Monday, February 11, 2019

Paul Kingsnorth: shedworker


Writer and founder of the Wyrd School, Paul Kingsnorth (The Wake, Beast) is also a shedworker, based on a smallholding in Galway. In an interview with Erica Wagner for the New Statesman, he tells her about Beast that "he could only have written it looking out over the field outside his writing shed". In fact, he built it himself. Here's how Wagner describes it:
"We’re sitting in the Irish sunshine in front of a comfortable wooden hut a moment’s walk away from the house. It’s his writing place, and it’s where I spent the night, the darkness and quiet providing the kind of sleep that I’d hardly recalled existed. Round the walls inside, Kingsnorth has tacked up a reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, the story of William the Bastard’s conquest. There is no wifi here and no phone signal, either."

Here's how he describes his shedworking writing routine (pictured above, his hut in the snow):
Like many writers I'm a fairly reclusive, introspective person. I need the stars, the wind and the silence to produce my words. I live on a smallholding in Ireland with my wife, where we grow our own food and fuel, make our own bread and school our own children. I'm not all over social media, I don't blog and I don't tweet pictures of my breakfast to the world. I sit in the writing hut you can see at the top of this page, light the fire, eat chocolate bars, listen to the song thrushes, watch the young birches grow, and see what arises. 
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