Writing the Weather - Experiments in Living

Ian McMillan and guests including Jenny Offill, Alice Oswald and Wayne Binitie discuss weather writing.

Alice Oswald The Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alice Oswald is a great listener to the weather, something she has written about as being part of her experiences as a gardener. She has shown great attentiveness to water in all forms – with books like ‘Dart’ her long river poem and with her writing on rain for Radio 3. Along with her co-editor Paul Keegan, Alice has put together an anthology of weather writing called ‘Gigantic Cinema ‘. For The Verb she reads from Daniel Defoe’s 'The Journal of the Plague year'; and from her own book ‘Nobody’. She also shares the following works: ‘My Cocaine Museum’ by Michael Taussig , ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel IV’ by Francois Rabelais , ‘Conversation about Dante’ by Osip Mandelstam, and ‘Trees in the Garden’ by DH Lawrence. The anthology is described as a 'bare-headed' collection, which in part means that titles from the selections are only referred to on the contents page - this allows the reader to experience the weather writing as if it all takes place on a single day.

Wayne Binitie Artist Wayne Binitie bring us the sounds of ancient weather. He has been collaborating with the British Antarctic Survey, and shares with us original compositions (made with his collaborator Art Lewy ) that allow us to hear a soundtrack of air bubbles being released from Antarctic ice cores which are thousands of years old. The compositions (Ice Fragments 1 and 2) also weave the music of Ravel and Debussy into these bubble sounds, as a way of exploring memory. Wayne is fascinated by the different states of water, and his work explores freezing and melting, condensation and evaporation, sublimation and deposition states. We are focusing on his sound art, but Wayne’s work takes in other senses, as his exhibitions have demonstrated ( http://waynebinitie.com/ ). All of Wayne’s work with the BAS helps us reflect on what it means to talk about the weather at a time when the climate is changing in profound ways.

Jenny Offill Jenny Offill thought deeply about how we talk about the weather in ways that are true to our experiences and our thoughts, in order to write her novel ‘Weather’. ‘Weather’ is narrated by Lizzie a librarian who ends up answering the mail for a doom-laden podcast called 'Hell and High Water'. Soon she is fielding questions from those worried about climate change. The novel is written in fragmented paragraphs which show how weather thoughts move through our thinking – and contain beautiful and comic observations. She discusses humour, the difficulty of talking about glaciers and the pleasure of manifestos. Jenny’s previous novel is the equally playful ‘The Department of Speculation’.