Chasing Fog Book Club: Chapter 4

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Wicken Fen (a colour version of the chapter opener)

Hello again, welcome to Chasing Fog Book Club!

I’m focusing on one chapter of my book each month. Each chapter of the book is set in a different foggy place, looks at a type of fog, and is guided by a sense. If you missed the previous chapters, you’ll find them here. This is Chapter Four, which is set in the East Anglian Fens, features a type of fog called roke, and is guided by the sense of touch. Here I am reading you a section of this chapter:

In the writing of this chapter, I delved into my own misty memories to find half-forgotten folklore, Fenland secrets, and a haunting story from my past that was finally ready, after many years, to be told. It’s a chapter about liminality which begins in a landscape that is simultaneously land and water, with a girl on the threshold between childhood and adulthood. The beautiful Moon casts her protective light over the girl I once was, and all across the Fens. We need her glow because horrible things lurk there in the fog — boggarts and bogles, lantern men and ghosts, but the Moon shines on to keep us safe.

This Chapter, ‘The Haunted In-Between’ has a focus on touch, including not just the cold touch of fog but also the skin-shivering touch of the unseen, and the quiet but insistent tap of the ancient dead whose treasures lie beneath. The past is always waiting here, just beneath the mirrorglass surface of the Fenland pools. This is a chapter that’s full of history and folklore — the Fens are rich with stories, and often heavy with melancholy.

My hope for you, the reader is that as you read, you will find yourself drawn in to the mysterious Fens with their swishing reeds and glossy black depths. Perhaps, if you go quietly, you may see Tiddy Mun the tiny bearded mist-whisperer, or glimpse the luminous face of the moon, hidden beneath her hooded cloak as she walks among us.

Writing Prompt:

‘I don’t remember how I first heard the stories, I grew up knowing, as if they had seeped beneath my skin, old tales of the foggy Fens, inhabited by boggarts and will-o-the-wisps and haunted by the cold touch of ghosts.’

What are the stories that you grew up knowing?

Is there one particular piece of folklore or history that you associate with the place where you spent your teenage years?

Write a re-telling of that story.

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I’ll be answering a couple of Q&A questions each month. This month’s are:

What’s the difference between writing on Substack and publishing a book? How do you know when a piece of writing is finished?

Writing on Substack is a much more free and immediate process — I often don’t choose what to write about until I sit down at my computer. I tend to focus on moments or experiences that have made me feel something — Small Stories is a search for magic and meaning, and I find those in many different things. I do keep to a Substack writing schedule — one post for paid subscribers each week — so in that sense it is similar to writing a book because I’m always writing to a deadline. But Substack does not come with a team of editors, and so my writing here is much less polished than in my books! With a book, I know its finished when it’s been edited, copy-edited, proofread, checked and checked again… with a Substack essay, it’s usually ready when I run out of time and hit publish! I enjoy both kinds of writing, and often the ideas in my essays feed into my books, and vice versa. I also have an ongoing Substack series called The Feeling of Writing a Book, which I’ll be updating soon with some news, so watch this space…

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I’ve created a community space for conversation about this chapter, please head over and join us:

Thank you for reading along. If you have read and enjoyed Chasing Fog, I’d be so grateful if you’d take a moment to leave a review — they really help.

Laura

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