How do we come home in a strange land?
Moving to a remote forest hamlet in a new country in the midst of a pandemic, the only way to connect is to take the time to linger, listen and observe—to be with the land that is becoming home. From this observations a series of haiku arise, following the Japanese system of 24 seasons divided into 72 micro-seasons and interspersed with eight lyric poems that travel around the Celtic wheel of the year. And so a forest garden and its surrounding Finistère woodland slowly reveals itself, weaving together the lunar and solar, melding the Celtic shape of the year with the increments of the Japanese solar terms, each one unveiling a new aspect of change.
Charting a life unmoored from the familiar, but permeable to the new the poems find their place at ‘the end of the world’, as the Romans called Finistère, but also in Penn-ar-Bed, the Breton name which is both the end and start of the world.
Most endings are also beginnings and here in these precise, exquisitely observed poems, we find ourselves both unsettled and settling, exploring what it means to hold together being adrift and belonging; cycles and transformation and how we find a beginning at the end of the world.
How do we come home in a strange land?
Moving to a remote forest hamlet in a new country in the midst of a pandemic, the only way to connect is to take the time to linger, listen and observe—to be with the land that is becoming home. From this observations a series of haiku arise, following the Japanese system of 24 seasons divided into 72 micro-seasons and interspersed with eight lyric poems that travel around the Celtic wheel of the year. And so a forest garden and its surrounding Finistère woodland slowly reveals itself, weaving together the lunar and solar, melding the Celtic shape of the year with the increments of the Japanese solar terms, each one unveiling a new aspect of change.
Charting a life unmoored from the familiar, but permeable to the new the poems find their place at ‘the end of the world’, as the Romans called Finistère, but also in Penn-ar-Bed, the Breton name which is both the end and start of the world.
Most endings are also beginnings and here in these precise, exquisitely observed poems, we find ourselves both unsettled and settling, exploring what it means to hold together being adrift and belonging; cycles and transformation and how we find a beginning at the end of the world.
Jan Fortune was born in Middlesbrough and grew up in Redcar. She
read theology at Cambridge and completed a doctorate in feminist
theology at Exeter University. Jan has worked as a teacher, priest
(ordained at the first ordination of women to the CofE) and charity
director. She is the founding editor of Cinnamon Press and has
edited around 400 books and led numerous creative writing courses
in the Wales, the UK (including courses for Arvon and Ty Newydd),
Spain, France, and online. She mentors writers from beginners to
highly experienced, across genres and hosts a writing community,
Kith, that includes weekly prompts, courses and inspiriation for
the writing life via her site Becoming a Different Story.
Her previous publications include non-fiction titles in alternative
education and parenting and the major book book for writers:
Writing Down Deep: an alchemy of the writing life (available as
both hardback and paperback editions) ; the novels Dear Ceridwen
and Coming Home. Her previous poetry collections include Particles
of Life (BlueChrome), Slate Voices (a collaborative collection with
Mavis Gulliver), Stale Bread & Miracles, Edge (a companion to Adam
Craig’s Year W), and Turn/Return, a pamphlet inspired by Brian
Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. Her most recent work is the Casilda
Trilogy of novels, which includes This is the End of the Story, A
Remedy for All Things and For Hope Is Always Born, and the
spin-off, stand-alone novel Saoirse’s Crossing.
Her cross-over novels re-envisaging the Arthurian legends in a
near-future authoritarian UK are The Standing Ground (originally
published in 2008 and being relaunched in a new edition in autumn
2021) and The Roots of the Ground, written during the first UK
lockdown as a live project with a group of writers as daily
audience for first draft readings, and also due out in autumn
2021.
She is currently working on a haiku and lyric sequence tracking the
seasons of a forest.
Jan is in the last stages of qualifiying as an aromatherapist,
about to begin her second intensive apprenticeship in herbalism and
is currently training as a yoga nidrā teacher. She lives in a
surviving area of ancient forest in Finistère, Brittany.
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