ALTHOUGH my potential journey to a PhD has been thwarted by insurmountable bureaucracy, I thought it would be fun for me — and perhaps for any interested readers out there in cyberspace — to document my route from my earliest encounter with my topic to (possibly) turning it into an academic monograph or even going the self-publishing route. The Introduction and first couple of chapters are already written although these will, undoubtedly, be revised and redrafted many times more along the way.
Back, in what now feels to me like a long-distant past, but was in fact 1980, when I was twenty-one years old, my family had recently moved from the idyllic small town of Tring, in Hertfordshire, to the rather less pleasant (to put it mildly) suburban enclave of Harrow in Middlesex, north-west of the UK's capital. These days Harrow is referred to as 'Greater London', but is over an hour away from the centre by train — both overground and underground — and involves at least two changes; three if you want to go somewhere further from the city centre. About a mile and a half away from North Harrow lies the slightly more scenic village of Pinner, the pretty timber-clad houses along the High Street a reminder to its Tudor legacy. One train station away or about forty five minutes' walk, it is perhaps most famous as the birth-place of Sir Elton John and where he grew up and went to school. The house where he, allegedly, had ballet lessons as a very young boy was pointed out to me once. I am, however, unable to verify the accuracy of this claim.
Pinner had, at the time at least, several charity shops which I would visit with some relish — not for the musty-smelling pre-loved clothes or dusty bric-a-brac, but for their eclectic selection of books. It was at one of these shops I first came across the work of George Mackay Brown. A slightly foxed but otherwise intact, copy of his volume of short stories, Hawkfall (1974) caught my attention. Reading the stories contained between its covers as soon as I got home I was intrigued. I was fascinated by Brown's simple, yet sensitive and uniquely lyrical depiction of hard-working farmers, fishermen and crofters. Who was this writer, residing in the distant Orkney Islands, that I had only the vaguest knowledge and understanding of at the time? I to find out more with an urgency that felt unaccustomed.
As I discovered more and more about George Mackay Brown, the poet and writer as well as the man he was, I grew to have an ever greater affinity to him as a person and his traits although, as a writer, I sadly lack his remarkable gift for word-shaping and storytelling. Thus, with the unforeseen delight of that first collection of short stories purchased in 1980, began my preoccupation with Brown's literary oeuvre. It's an enchantment that will hopefully endure for the rest of my life.
As for the mystery of that unfamiliar remote archipelago of islands, Dear Reader, I am thrilled to share that they became my home fifteen years after the story I have just told. I feel blessed, every day to have found peace and tranquility in this beautiful place, that has not only afforded me sanctuary from a past I'd rather forget, but has provided me with opportunities I never before experienced or imagined possible.
I am pleased to witness the increasing number of authors who choose to address climate change in their fiction — for even in fiction there is always a grain of reality which gives the reader insight and pause for thought. As an independent scholar, not affiliated to any academic institution, I consider it a kind of privilege to be able to utilize the experience gained from studying for an MLitt in Literature at the University of the Highlands and Islands in 2012 – 2013 that affords me the ability to reason, research and write intelligently about a topic I feel passionate about.
Just because I am no longer able to leave my home due to severely impaired mobility does not mean I don't want to support efforts to bring climate change under control, as much as it is still possible to do so at this relatively late stage. It is my generation's duty to ensure the sustainability of our planet for those who will follow in our footsteps. Sadly it won't make any difference to what is happening in the wider world, but in embarking on a new phase of my independent studies, I aim to build on my initial work on the Orkney poet and writer, George Mackay Brown (1921 – 1921), in which I shone a light on his first novel, Greenvoe (1972), exploring it from a Gothic perspective.
My new phase of research will interrogate Brown's major prose works from an ecocritical standpoint, facilitating, specifically, further deconstruction of Greenvoe which, I believe, lends itself particularly well to ecocritism. It will also be an opportunity to consider his other novels in greater depth than I have before, as well as being a chance to address his position as a writer situated between two literary eras, those of the Enlightenment and Modernism and to examine how this influenced his output.
Setting out my intentions publicly in this way will, I hope, serve me as motivation to accomplish my aims at some point in the future. Let's see how that pans out in the long term .......
16/01/2025
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