ANNA SELBY
I am a poet, naturalist and researcher and my writing often explores our connection with water, the sea and coast. My most recent publication, Field Notes was written in and under the Atlantic Ocean (using waterproof notebooks) through a kind of creative fieldwork, whilst observing marine habitats and species over three years. It combines poems and written poetic “sketches” made in-situ with their subject, through direct experience.
I often work in collaboration with specialists from a range of different fields, from maritime archaeologists, to conservationists and choreographers; and I really value this as part of my process. My research, teaching and essays mostly sit within the blue humanities, and last summer I co-led an interdisciplinary Creative Ecology Residency on a yacht in the Outer Hebrides. I became smitten with sailing, and have just completed my RYA Competent Crew course. In reference to her book The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson
said: “If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” And Aldo Leopold wrote, ‘we grieve only for what we know’. Many people around the world will never get to see the sea, so I want to connect people with it through my writing and take them on and under the waves.
I would like to use my time onboard to learn with people from different disciplines to help shape new work and to focus on my current project ‘Living Water: Ecological-Poetry of Sea, Islands and Coastal Communities’ which is partly focused on marine conservation areas in Scotland. I would like to work on a new sequence of poems began on the boat and islands responding to the species we encounter. ‘Living Water’ is one of the names given to jellyfish in some languages and over recent years I have witnessed their blooms as one of the warm-water species increasing due to marine heatwaves in the UK.
For me, moments of fracture can form gaps for new ways of living to rise up and through. Bayo Akomolafe describes it as ‘dancing with mountains into the cracks’ and Joanna Macy refers to this as ‘The Great Turning” with a shift from industrial growth societies to a life-sustaining civilisation. I’d like to bring my knowledge of pleasure activism and intersectional environmentalism to our collective exploration of this prompt and view it as an opportunity to reframe and find the stories that need to be told and heard for these times and the times to come.