Writer and facilitator Sarah Davy uses fiction to explore climate change and its effect on rural communities

When my novel-in-progress is shortlisted for the Northern Writers Awards two years in a row, I am hopeful. Can I make it third time lucky? I tighten the focus, change the title and guide it gently away from dystopia and into realism. Research climate change models and hydroponics and farming calendars. I enter it again and wait. It still isn’t finished, but it’s getting there.

It doesn’t pay off. Not even an honourable mention.

I still want to finish it, to bring all my work together. The process becomes a slog. I write, I edit, but the word count gets smaller and smaller, and I struggle to find my way through the sticky middle to a satisfying ending.

I try planning, pantsing, and everything in between. I write on rolls of paper, backs of envelopes, make audio notes and Google Map my way from one end of Hadrian’s Wall to the other. And then, one day, the actual problem reveals itself.

I’m not a novelist.

In fact, I don’t think I ever wanted to write a novel and was sucked into the dreamy idea of what being a novelist meant. To everyone else. But not to me. I need to find a different way to tell this story. I gather the printed pages into a folder, label it ‘The Flitting,’ slide it into my office bookcase and close the door.

Another seasonal storm rattles its way across the country and knocks the power out in our rural village. As I heat soup over a camping stove, my mind wanders back to my story. It began as a vividly recalled dream scribbled into the pages of my notebook. A close future where climate change is happening; temperatures climbing, communities fractured, normal life becoming unworkable. It snakes its way along the lanes, roads and valleys of West Northumberland. Over gap toothed walls, parched meadows, and felled forests. It seeps into the fabric of homes and lives and forces people to make choices. And that’s the heart of the story I want to tell. Not the climate, but the people it effects and how they react to it. The difference between what happens and what the story is about. The two sides that every story needs.

I pour over my drafts and tease out key characters. Each has a story, a reaction to change, a unique, complex and sometimes predictable way of dealing with it. And that’s how I pull my story back out of the unsuccessful drafts folder and into work-in-progress. By telling a series of stories and creating a collection, threaded together with a common theme.

*

I write the first three stories in quick succession, working in a flurry of excitement. They are drawn from the novel draft, the back story and setting work I did in my planning phase. A farmer grapples with isolation in the wake of an accident. A father and son are faced with the grim reality of an uncertain future. A young woman makes a sacrifice to protect a historic site. These are the people I know, the settings I’ve explored on foot and in guidebooks. But there needs to be more. A broader range of voices who are connected to the landscape in other ways, strongly enough to feel the loss of it acutely. I need to talk to people, to gauge their feelings and concerns, to research the wider impact of the wall and its landscape. To bring in voices to properly represent the scale of the loss and challenges we face.

*

I’m shopping in Hexham one morning and meet a local climate change activist. He is trying to engage the local community to take part in a protest. There are only a few stickers on his chart, and none are in the ‘terrified’ of climate change column. He tells me that his activism has resulted in dog muck smeared on his windows, physical threats and his personal details being distributed online. He invites me to a climate change café and I accept but dodge the library entrance at the last minute. I can’t cope with confrontation. With arguments, fear, anger. I wonder if anyone turned up or if it was just one person, hopeful, drinking the huge flask of coffee and eating a whole tray of homemade cakes. I question why I’m writing about a topic that so many people are choosing to ignore. One that elicits extreme responses and divides neighbours and communities. I think it’s because I know we can’t file this away to sort out later. It is happening right now, in front of us.

*

I need to plunge myself back into the landscape and find myself standing on the edge on an ancient earthwork close to the central point of Hadrian’s Wall. Grey skies are thick with mizzle that coats my glasses, turning my vision compound like a fly until the bleak moorland is kaleidoscopic. I push my hands into my pockets and follow the line of the earthwork, straight then dipping sharply down a slippery bank coated in crisp bracken into the ruin of a Mithraic temple. Waist high walls wrap themselves around me and I feel the shadow of a vaulted ceiling above me. I close my eyes, recall visits to churches and cathedrals, the cool feeling of stone under feet and fingertips. The calm that comes with places of worship. I realise that this whole place, its fields, walls, moors, and ridges, is its own church. Opening out to a wide Northumbrian sky, calling people to it. To walk, to think, to live. Even on a bleak February morning, the pull of this place reminds me why I moved here. And why capturing how it is and how it might be matters. The question isn’t if things will change, but when, and what we will all do to weather the change. I will continue to make space for these questions and conversations the only way I know how. By writing.

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