Welcome to episode 10 of Prompted by Nature. I hope this one finds you happy and well wherever you are!
This week I’m excited to release the conversation I had with the lovely Jini Reddy back in mid-May.
Jini is an award-winning author and journalist, originally born in London to Indian parents who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa. She was in Montreal, Canada and has a passion for writing travel, nature and spirituality. She has been published in publications such as The Guardian, Time magazine, The Times, Sunday Times Style, National Geographic Traveller, and BBC Wildlife to name just a few! Her first book Wild Times, which I highly recommend, was published in 2016 and she is a contributor to the forthcoming Women on Nature anthology.
Her book Wanderland, which we discuss in the episode, is utterly beautiful and charts Jini’s search for the magical ‘Other’ through her travels around the UK. From the blurb, ‘along the way she tracks down ephemeral wild art, encounters women who worship the goddess, falls deeper in love with her birth land, and struggles, but mostly fails, to get to grips with its lore. Throughout the book she rejoices in the wilderness we cannot see and celebrates the natural beauty we can.’ This is a book full of magic and if you’re feeling a bit disconnected from nature, I highly recommend this as a gentle nudge to get back into it and remind yourself that you and nature are both as magical as each other!
In this episode we discuss:
- Her background and her inspiration for the book
- What she means when she talks of the magic in the landscape
- The concept of the magical ‘Other’ and how this relates to ‘Othering’
- Accessible nature and the need to shift the dialogue around visibility in green spaces
- The importance of hearing a range of voices in nature writing
- Following your intuition and the source of creativity
- Writer’s block and how she stays creative
- The link between Belonging and Nature
- Nature as an animate entity
- The joy of being given freedom to what the book you want to write
- The link between travel writing and nature writing