shimmering pictures

{behind the scenes of a book}

To write is to gather shimmering pictures, holding them up to the light as they ripple and glow, turning them over in your mind like shards of iridescent shell picked up on the beach and rolled between your fingers. To write a non-fiction book is to spend months, even years, seeking out and collecting these pearlescent splinters, hoping that with time and reflection they will, as Joan Didion put it, ‘coalesce’ into a coherent form, revealing an innate shape and meaning.

Compelled to write about the pictures in her mind that ‘shimmer[ed] around the edges’, Joan Didion said of writing that:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

I spent almost two years working on my book Chasing Fog, and during that period, as I collected the pictures that shimmered in my mind, I also collected pictures on my camera roll, pictures that held the key to the stories I was weaving in the book.

Chasing Fog is a work of narrative non-fiction: Rebecca Schiller described it as ‘haunting and beautiful, a surprising mix of nature-writing and memoir’. In it, I tell elements of my story, twisted together with the curling tendril’s of fog’s story: its landscapes, people, myths, folklore, art, literature, ghosts and optical meteorological phenomena.

The book has nine chapters, each of which focuses on a place, a sense experience and a particular type of fog. The images that follow represent some of my pictures that shimmer around the edges, one picture for each chapter.

{In a hilltop graveyard overlooking the Severn river valley, I searched for a gravestone embossed with a stone lighthouse. I visited it on a summer morning and left behind a bunch of purple sweet peas from a roadside honesty-box stall.}

{My best friend took me to a wildwood on windswept Dartmoor, in search of pixies. The trees in this scrap of temperate rainforest hung with candyfloss clouds of beard lichen. A fallen tendril blew across the path and I caught it in my hand.}

{On a chill January day, in the kingdom of a foggy folkloric king, I swam in a hidden lake at the top of a Welsh mountain. This llyn is said to be the haunt of a mythological monster called an afanc.}

{In a bird hide, on a fragment of untouched wetland in the East Anglian Fens, I sat frozen as the sun sank down, waiting in the space between day and night for the hen harriers to come to roost.}

{Climbing the lighthouse stairs, I found myself staring into an enormous, glittering glass eye. This unexpectedly gorgeous prismatic structure was a catadioptric lens that had lit the lighthouse for sixty years.}

{I stopped at the Edinburgh Writers’ Museum to read quotations from famous Scottish writers inscribed onto honey-coloured paving stones outside. Nan Shepherd’s words spoke to me.}

{Sun flickered over the white ceiling of Ireland’s only cable car in shifting patches as we crossed the Dursey Sound. The car swayed, but only gently, and light whisked into the cable car corners.}

{A place of repose in a whirling city, the ruined church’s walls were draped with hanging vines, its roofless centre open to the sky. A robin sang gaily from the top of a tree.}

{Under the archways of the arcade beside the piazza, hundreds of silver baubles were jumbled, spread along tarpaulins across the floor. The city was gathering her festive finery.}

You’ll find all these shimmering moments, and the stories that link them together, in Chasing Fog which is now available to pre-order.

(If you’re not in the UK, Blackwells offer free international delivery). Every single pre-order (from a bookshop, online retailer, or a library) makes my heart skip—thank you.

Tell me, what are your pictures that shimmer around the edges?

Thank you for reading,

Laura x

PS: You can read Joan Didion’s full essay here