Impromptu debate marks end of inaugural Festival week
Margaret Atwood at The Norfolk Festival of Nature photo: Adam Shawyer Margaret Atwood piled more pressure on the Oxford University Press in a surprise appearance at the Norfolk Festival of Nature on Saturday. She gave an impromptu response to nature writer Mark Cocker’s address to festival goers, illustrated by a looped series of slides depicting nature words cut from the OJD. She proposed that to ensure that words like acorn, bluebell, poppy and otter were not dismissed as irrelevant in children’s lives, a new book be produced that celebrated those words instead.
Mark Cocker had been speaking on the final day of the inaugural week of the Festival. It is to be a year-round celebration of nature in the cultural life of the county, and of the country. Starting with a week of literary, musical, visual and scientific exploration hosted by Gresham’s School, Holt, Festival events will tour the county hosted by organisations as diverse as the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, National Trust, RSPB, Writers’ Centre Norwich and Waveney and Blyth Arts. The list of collaborators is expected to grow.
As Cocker spoke, his words were accompanied by a poignant exhibition of his own photographs, alphabetically cataloguing more than fifty lost nature words: acorn, adder, bluebell, catkin....kingfisher, lark, magpie, newt, otter, poppy....
He then invited renowned Canadian novelist and Atwood’s partner, Graeme Gibson to respond. His focus was on the need to ensure children grow up with a love and understanding of the countryside, before they become a generation of uncomprehending adults. Margaret Atwood then reminded us of the interconnectedness of nature and human wellbeing; our dependence on the health of the oceans; and the fact that birds, in travelling the globe, give us “an overview of the entire web of life.” Atwood, Gibson and Cocker are among 28 literary figures to have written to Oxford University Press in support of the #naturewords campaign.
Mark Cocker had been speaking on the final day of the inaugural week of the Festival. It is to be a year-round celebration of nature in the cultural life of the county, and of the country. Starting with a week of literary, musical, visual and scientific exploration hosted by Gresham’s School, Holt, Festival events will tour the county hosted by organisations as diverse as the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, National Trust, RSPB, Writers’ Centre Norwich and Waveney and Blyth Arts. The list of collaborators is expected to grow.
As Cocker spoke, his words were accompanied by a poignant exhibition of his own photographs, alphabetically cataloguing more than fifty lost nature words: acorn, adder, bluebell, catkin....kingfisher, lark, magpie, newt, otter, poppy....
He then invited renowned Canadian novelist and Atwood’s partner, Graeme Gibson to respond. His focus was on the need to ensure children grow up with a love and understanding of the countryside, before they become a generation of uncomprehending adults. Margaret Atwood then reminded us of the interconnectedness of nature and human wellbeing; our dependence on the health of the oceans; and the fact that birds, in travelling the globe, give us “an overview of the entire web of life.” Atwood, Gibson and Cocker are among 28 literary figures to have written to Oxford University Press in support of the #naturewords campaign.
Bluebell - an unimaginable omission They, along with Festival Director Dr. Al Cormack formed a panel to take questions. The first, from Jessica Lawrence, asked simply “which one word would you put back in the Junior Dictionary if you could?”
Atwood and Cocker both saw acorn as having the strongest symbolism – the seed of mighty oak trees, with their great cultural significance; Cormack felt it was unimaginable to omit Britain’s most popular flower, the bluebell. Graeme Gibson, however, declared himself unwilling even to consider the question; for him, it wasn’t about trading odd words, but (he explained to me afterwards) about safeguarding nature literacy.
Atwood and Cocker both saw acorn as having the strongest symbolism – the seed of mighty oak trees, with their great cultural significance; Cormack felt it was unimaginable to omit Britain’s most popular flower, the bluebell. Graeme Gibson, however, declared himself unwilling even to consider the question; for him, it wasn’t about trading odd words, but (he explained to me afterwards) about safeguarding nature literacy.
Guardian and Sunday Times coverage
Meanwhile, Saturday’s Guardian Review devoted two and a half pages to Robert Macfarlane’s magpie-like gathering of those dialect words that enable a forensic specificity in describing nature. His article bemoans the impoverishment of nature vocabulary symptomised by the OJD word-cull. In today’s Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard interviews Macfarlane ahead of his forthcoming book Landmarks. Appleyard cites the “disastrously edited” Junior Dictionary as an example of “virtuality replacing real contact with real things.” Macfarlane tells him that some children are making and remaking our sense of place: “I want to send people out into the landscape and down into the dictionary.”
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