Love List: October

literary love | wetlands | a thinness to the air

Somewhere in my parents’ loft is a photograph of me as an infant, being breastfed in a white Morris Traveller by my incredibly beautiful young mother behind her curtain of long, dark hair. In the photograph, it is June, and my parents have taken me to Hood Meadows on the River Dart for Hood Faire, a pagan-tinged Midsummer gathering for ‘the folk of Devon, the travellers and the curious’.

I had no memory of this moment when I stood, over four decades later, in the still, misty valley beside the River Dart, only discovering I had been there before when my Dad told me afterwards. With a book event that evening, the best way I could think to prepare was to submerge myself in the Dart’s pristine water in the company of Sarah, who I had met in person for the first time that morning and who would later be interviewing me. Oak trees overhung the river, their slowly turning leaves mirrored in its still surface. The water was silky soft but deeply, bone-chillingly cold from its passage over Dartmoor, and although I had swum out in a quarry only days previously, the cold of this river took my breath away. ‘Look!’ Sarah called out, as a kingfisher flew past us, low along the river in a streak of electric blue.

Not long afterwards, I took another autumnal swim in a west-country river, this time the River Lynher, which joins the River Tamar where Devon meets Cornwall. Here too, I swam in communion with women – writers – newly met. We changed into our costumes on a secluded section of the riverbank, sheltered by a small ruin. Our toes touched grass and then thick mud as we waded on through seaweed before striking out into the current. The trees on the far bank dipped down into the water, colours on the cusp. Laughter rang out into stillness – the joyous, uninhibited freedom of women in water, a transient wild swim sisterhood. Clouds were reflected in the slowly turning tide as I, a curious traveller still, shook droplets from my shoulders and felt in that moment that I belonged.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month (read to the end for some news!):