Kathleen Jamie: a life in writing

When Kathleen Jamie's first collection of essays, Findings, came out in 2005, no one – least of all its author – was expecting anything much. Fresh from winning the 2004 Forward prize for The Tree House, a collection described by the chair of judges, Lavinia Greenlaw, as "a book which enlarges … the scope and capacity of poetry being written today", Jamie was riding high. But success in one arena was no guarantee of success in another – and Findings was, by anyone's standards, a fiendishly tricky sell. Jamie's choice of the essay form was unfashionable; her subjects (Orkney in midwinter, a pair of nesting peregrines, 21st-century flotsam on a Hebridean shoreline) were queer and disparate. Her publisher wasn't even sure how the book should be classified. Travel writing? Not quite: none of the essays took Jamie outside her native Scotland; many were written from her own back door. Autobiography? The book was bewitchingly first-person, but there was no sense of a coherent memoir. "We had a horror", Jamie says, "of it turning up in the 'body, mind and spirit' section of the bookshops. And I didn't want it to be in Scottish literature, because I felt it was broader than that. But it's not travel, no. There didn't really seem to be a word for it."

Over the past 20 years, the field of landscape literature has been slowly bursting into full bloom. Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley, to name but a few: many of the country's finest writers have been bringing their attention to the landscape, and Findings has been at the centre of this revival. Reviewers fell over themselves to praise the book ("a sorceress of the essay form," John Berger wrote); readers, seduced by Jamie's straightforward approach to her environment, in which nature resides in the cracks and crevices of daily life, bought copies by the thousand. "Between the laundry and fetching the kids from school, that's how birds enter my life," Jamie writes, in "Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes". "During a lull in the traffic, oyster catchers. In the school playground, sparrows." The small-scale, achievable nature of her quests joined with her frank, beautiful sentences to nudge landscape writing into the 21st century, transforming it into a democratic art. "Up to the mid-1960s we had something called nature writing, but it just vanished," Jamie says. "It went down its little burrow and stayed there. It wasn't until 40 years on that we started to worry and had to reappraise our relationship with what's around us. Suddenly it was possible to come out with this new kind of work that renegotiated our place in the natural world. I'd like to think that's what books like mine were busy doing."

Seven years on, and she's doing it again. Sightlines, her second essay collection, is built very much along the lines of Findings – same format, similar concerns – but where the focus in the earlier book is up close and personal, Jamie's eye drawn to cobwebs in the gutter, winter sunlight cutting across a kitchen table, in Sightlines she lifts her gaze to the horizon. There's more of everything here: wider seas, higher cliffs, bigger weather. The change, she says, is entirely down to circumstance. "When I was writing Findings, I was right in the thick of the childhood years. I didn't have the time or the resources to go far. These days, there's scope for longer trips." The children – she and her husband Phil have a son and a daughter, both in their teens now – appear in Sightlines, but glancingly, leaping around with friends, mired in school intrigues. There's a strong sense throughout the collection of the freedom that their growing up brings. "It seems like a long time ago," Jamie says to her companion in "The Gannetry", as they peer down at a colony of seabirds. "I gestured to the bird-crowded cliff face. I meant the time of breaking water and nappy buckets and trails of milky vomit down one's shoulder. 'Over!' I laughed. 'That bit's over. For me, anyway.'"

So now she travels: to Greenland to see the aurora borealis; to Bergen to visit the whale rooms of the Natural History Museum; on a personal quest to St Kilda, Scotland's "fabled outlier". If birds were the animating spirit of Findings, in Sightlines it's whales: their bones standing as monuments along the British coastline; pods of them glimpsed from clifftops on Shetland and Rona. "What is it about whales?" Jamie muses. "They're just … big and out there. Like Everest. Whales are real, in the world, but they're also half-mythic, and we respond to that. Our relationship with them seems to be the point at which we have our best and worst arguments with the natural world. Industrialised whaling, and the end of it: we're capable of both." Despite her thoughtfulness on the subject of environmentalism, however, and the strands of climate change, pollution and declining populations that criss-cross her books, she doesn't view what she does as activism. "I can't be didactic, telling people what they ought to think – people can think what they like. I'm just encountering. The best thing I can do is go out and be in the world in a very loose, open sort of way, and see what happens. See what I stumble across."

Jamie was born in Renfrewshire, the eldest of three siblings. Her mother was a solicitor's clerk (Jamie records her death from pneumonia in Sightlines), her father an accountant. Hers was "a normal sort of upbringing", she says. The family settled in Currie, a suburb on the west side of Edinburgh, "a couple of miles from the city centre in one direction and the hills in the other – perfectly poised between the two. I think I've carried that sensibility with me all my days; a foot in both camps." She lives now in a small town in Fife, but reading her work it's easy to forget it: she seems constantly to be looking through and past the bricks and mortar to the wildlife beyond. Has she no yearning, then, to light out permanently for the hills? "Oh God, no!" she roars. "No shopping? No nail bars? Why would I do that?"

Jamie attended Currie High School, "probably the most ordinary comprehensive on the planet, which I passed through without much notion of anything beyond it. I wasn't particularly clever. But I started writing when I was 15 or so. Excruciating, terrible poetry, but I just got a feeling that I could do it." In fact, her ambitions at the time didn't run towards writing at all. "I was a teenager when I first became aware of the past," she writes in "The Woman in the Field", the third essay in Sightlines. "A teenage antiquarian, thrilled by standing stones, tumuli, ley lines and all that; what their aficionados grandly called 'earth mysteries'." In 1979, just after her final school exam, her mother drove her through rural Perthshire, past blue posters touting for the newly elected Margaret Thatcher, to a collapsing farmhouse next to a neolithic dig site. "The Woman in the Field" tracks the summer that followed, of sifting and stripping, scraping away with the other volunteers at the hard-packed soil in order to ease out the stone age monument beneath. Plenty of poets, Seamus Heaney among them, have harped on the correspondences between the work of the archaeologist and the poet, each occupied with the task of unearthing, but Jamie herself resists the comparison. "I wouldn't say one was a metaphor for the other. The draw for me was the sense of time, of the long-past being still with us. Getting out into the landscape and discovering the remnants of peoples who'd been there thousands of years ago: I found that thrilling. I still do."

Alas, a career in archeology was off the cards when Jamie found that she'd "bollocksed" her exams, though the fascination resurfaces in her work in a thoroughgoing preoccupation with deep time. Her mother suggested librarianship or secretarial college, but Jamie was set on university. "The alternatives looked ghastly," she says, "so I spent a couple of years in night school to get the exams up, and talked my way in. I thought it would buy me that four years, a bit of space and vision before the 9 to 5." In the end, it bought her a whole lot more; she is heartfelt in her endorsement of the experience. "University then wasn't there just so you could get a good job: it was mind-expanding, educational, scholarly – even bohemian," she says. "They were good years. It was the early 1980s, the height of the women's movement, and I was what they called 'an aware woman' – a title I loved. I wasn't an activist, but my flatmates were: a proud anarchist, a couple of lesbian separatists, and their various cohorts. It was grand – a real political education. I can't imagine what my life would have been without it. An opportunity arose for people of my generation to experience that; the gates are slamming shut again now, and it's outrageous."

This engagement with the political side of life is never far from Jamie's conversation, but its presence in her work is less explicit. When I ask whether politics is important to her writing, she turns the question back on me: "Can you tell from reading my work that I have any political awareness?" Well, yes, I say, certainly – but put on the spot, I can't call any specific examples to mind. It's more a mood, strong but diffuse: an atmosphere of egalitarianism. She nods slowly. "I don't think, when I'm writing, 'now I'm going to write a political tract', but … I do think that part of the reason for Findings' success, for example, was that the land and landscapes were described by an indigene. Not by someone arriving as a tourist – or crucially, as an owner. On the scandalous business of land and land ownership, especially in Scotland, where 80% of the land is owned by 10% of the people, I feel I might be striking a tiny blow: by getting out into these places, and developing a language and a way of seeing which is not theirs but ours. And when we do that – step outdoors, and look up – we're not little cogs in the capitalist machine. It's the simplest act of resistance and renewal. This isn't new, of course, but alas it's still necessary. Never more so."

As it happens, though, Jamie's first foray into prose saw her in the position of tourist – and taking a far more overtly political stance. In the early 90s she "fell in with some mountaineers who were all for going to the Himalayas. I asked if I could tag along, and I ended up going out to northern Pakistan and writing about that." The book was originally published as The Golden Peak in 1992, then reissued as Among Muslims with a new prologue and epilogue after she went back to the region in the wake of 9/11. "It was an extraordinary place," she says. "Because I was a woman I was co-opted into Muslim families in a way a man couldn't be; I got beyond the garden wall. At that time, the relationship between the west and Islam was … can it be worse than it is now? No, it can't. But it was starting to be spoken about a great deal, and usually with colossal misunderstanding on both sides. And I found I could get on with these girls fine, and come to a respect and understanding of the way they wished to live their lives without us barracking them. If they want to wear a veil, well hell, you know? It's a bit of cloth. It's not an affront to us."

All of this, though, lay in the future. Jamie's first experience of publication occurred while she was still at university, and in a highly unorthodox fashion. "A man called Tom Fenton [brother of the poet James Fenton] moved in a couple of streets from where I lived," she says, "and the word went out that he was a publisher and was looking for books. So I took my sheaf of poems round and left them in an envelope on his doorstep, like an abandoned baby. A couple of weeks later he sent me a postcard and said 'I'd love to publish these'. He made a lovely wee pamphlet. I remember sitting in his rather grand house in Morningside and him bringing out sheaves of beautiful paper and asking 'Would you rather have this, or this?' I thought, this is how you publish a book; this is fine!"

The pamphlet, Black Spiders, won an Eric Gregory award as well as a Scottish Arts Council book award, and when Jamie left university the SAC followed up with a small grant, "which kept me going for a couple of years. After that I got a job as a writer in residence and just eked out a living for a while. It's never," she says, grimacing at the poet's lot, "not been difficult, financially. You see how much novelists can earn, and once or twice in my life I've thought, surely to God I can do that. I've sat down and written 30,000 words of drivel and then thought, what am I doing? I could do this in a 20-line poem."

If there's one downside to the success of Jamie's essay-writing career, it's that it has overshadowed, in the public mind, the excellence of her poetry. The two are very definitely separate strands for her, but what is present in her poetry just as strongly as in her prose is a remarkable quality of attention. It's there in her Forward prizewinning collection The Tree House, which offers brief, lyric versions of Findings' conversations with nature, all eye and no ego; and in 1999's Jizzen, a collection that takes its title from the Scots world for childbed. The latter, written in the wake of her own mid-30s tumble into maternity, is an undersung masterpiece. Jamie ably lays out motherhood's fracturing contradictions, balancing the grind of the "heap of nappies / carried from the automatic / in a red plastic bucket" against "the first / wild-sweet weeks of your life", and potently evokes the emotional depth charges that childbirth can set off. In "The Tay Moses", inspired by her fear of disliking the child she gives birth to, she imagines setting her son adrift in a basket of reeds, tracking his progress downstream to the place where a river-pilot fishes him out. "And you'll change hands", she writes, "tractor-man, grieve, farm-wife / who takes you into her / competent arms" – an image of warmth and safety that she establishes only to smash it in horror, sending her conflicted self running for the child in a skitter of desperate, verb-strewn lines:

even as I drive, slamming
the car's gears,
spitting gravel on tracks
down between berry-fields,
engine still racing, the door wide
as I run toward her, crying
LEAVE HIM! Please,
it's okay, he's mine.

The collection, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, was also instrumental in securing her first "proper" teaching post, at St Andrews; she now holds the chair in creative writing at Stirling University, and has officially joined the ranks of the poet-teachers who support their writing careers through academia.

And Jamie has a new volume of poetry coming out in September, her first full-length collection since 2004. "I've been quietly accruing poems. It's going to be called The Overhaul. It's a mid-life thing," she says with a snort. "After that, the diary's blank, the desk is empty." Is that scary? "It is, a little. I'm 50 this year too, so it's a bit like, what now? But things will start to drip into my mind. You have to have faith in that process. Having times of emptiness is part of it."