This is my first post as tidesandlines.com rather than emilywillisblog.wordpress.com.
^ After what seemed like a veeeeery long weekend going back and forth with WordPress and Dreamhost to get this website properly migrated without losing all of my content…. > I’m finally back online and able to focus on reviving this blog!
Migrating a website from .wordpress.com to an owned domain
What made me want to start again? I’ve mostly been focusing on other projects in the past year (I have been saving for a mortgage, volunteering for an arts organisation, had my first collection of poetry published in 2019, and have just completed a first draft of a novel, amongst other pursuits!) I’ve kept writing, but none of it seemed to make it onto the blog. In the past, I posted about the effects of digital technologies on social interaction, and about creative writing as a process. But I found, over time, that the blog became a kind of repository for a deluge of nervous energy surrounding trying to find time to write, and frustration with the logistical, technological, and self-promotional crap that is sometimes necessary to further one’s career and connections, but which detracts (for me at least) from the actual creative process. I needed a clean slate – new domain name, new web layout, new niche.
How to choose a website niche?
Moving forwards, I want the blog to have a new focus; rather than serving as a sort epistolary relationship with a void, I want to write specifically about walking and its relationship with writing. It feels as if this keeps surfacing in my writing and finding ways to make itself know. Looking back at my undergrad degree for example, I realise I wrote essays on the symbolism topography in Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and on flaneurie in Kate Tempest’s Let them Eat Chaos, during my MA. My poetry collection Lizzie on the Rocks is a psychogeographical exploration of the North East coastlines and local history, where objects which wash upon the beach act as spring boards for narratives about different characters.
Why walking?
Walking has always had a kind of catharsis for me. Even all the hills in the Lakes we were forced to climb on very rainy summer holidays as a child – there was an invigorating feeling there, and I always slept well afterwards. As a student, walks turned to biking because you could get back from a night out more quickly and more safely (depending on how much alcohol had been consumed) on a vintage road bike that used to be your grandma’s – huffing and puffing over the roots of trees on the river path as the yellow lights receded behind and the lights on the millennium bridge blinked in the distance. Then, during the MA the walking became a thing again – mostly to escape the greyness of Earlham and the rat-infested house. The Norfolk coastline is an altogether desert kind of coast – at Wells-Next-the-Sea you have to walk a mile across the strand when the tide is out before you even hit the water. I had some bitter walks there – in the snow and after storms, and never came across another soul. When writing my book last year, I walked about 80 miles up and down the North East coast, trying to let the coal under my feet and the industrial waste and the scars in the cliff rocks sink in and write itself. I like to ramble in the dales sometimes too – highlights of the last year have been Simonside in Northumberland and the Sleighholme mountains in Ireland, and pine-studded strays near Dunbar. City-combing has its appeal of course too – but in a different way.
How can walking help with lockdown?
During lockdown, I have found it surprisingly difficult (for an introverted person) to be at peace with myself in my home. The extra free time I have from not being able to visit anyone and not having to commute I have for no apparent reason filled with extra work for my job, and thrown myself with abandon into various creative activities, blogs, classes, online poetry readings, books, courses, and a general exhausting timetable of self-improvement, when I could have instead taken an opportunity to rest. Walking has been a sort of lighthouse in all this – I have a 2 mile walk every night straight after work, no matter the weather, no matter what kind of day I’ve had, no matter when tea will be ready.
The lockdown route
My route takes me down the beck and through a wooded area of ash and maple, which opens out onto Gosforth golf course and circles round behind the horse fields where there are often deer just beyond the hedges. I’ve had to stop feeding the horse as the owners don’t like it, which is hard as it does not come to be stroked anymore and instead fixes me with a resentful look. The sides of the path are incredibly overgrown since my guess is it hasn’t been high on the priority list for the council right now to come and cut them, and bramble and hawthorn, nettle and queen anne’s lace, poppies and daisies and dog roses abound, in pleasant tangles. There’s also a beautiful lilac little flower – I have no idea what it is. All apps fail to identify it and it does not appear in the wild flower book. It shall remain a mystery.
The route then circles back down a cycle path and along the edges of the estates and I cut it short sometimes to come down the cul de sac and row of houses behind ours, before cutting down the snicket on the end. I have been surprised how out of breath you can get walking on the flat if you do it at pace. And I like the circularity. I like that arriving back home you re-enter it as an evening space, rather than a work one. I like that the brain is really that simple. I like that it is the lockdown loop. The knowing where you will end up and exactly what you’ll see on the way.
Choosing a website name
Coastal and riverside landscapes seem to weave their way back into my work all the time – even when I consciously try to write about something else. Like the lockdown loop for instance. I find myself drawn to becks and streams – clambering over fallen trees across rivers to be closer to the water, and ending up tangled and suspended in brambles.
Why fight this in my writing? Water has a unique relationship with the human body; Rachel Carson in her wonderfully lyrical part marine-biological, part poetical work entitled The Sea Around Us – said water was here on the planet before anything else and will likely be here long afterwards. There’s something simple and right about that.
Maybe that’s what the pull is standing on the edge of an ocean – a sort of anti-evolutionary desire to go back to the before – the womb of all wombs, if you like. It’s like standing on the edge of yourself and history and looking into something that feels very infinite. And the tide itself – that movement – it’s aeortal, sexual, temporal, spatial. It’s everything. Writing for me is really a way to try and articulate things that seem beyond representation, in lines on the page. They’ll never quite touch the texture or the colour or the glitter or the smell of the tide lines on the shore. But that seems right and natural. The sea makes perpetual poetry, and I’ll try to make my own small tidelines too.
