25. On language, landscapes and mending the world // SARAH THOMAS

In this episode I speak to writer and filmmaker Sarah Thomas. Her memoir, The Raven’s Nest, is a meditation on her time spent in Iceland, and explores how identity and language are interwoven with landscape and ecology. What does it mean to fall in love with a place, with its human and non-human inhabitants?  And how may we each do our little part in mending the world? 

Sarah Thomas is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and traveller with a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies. She is committed to work that explores, evokes and honours our entanglements with the living world. She has lived and journeyed from the Equator to the Arctic Circle finding stories in the everyday. Her films have been screened internationally. In 2020 she was nominated for the Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award. She was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing and shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. Her ecological memoir, The Raven’s Nest (Atlantic Books 2022), is her debut. 

ICELANDIC WORDS FROM THE EPISODE: 

• Óvissuferð – a journey where you don’t know what will happen
• Kvöldvaka – an evening gathering, traditionally to mend or do crafts while listening to someone reading aloud.
• Bergmál – echo (literally: language of the mountains)
• Tölva – computer (literally: number oracle)

LINKS: 

• Sarah’s website: ⁠https://sarahthomas.net⁠
• The Raven’s Nest: ⁠https://sarahthomas.net/the-ravens-nest/⁠
• Book by David Abram on language and ecology: Spell of the sensuous: ⁠https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/319/the-spell-of-the-sensuous-by-david-abram/⁠
• Ursula LeGuin’s The carrier bag theory of fiction: ⁠https://otherfutures.nl/uploads/documents/le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf⁠

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