Chasing Fog Book Club: Chapter 5

haag

Pendeen Lighthouse (a colour version of the chapter opener)

Welcome to Chasing Fog Book Club!

Together, we are exploring one chapter of my book each month. Each chapter of the book is set in a different foggy place, explores a type of fog, and is guided by a sense. If you missed the previous chapters, you’ll find them here. This is chapter five, which is set on the Devon and Cornwall coast, features a sea fog called haag, and is guided by the sense of sound. Here I am reading you a section of chapter five:

This chapter, ‘The Fog Horn’, begins with a lighthouse that clings to the tip of a lonely headland, far beyond the end of the road, reached only by a winding primrose path. In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the Ramsay family never quite make it to the ‘silvery, misty-looking tower’, and perhaps a lighthouse’s mysterious elusiveness is part of its appeal, existing as it does in liminality — perched at the borderline of land, sea and sky.

There are two lighthouses in this chapter — the first, Start Point, allowed the opportunity to explore inside, offering a glimpse of lighthouse life, and giving me the chance to stare into the enormous glittering glass eye of its now defunct Fresnel lens. ‘Warning’ read a sign on this lighthouse gate ‘a fog signal emitting a very loud noise may be sounded in this vicinity at any time’, but the day was bright and the foghorn remained silent.

When I visited the second lighthouse, Pendeen, I arrived to find it cocooned by a weighty shawl of fog. On the clifftop, I could see the large, black curved twin horns of its foghorn pointing out to sea, but the decommissioned Pendeen Foghorn remained silent, a strange and melancholy sight when surrounded by thick fog. I travelled on along the coast, looking for shipwrecks; for a fae fog warning called a Whooper; and hoping not to find a gothic nightmare on Bodmin Moor. Eventually, the eerie wail of a foghorn crept into my ears somewhere I least expected it.

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Writing Prompt:

‘Up in the lighthouse service room, one floor below the lantern, a map shows known shipwrecks in the waters around Start Point, and they are many. The listed names sound a strange and terrible recitation — a found poem:

Reliance

Gossamer

Lizzie Ellen

Lyra, Freedom, Dryad

Spirit of the Ocean’

Can you look out for, and record, your own found poem?

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This month’s Q&A questions are extracted from an interview with Cunning Folk Magazine, who featured Chasing Fog in their book club.

What was on your mind when writing this book?

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.

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?

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.

You can read the full conversation here.

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I recently spoke to

Sara

Tasker for her podcast Hashtag Authentic and we talked about many things, including the process of promoting Chasing Fog. Our conversation is here: (it was so relaxed, I almost forgot we were recording, so listen along for giggles and all the details…)

Migrating your audience online, with Laura Pashby

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

Chasing Fog // buy a signed copy of Chasing Fog

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