S. McNeill’s Folklore Rules, and Folklore: The Basics by Simon J. Bronner. Both Marina Warner and Andrew Teverson have written good short introductions to the fairy tale, while Nicolas Jubbers’ The Fairy Tellers looks at some of the major figures in the history of the fairy tale. Jack Zipes is always informative, entertaining, and provocative: maybe start with The Irresistible Fairy Tale, or Why Fairy Tales Stick.

In terms of English folklore, I would particularly recommend Carolyne Larrington’s The Land of the Green Man, for the way it intertwines story and landscape, Ronald Hutton’s Stations of the Sun for its clear-eyed account of the ritual year, Julia Bishop & Steve Roud’s Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, and Iona & Peter Opie’s Children’s Games in Street and Playground.

If someone has a developing interest in folklore, most good books have excellent bibliographies or further reading sections, so you can just follow your interests, book by book. Probably the most helpful thing anyone in the UK can do is to join The Folklore Society.

The Watkins Book of English Folktales is out on October 11th, priced £14.99, and is available in all good book stores.

In conversation with Francesca Lisette

Francesca Lisette is a poet, astrologer, interdisciplinary artist, and creativity mentor based in London. They are the author of two collections of poetry, performance writing, and artistic ephemera: Teens (Mountain, 2012) and sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics (Boiler House Press, 2018). They have performed their work in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia. Work is forthcoming in the 2021 Athens Biennale catalogue and featured in the recently-released anthology Anthropocene of the Everyday (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020). In Fall 2021, they are starting a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Denver. Follow them on Instagram @fountainofiris.

MB How did you first become interested in astrology?

FL I grew up in an Air-sign (Gemini & Libra) family. My mother and sister share a birthday, and I was due on my father’s birthday. I arrived early, on-brand for someone with the Moon in notoriously impatient Aries! As a teenager obsessed with Buffy, nature & mythology, I started practising witchcraft and Wicca, collecting crystals and reading magazine horoscopes. But astrology really started to resonate with me when I looked up my own birth chart shortly before I turned 21. I’d had a tumultuous, life-changing year in which I was diagnosed with debilitating chronic pain, and this was the first opportunity to learn more about myself which came from a perspective which seemed truthful, empowering and kind. I felt seen objectively for the first time. From then on, I was constantly looking up charts, horoscopes and the meanings of placements online and reading classic books of modern psychological astrology, like Liz Greene and Steven Forrest. Around 2013 it occurred to me that I might actually be obsessed enough to practise astrology professionally, and a couple of years later when Chani Nicholas told me my chart indicated a strong natural affinity for divination, that sealed the deal. 

MB Could you tell us a little about the "style" or tradition of astrology that you practice?

FL My style is always evolving. I continually study as I practise, and use what works. When I first started, I was working in a modern psychological style because that was what I knew. Since studying at Nightlight Astrology School, I’ve shifted towards traditional astrology, incorporating whole sign houses and traditional rulerships. When I say ‘traditional’, I mean through the framework of ancient Hellenistic techniques which have only become more widely available through translation in the last 25 years or so, as well those which survived in altered form into the Renaissance era. These techniques provide a wealth of predictive and evaluative information. However, I continue to be guided by intuition in my work. I am less interested in technique for the sake of it, and more in developing a dialogue with the person in front of me to find solutions to the issues and questions they’ve come in with.

The real magic of astrology happens in the consultation, at the intersection of intuition, inquiry and presence. Before a session I’ll often feel drawn to look up certain asteroids, fixed stars or other configurations in someone’s chart, based on what they said in a couple of sentences on their intake form. When we talk, it turns out that the symbolism and themes of that astrological point coincides with their recent experiences or current dilemmas to a degree which is frankly astonishing. I have similar uncanny flashes of knowledge and insight - claircognizance and clairsentience - when reading tarot as well. So while astrology can often be about rules, angles and foundational principles, what we’re really doing when meeting for a reading is creating a portal for radical and spontaneous insights to flow forth.

MB I find it fascinating that you are both a poet and an astrologer. What do you believe can be found at the intersection of poetry and astrology? How do these two practices inform each other and how do they differ? In what way does your poetry practice influence your astrological readings?

FL This is a great question, thank you for asking it! For me, poetry has more in common with painting and music than it does with prose, focused as it is on the subtle music and hidden resonances of language. Astrology is itself a poetic art: leaning heavily on mythology, precision and calibration to understand a unique moment in time, and by extension, an individual as an expression of that moment. I think poetry similarly arises at instances of inexplicable confluence, or at least, it does for me: sometimes I want to write because of a shape I saw, a song lyric, or unusual light. Often it’s the culmination of a strange brew of sensory information. It’s defined by a yearning to communicate with the numinous and elemental. 

Astrology came into my life around the time I started publishing my poems, so it has pervaded my work from the very beginning. In my consultation practice I often reach for an image to describe the experience of certain placements or transits, and no doubt the practice of writing poetry makes those sensory expressions more accessible to me. 

I often think of Keats’ negative capability as a general compass for navigating life. He says that a poet must be capable of being in the presence of uncertainty and mysteries, and what better principle could there be for an astrologer to grasp, given that our art is such an odd mixture of precise calculations, and the unknowable quantity that is any human being?

MB Your take on astrology is also informed by your interest in somatics - how are these two related, for you?

FL I became interested in movement as an adult when I made a performance piece which tapped into some of my experiences with the medical establishment as a gendered and inexplicably symptomatic body. Through movement I initially hoped to heal my physical pain; it was also an attempt to return my body to the process of writing. 

I now teach a course combining literature, astrology and movement practices called Draw Down the Stars. It takes the ‘outer’ planets – the social planets Jupiter and Saturn, and the transpersonal planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, plus rogue comet-asteroid Chiron – as a complete roadmap for the creative process. The initial idea for this came from a moment in a dance class in 2016, when my teacher Kathleen Hermesdorf asked us to dance with Impulse, Imagination and Instinct, three specific modes which we had practised that day, which she now wanted us to combine. I said something like, ‘oh, like: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto’ – and then she asked me to explain what I meant by that to the class. Kathleen passed recently, and so it is more important than ever for me to stress the impact of her generous pedagogy, rapt attention, and inspirational genius without which my work simply wouldn’t exist – and to strive to follow her example in my own teaching.

The archetypal forces which the planets represent exceed us, romance us, impel us, command us, evade us, throughout and across time. The birth chart is like a sketch of our personal connections to these ancient divinities. Somatics allow that which is latently present to come to the surface, and astrology can reveal and articulate the full dimensions of those capacities. Bringing these two practices together connects body, spirit and the ineffable – opening new avenues for creativity, self-knowledge and adaptability which changes how we show up for each other, ourselves, and to the wild opportunity of life itself. 

In conversation with Mar Lébou

You may well have already seen Mar Lébou’s The Book of Molfars in The Re-Enchantment Issue. After publishing it, we received an unusual number of (serious) emails, asking us where one can purchase said book. The answer? If it wasn’t clear from his photo essay, Lébou says “the book is within us.”

The artist was born in Russia, and in his late 20s emigrated to Portugal. He is better known by another name and is a respected documentary photographer. His photos have appeared in National Geographic, the BBC, and The Guardian, among others, and he has worked with various NGOs. The Book of Molfars was initially published as a multimedia project by Bird in Flight. These photographs offer an intimate portrait of a community of shamans living in the Carpathian Mountains, who live with nature, not against it. We had a chat with Lébou about the making of this project.

Elizabeth Kim You're a documentary photographer known by another name, in a well-respected agency. Why did you decide to do this work under another name?

Mar Lébou As a documentary photographer I usually cover humanitarian and environmental issues, like climate change or child slavery. At the same time in my personal life, I have for many years been exploring the relationship between humans and the world of the Spirit. When working on Molfars project, its format didn’t fit into my “normal” photography life so I decided to publish it under my spiritual name, Mar Lébou, which I received during one mystical initiation in Senegal. Some of my colleagues know about this project and the name I work under. I am quite excited to experiment with publishing some of my works under a different name, I think it’s not an unusual practice.

EK How did you learn about the Molfars?

ML In 2018 I visited Ukraine many times and really wanted to explore the Hutsul magical traditions in the Western part of the country. That’s how I discovered molfars. I partnered up with a Ukrainian online magazine, BirdInFlight, and they sent me to the Carpathian Mountains to find the mysterious magicians. 

EK What drew you to this project? 

ML I am currently working on a big project about world shamanism and wanted to see what I could find in Ukraine. Back in 2010-2011, when I lived in Mozambique for a year, I was working on a project titled ‘The Spirit of Mozambique’ and met many shamans and traditional healers. I also underwent a spiritual initiation in the Nyau brotherhood. Those experiences really opened me up to the reality of the spiritual world. Earlier in life, I was involved in religious and spiritual life in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and in the Islamic Sufi path where I underwent several initiations as well, experiences based on belief. Meeting with the African shamans turned belief into knowledge, based on direct experience, if you understand what I mean. Since then I regularly go to Africa and continue my exploration of those traditions, many of which still remain hidden. A few years ago I’ve decided to expand this exploration and look for other world shamanic traditions. That’s how Molfars have become a part of it. 

EK Was it hard to gain access? And were you able to document everything?

ML It was and wasn’t easy at the same time. When you work on projects like this you need to understand that not everything will work under the normal rules and circumstances. Some potent and mysterious things happened during the course of shooting. For example, on a number of occasions, we tried to get into the village to see one famous molfar lady, and we weren’t able to. Every time something would happen—the car broke down, people would give us the wrong direction. It was clearly a sign for us not to disturb that lady. Also, some molfars do not want to go public, as several years ago one very famous molfar, Mykhailo Nechay, was assassinated because of his work. I had only two weeks in the region and of course, it wasn’t enough time to find and visit all of the molfars. But those we visited shared some of their knowledge with us.

EK How long has this project been in the making? 

ML Two weeks in the field and several months of home-based work. When I brought back the images from Ukraine, I realised it would not be a normal documentary-style project. It was asking for something more. The molfars wanted to speak through it themselves. That’s why the text (as well as the whole format) is quite esoteric and has many riddles and hidden messages. Those who have eyes shall find them. When I was writing the text I was receiving many ideas in my meditations and dreams—all of them are reflected in the project. I’ve also researched many old Ukrainian books on folk magic, grimoires and even underwent some shamanic ceremonies to better understand what they feel when they do it. It was quite a journey and I am happy with the result. 

EK What kinds of rituals and beliefs do molfars typically practise/hold? 

ML It varies. Some are healers or herbalists, others invoke spirits and do spells. With a few exceptions, most of them are involved in village magic and their practices are related to sowing or harvesting rituals, healing wounds, connecting with elements and natural places of power, protecting homes and people from the influence of the bad spirits, and so on. 

EK For those keen to learn more about molfars and Ukrainian shamanism, are there any books you can recommend?

ML I could recommend the classic book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Another interesting read is a book printed in 1909, called Materials about Hutsul demonology, written by Antin Onischuk. I’m not sure if there is an English version, but those who read Russian or Ukrainian will enjoy it. 

EK What have you learned about yourself and the world while working on this series?

ML Well, many things. I had another confirmation that we are all connected, and not only through our physical existence. Messages from the molfars were reaching me even after I left the Carpathian mountains, when I got back to my home in Thailand. There, while working on drawings, poems and text, I received a message, telling me to experience the burial ceremony, a very ancient initiation practice that is also used for healing. The famous molfar, Nechay, did it once a year. I decided to do it on my 38th birthday for 38 minutes and asked my friends to witness it. Spending 38 minutes buried alive, with a bamboo straw in my mouth as the only connection with the outside world, was quite an experience! I had many visions and realisations while underground, which I reflected on in this project. But the best thing was reconnecting with my father, who died at the age of 38… When I left my “grave” I felt something had shifted. I am not the same person I was before.

Mar Lébou’s The Book of Molfars appeared in The Re-Enchantment Issue. You can also experience the multimedia project via Bird in Flight. Follow the artist on Instagram @marlebou.

All images © Mar Lébou

In conversation with Andrew Whittle

Andrew Whittle on Netflix’s The Big Flower Fight

At the beginning of lockdown 2020, many of us were glued to our screens watching Netflix’s Big Flower Fight. In it, contestants were pushed to their creative limits, racing against the clock to conceive and create  enormous horticultural installations. There were giant insects and sea creatures; there were edible thrones and fairytale-esque dwellings. It has been described as the gardening world’s answer to The Great British Bake Off, but it’s wilder than that. Though perhaps less accessible than its baking counterpart, I found the large-scale floral creations an inspiration; they were created with limited time using grasses, flowers, and found things, a testament to what can be created from nothing, if we adopt a new way of thinking and seeing. Contestants Andrew Whittle and Ryan Lanji won the competition with their otherworldly structures. Neither were florists, but their artistry and craftsmanship translated well to this new medium. On seeing the fairytale cottage and Merlin’s throne, I wondered whether Andrew and Ryan were interested in the esoteric. Via his Instagram, Andrew has shared photographs of Neolithic standing stones, an interest in ley lines and folklore. I had to enquire further, and Andrew kindly agreed to have a chat about being on the show, his occult inspirations, and the final prize, work commissioned by Kew Gardens. 

Original sketch of Merlin’s throne, © Andrew Whittle

Elizabeth Kim What was it like being in the Big Flower Fight? 

Andrew Whittle The Big Flower fight was an opportunity that came out of nowhere. Upon arrival it was clear that we were surrounded by expert horticulturalists, people that know the world of plants by name and the ecosystems they create. I have only ever had an instinctual relationship with plants; as a child I spent most of my time in the woods tending small gardens I had compiled from the wild, building dens, treehouses, and training wild roses to conceal them. 

EK That sounds like a wonderful childhood. It was often repeated during the show that you and Ryan weren’t florists; you’re artists. Was it very different working in a new medium?

AW A slight imposter’s syndrome crept in as the lack of plant knowledge became apparent. However, they became a new medium to work with; they  become textures and colours, ready to be woven together into a tapestry creating illusion. 

EK One criticism of the show was that unlike cakes on the Great British Bake off, people don’t just try their hand at making giant animals made of grass, flowers and recycled goods—but you did it and under a strict time limit. Were you thinking this big before the Big Flower Fight, and has it in any way changed what you thought you were capable of? What would you say to people who want to try their hand at gardening, or creating extravagant floral installations? 

AW The scale of the pieces were immense, and as a participant who didn’t really know what was going to be presented I couldn’t help but be excited—it’s a rare opportunity to go hard or go home and really fun. The time constraints were difficult but i developed practices that  helped during the show, I would take time out to meditate in a small garden I found around the back of the house which dissolved the chaos and allowed me to work within the time parameters we had—which were extremely tight. 

Not everybody will get the opportunity to build on this scale—they are generally show pieces. One thing I would suggest to people is to use some of the ideas within their garden, like texture and colour. The use of waste material (the Sea Horse), a wild flower meadow (the Bee), grass garden (the Boar), undulating surfaces (the T-rex). I wouldn’t be fooled by the initial impact—these sculptures aren’t built to last much more than a month. However it is possible to create sculpture from other materials that can become a part of the garden, use them to grow around, up, and on. The natural materials are the best way to do this—they create habitats for many species and have little to no impact on the environment—or use waste materials that do not biodegrade as a means of suspending them outside of the ecosystem where they create as little damage as possible. 

EK I loved Merlin's throne. The attention to detail was incredible, from the edible herbs to Merlin’s face pushing through the rock. How much time did you have to conceive it, research it, and what ideas went into it?

AW Merlin’s Throne was the passion project for me, I have worked closely with neolithic sites in England and Northern France in previous projects. These monuments function as antennae, placed on nodes on the Earths energy grid and are able to alter our perceptions. The idea of Merlin’s memory  being embodied in the stone was fun, I wanted somehow to show the memory of quartz and create an apothecary garden. The show was a playful environment and it was interesting and fun to place these ideas within that context.

EK I had a look through your Instagram posts, and there’s so much there that would interest our readers, including those Neolithic structures, stone circles and ley lines. What first made you interested in the numinous? Is much of your art inspired by these ideas? 

AW I would say that my interest in the numinous developed quite early through a fascination with mythology and much time observing nature outdoors and feeling a part of it. When I was young I spent many nights floating in a black abyss with no body; I was looking for something. It developed considerably whilst finishing my degree; I was reducing  photography to its most minimal. This led to a lot of research into the atheistic world of science (nothingness) which didn’t suffice, so instead I turned to alchemical and ancient texts that drew me towards a more intrinsic way of seeing and feeling my experience here. Around this time I also had a bout of seeing UFOs—these experiences took some reconfiguring of thought. As my perceptions changed, the ability to see reality and experience as something that can be manipulated grew, and that I understood as  the source of magic. 

Much of my work is inspired by The Great Work. Alchemy and reduction/purification to me are intrinsic to the photographic work that I do, with light being the main medium. I think any exposure to these ideas can begin a transformation. I believe there is a universally felt absence derived from a detachment with nature. A regressive future could lead to a reconnection and further symbiosis with the planet. I do not deny the potential of science and forward thinking to help us achieve this—anything we learn from history is manipulated by all the events that occurred between then and now, therefore our re-application of it would not be exact; I mean regressive perhaps in that we should shed a lot of the syntactic way of thinking we have now in terms of how we treat the planet. 

EK We resonate with that feeling of disconnection from the natural world, which leads me to The Whale you created out of beach waste, repurposed for longevity. Can you tell us more about your Kew Gardens commission?

AW The final prize—The Whale at Kew—was a great project and opportunity. Beach Guardians are a charity in Cornwall who provided all the waste for the sea episode. They regularly clean their beaches of both large and minuscule plastics that are slowly becoming our ocean. The Seahorse was my favourite during the Big Flower Fight, and so I immediately got in touch to work with them again at Kew. As with many large pieces, when they are finished with they are often scrapped. So after Kew I got to work in securing the incredible structure so that we could gift it to Beach Guardians where it will be installed permanently in their communal meadow. This second project is where the whole experience started to make sense. We used ghost gear to weave the entire structure, to bind the plastic to the whale creating something entirely new and unrecognisable to the original medium.

Grace Emily Manning (my partner on this venture) and I spent around 250 hours weaving the whale with help from volunteers, and during the evening we embedded ourselves in the Cornish coast. The Blow Hole at Trevone, and many caves that we imagined as the belly of the whale, became spaces of metamorphosis where we began to un-do some of the damage. Throughout this whole process we aimed to cleanse the materials and our societal  relationship with the planet. We conducted small rituals based around the area at night with the weaving of the whale being the biggest. We were apple bobbing on the Cliffs under a full moon at Alentide (these apples came back to us almost a week later). Seeking faces in the rocks and following quartz lines we connected to the area. The project is being developed into a short film that we will show in 2021.

I think the main criticism of the sculptures being unattainable is true, which was the main reason (other than sustainability issues) why I felt that the Whale must be gifted to others. In every monument you imbue spirit and if unwitnessed the sentiment can die alongside it. The longevity of standing stones is a testament to this; though many are overgrown, disheveled and are functioning at only a fraction of their potential, the purpose is there even if only to inspire. 

Photo: Netflix

Andrew and Grace have set up a Patreon page where you can subscribe to fund the short film and follow its progress.

In conversation with Afia Atakora

Afia Atakora was born in the UK and raised in New Jersey; she is author of debut novel, Conjure Women. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she was a finalist for the 2010 Hurston/Wright Award for college writers. Set around the time of the America Civil War, Conjure Women follows the journey of midwife, Rue, as she navigates growing suspicion from the village community when a mysterious illness descends following the birth of an apparently unusual child that Rue feels compelled to protect. The narrative deftly weaves pre and post war narrative time-line with themes of womanhood, friendship and witchcraft. I spoke with Afia via email about folk magic, womanhood, and identity.

Photo: © Edwin Tse

Yasmina Floyer What inspired you to write Conjure Women?

Afia Atakora I’ve always been drawn to the enduring wisdom of folklore and folk magic. So many of the stories and practices that are passed down through generations are about preserving culture and imparting a self-sufficient means of survival. Particularly in cultures displaced by slavery or strife, the fact that the legacy of magic endures is deeply powerful. The determination to pass down these histories so often falls to women, so it felt natural to begin to explore the midwife, a fixture who appears in so many cultures, and begin to render her as more than the old healing witch in the woods. What does she look like young? How did she learn her role and how does she feel about it? I began with all these questions and slowly Rue began to form, to answer them.

YF The story unfolds around the time of Civil War, why were you drawn to write about that period in history?

AA When I began studying this time period, I had no intention of writing a novel about it. The research was for myself. As a Black woman living in America, I felt that I had a very limited understanding of the history of slavery and emancipation, particularly in the years just after the Civil War. We get this broad-strokes overview, “the slaves were freed and all was well.” When it came time to explore my archetypical “folk healer” where better to place her wisdom and skills than in the years just after the Civil War, when so many deep hurts needed healing?

YF What sort of research did you do?

AA A huge resource were the interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration, a US government agency, who in the 1930s collected the memories of former slaves. Much of these histories are anecdotal, but they represent rich shared memories of the experience of enslavement. From these I collected little snippets of familial practices: lists of herbs, beliefs and colloquial remedies. I was fascinated by the personal practices that echoed each other across the vast US South and across time. Similarly, I was influenced by folk practices that still exist today, particularly those that are practiced in West Africa and are antecedents for other diasporic practices. I explored my own family history and traditions and wrote about those too.

YF Were there also folktales from your childhood that fed into the creation of CW?

AA My parents are immigrants from Ghana, but I was born in the UK and raised in the US. I grew up with their stories from “back home,” chief among these were the tales of Anansi the trickster. As I grew up and began to try to define my own identity in the US, I found the Brer Rabbit stories. It was sort of a revelatory experience to rediscover these trickster tales in a completely different setting and yet still wholly intact from the bedtimes stories that migrated with my parents. I wanted the history of memory within Conjure Women to mirror the experience I had in defining and discovering myself, as well as the enduring spirit of Black identity.

YF Were any characters based on people from your life?

AA None of the characters were fully based on real people, however I drew inspiration from my own experiences to shape the relationships in the story, especially between Rue and her mother Miss May Belle. My own mother worked as a nurse and home health aide while I was growing up and I often observed her interactions with her patients, the way that all children do, trying to understand the world and their eventual place in it. Similarly, the character of Ma Doe, who is a symbol of the long memory of Rue’s community, is named for my grandmother, who passed down so much of her matriarchal wisdom.

YF Our protagonist Rue makes really difficult decisions in the novel, choosing to do awful things for what she believes to be the right reasons. Do you see Rue as a heroine or villain?

AA I decided very early on that I did not want there to be any clear heroes or villains in this story. I was determined to explore slavery in particular from a complex psychological stand point. What deep wounds might enslaved people carry with them? In what ways do they go about healing them or visiting wounds upon others as a means of survival? How has the violence of slavery been perpetuated throughout time, in complex insidious ways, in ways we might not even immediately recognize? In the course of the novel Rue makes a lot of hard decisions, sometimes the wrong ones, but ultimately, I believe her story is one of redemption and self-discovery.

YF The townspeople begin to call Rue a witch. Do you identify her as such?

AA I very intentionally chose the term “witch” for the accusation thrown against Rue. There’s so much historical connotation to the word, so much of it negative and so much of it female. Rue and her mother possess mysterious skills throughout the novel, but Rue only becomes a “witch” in the eyes of the town people after they feel that she has failed them. The echo of that insult is not only that you are a strange woman but that you are a solitary one and women who live outside of the boundaries of society ought to be castigated for it. She becomes a dangerous witch in the eyes of the community particularly when she uses her powers to her own advantage, again an insinuation that a woman must never be concerned with her own needs or ambitions, but give of herself endlessly. Much of the story is about Rue taking ownership of this term, “witch”, of becoming not only proud of her abilities but proud to be a brave, independent spirit.

YF I love how you depict the women in the book as young girls navigating the transition into women. Why are you drawn to this period of womanhood?

AA There are many, many themes in Conjure Women but for me, the coming-of-age of young women is one that is paramount to the telling. While Rue’s experiences growing up, enslaved and then freed, are specific to this era, her relationship with girlhood is timeless. I was fascinated by the way that young girls emulate, learn from, and sometimes reject their mothers. I was drawn as well to bonds of friendship that women form with one another and the ways in which that changes as they grow up, especially within the constraints of a society which has clearly defined roles for what it means to be a woman of a particular race.

YF The novel explores identity and how identities shift depending on time and place, gender and race. What do you hope the reader will take away from the novel?

AA I hope that the novel portrays historical characters and enslaved persons as full-bodied people, not just caricatures, or object lessons, or bullet points in history. They lived full unique lives, sometimes flawed, sometimes painful, sometimes hopeful. The institution of slavery has cast a long shadow not only in America, that shadow remains and needs reckoning with. Despite the pain and the darkness, we owe it to these people to explore their histories and legacies. We owe it to ourselves, too.

In conversation with Edward Parnell

Edward Parnell is the author of The Listeners, and more recently Ghostland, a memoir-cum-literary tour of Britain’s ghost tales and loss. The book was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2020 for memoir and biography. Its hauntings are linked with landscape, memory and an awareness of the passage of time. I spoke with Edward via email ahead of the paperback release of Ghostland. 

Elizabeth Kim What compelled you to write Ghostland and what did you initially have in mind for it? 

Edward Parnell The book came out of a meeting with my editor Tom at HarperCollins, who’d seen a blog post I’d written about the village in Suffolk where M. R. James grew up. We met and bonded over a love of ghost stories and slightly pulpy ‘70s horror movies and I went away wondering whether I could write a book about the love I’d harboured for ghost stories since being a young boy. I soon realised that were I to engage on such a project I’d only want to do it if I could bring something unique to the subject. And I realised how entwined many of the places that I would want to visit – places that were in some way linked to various stories, authors or films – were with my own rather haunted family history. And so I went away and came up with a proposal for a book that, as well as examining some of my favourite authors, would also be an exploration of my own lost family. 

EK Is that blog post still available, somewhere?

EP No, I took down that blog post when I began writing the book as there was some material in there that I wanted to use! I kept a few photos on my website.

EK Why do you think people in Britain and Ireland are so good at writing ghost stories?

EP All that pressing history, I think. Almost everywhere you go there are reminders in place names or old architecture of the people who have been there before you. Only the other day I was driving back to my house from the North Norfolk coast and passed a small country drove I’d not previously noticed called Gallowhill Lane, which put me straight in mind of M. R. James’s ‘A View from a Hill’…

EK You often refer back to M. R. James. Why do you think was James so influential, and which of his stories would you recommend to new readers?

EP I think James is so influential because his stories are simply so good – so full of atmosphere, eeriness and playfulness. He wasn’t that prolific (there are around 30-odd stories that were published in his lifetime) and as a result the consistency remains high throughout. I’d definitely try and read them chronologically in the order that they were published, though, as I do think there’s a bit of a drop off in the later stories – though actually the reason that some of those are perhaps a bit more unsatisfying is because they’re structurally more complicated and harder to try and decode. It’s hard for me to pick out a favourite as that seems to fluctuate depending on my mood, but ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, ‘Lost Hearts’, ‘The Mezzotint’ and ‘Count Magnus’ – all from his first published collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, are a good place to begin. 

EK Aside from M. R. James, which ghost stories have frightened you or spoke to you the most?

EP I’d like to think I’m not that easily spooked, but the one book that did unsettle me when I was writing Ghostland was Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House. I remember reading it on my own at home at night and definitely feeling a little nervous of killing the light and trying to go to sleep. Other favourites include Algernon Blackwood’s sublime ‘The Willows’, William Hope Hodgson’s weirdly wonderful novel The House on the Borderland, Rudyard Kipling’s heartbreaking ‘They’, and E. F. Benson’s ‘Pirates’. And if we’re talking TV and film then there would be another huge list!

EK I love Shirley Jackson! Now you mention near the beginning of Ghostland that most ghost stories happen in the past. There is a narrow division between nostalgia, sadness, and the uncanny in most. Your own tour of Britain via the ghost stories written about it is interwoven with a memoir of loss. Is there some truth to these weird tales? Are there some ghosts that don't move on?

EP I certainly think that there’s a truth in the subtext of lots of these tales, the best of which deal with huge themes like grief, loss and mortality. And life and the world can obviously be weird and unsettling – as these strange present days show us – with things happening that we can’t easily make sense of. A good ghost story can certainly help to explore this. 

As to ghosts that don’t move on, I think that most ‘real’ hauntings intrinsically contain place-bound phantoms. And that’s something that I feel a bit of myself, as I know that in Ghostland I was trying to stare back into my own past. Yet, I wouldn’t want to stop – to not be able to look back on everything that’s happened to me, even though doing so is sometimes painful; I think we walk a tightrope between acknowledging our histories and being beholden to them, but hopefully I’ve got the balance about right. 

EK From your book and beyond, have you ever had an experience or encounter you couldn’t explain?

EP I talk about a handful in Ghostland – one odd occurrence that took place in a room I subsequently found has a long and documented history of strange occurrences, and another in the house I grew up in, when I returned to it as a student. Generally though, I’d hazard that if as people we have different levels of weird-detecting ‘radars’ then mine is set at a very low level… Because I can seem to walk around places and not get spooked by things, whereas I have a friend who could be in that same room and claim to be picking up odd vibes that have completely passed me by.

EK How do you explain such unexplainable experiences?

EP I definitely always try to rationalise any odd experiences that I’ve been privy to – so for instance the ‘phantom door bell’ that periodically goes off in my house and plays a ringtone that isn’t selected is something I’d put down to being some kind of radio interference. I have no scientific basis for this, but it seems more likely than some esoteric spirit trying to contact me! I fully accept, however, that there are plenty of good documented examples of odd things that are difficult to rationally explain. So, like M. R. James, I take the view that “I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.”

EK So open-minded with a healthy dose of scepticism.

EP I would say open-minded with a health dose of scepticism neatly sums up my view of strange occurences. Though a bit like Fox Mulder, a part of me “wants to believe…”

EK New nature writing is increasingly veering into the territory of the numinous. I’m thinking about writers like Robert MacFarlane and Helen MacDonald. What role do you think this new sort of “emotional ecology” might have in repairing our relationship with the natural world, and in order to repair this relationship, do you think it’s important we also reconnect with the supernatural world?

EP I think in order to have even a chance of repairing our fractured planet we do need a lot more people to feel a strong connection to it, and then to make choices and act in ways that start to make a tangible difference. I don’t think that’s going to be easy to achieve, but if part of that process also means that people have to engage with the layers of history, superstition and human experience that are intertwined with places – then that surely can’t hurt.