The Salt Path author Raynor Winn tells us about her latest book The Wild Silence and the best piece of advice she's ever been given.
Raynor Winn is an author who will be very familiar to Suffolk readers. Her first book The Salt Path was a bestseller in 2018 and is one of the most read Non-Fiction books in our stock. The Salt Path was shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize and the 2018 Costa Book Awards in the Biography category. In May 2019 The Salt Path won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize. Raynor's second book Wild Silence is due for publication this week and will be widely available through Suffolk Libraries.
Raynor Winn's The Salt Path is one of the books selected as part of our Wild Reads project. Find out more about Wild Reads →
As a young child I loved children’s nature books – Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson probably being the one I reread the most, although Jack London’s Call of the Wild was equally tatty. I only had access to the books on the family bookshelf, so I read everything from American westerns to Mills and Boon and a German text book called Deutsches Leben 1. But when I was thirteen a library opened in the next village and a whole other world opened with it. Then I found George Orwell, Rachel Carson, Thomas Hardy and Martin Luther King and everything changed.
I wrote The Salt Path for Moth, so that as his memory began to fail he would remember our walk. I tried to capture the smell of the salt air, the feel of the wind and the rain on our skin. When I began to write about nature in that totally immersed way it was easy, I opened the guidebook and I was there myself, back on the path. But I couldn’t write about the walk without writing about how we came to be there. That was hard - I had to force myself to go back to the difficult week when our lives fell apart and write about that with equal clarity.
In that moment when life falls apart, no amount of advice can help. But when you stand in the rubble afterwards, then you have choices. You can allow the dust of that traumatic event to suffocate you, cloud your vision of life and define your future. Or you can make another choice – you can get up, shake off the dust and go on.
There’s a short chapter in The Wild Silence called Jump. It’s about a moment when I was a child, playing with my cousins in a hay barn. There’s a platform in the hay, thirty feet up, high in the roof of the barn, we’re jumping from the platform onto the soft landing of a pile of broken bales below – the game for that day. They’ve all jumped and are shouting to me from the bottom, it’s my turn but I can’t do it. I’m standing at the edge of the platform, looking down and I’m gripped by fear – of the height, of the fall, of what might happen at the bottom – and I can’t make that leap. Then I hear a rustle in the corner of the barn behind me. It’s a barn owl, I’ve disturbed him and he’s preparing to fly. As he lifts from his perch, I stand on the edge of the bales and as he flies, I jump. No more fear. As I fall I watch him fly over the field and I fly with him, ‘free of fear, free flight.’ Trust yourself and jump – life will be waiting for you when you land.
I began to write The Wild Silence as an exploration of how Moth’s health had changed as we walked, but in doing so it became something much more - a book of love and loss and rediscovering self-belief and how our deep connection to the natural world has defined our lives both before and after The Salt Path. But even more it became a book of the earth, the land, our connection to it, its power to heal and our power to heal it in return. All that set against the landscapes of our youth, the corner of Cornwall we have come to know so well and the wild limitless expanse of Iceland. Oh, and there’s a return of Dave and Julie.
I do, there’s a project planned for next year – if Covid-19 allows – so get your walking boots ready, it’s going to be quite a big one!
I like the thought of a reader closing the book with hope and to keep that feeling with them -never give up on hope. Even in the darkest moments when it seems as if there is no way out, if you hold on to hope anything can happen. And maybe next time they pass a homeless person in the street, rather than hurry by they might stop and talk, ask them about their day, ask them what they need – it could be me, it could be you.
There’s a piece in The Wild Silence about the first time I went on holiday with Moth. It was a backpacking trip to Scotland and I’d borrowed a rucksack that was too big and far too heavy. At the end of a hot sweaty day when I’d carried it up a mountain, I was standing in a campsite toilet block trying to pick bits of t-shirt out of the blistered skin on my shoulders. A group of Spanish girls who were sharing the one mirror, took over, bathing the skin and tutting over my rucksack – ‘never borrow kit for the hills, it always causes pain.’ Sounds like nothing, but I’ve thought of that advice at so many different moments over the years since.
I think over time I’ve reworded what the girls said, so that when I think of it now it always comes out as – ‘live your own life, if you try to live someone else’s version it’s always going to chafe.’
I got an E in my English Literature O’level. Loved English Language, I got an A in that, but literature was an entirely other matter. Apparently, I didn’t see the points in the text that I was supposed to see – it seems Lady Macbeth wasn’t an early advocate of women’s equality after all.
