Charged Landscape

Hello, I’m Wendy Pratt; author and poet. I wrote a memoir, The Ghost Lake, about my experience of living on an ancient extinct glacial lake called Paleolake Flixton in North Yorkshire, and how I found my place in a long line of lake ancestry going back to the palaeolithic. I also wrote a poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to the memoir.

This is a post for paid subscribers. It contains the poem and prose extracts we looked at in this month’s Dawn and Dusk Chorus zoom writing sessions, and the writing prompts we worked to.

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The next Dawn and Dusk Chorus sessions are on the 22nd September 7-8am and 6-7pm UK time

Thanks so much for coming along to this month’s Dawn and Dusk chorus sessions. So often creativity is forced like rhubarb, but I’m a strong believer that good writing happens in the quiet spaces, in the places in which we have time to think and experience and absorb. Thanks for being with me as part of that process.

This month we peeled back the past and explored connection to self through ancient landscapes. It was a joy to sit in the zoom room writing along with you while the starlings flocked to the elder outside my window and the shadows fell across my desk. We started the session with this magnificent, slightly unnerving poem by Philip Pacey: