How would you describe yourself?
I am a writer. I have been a number of other things in my time, and still am, but that’s the job description I put on the insurance forms.
Looking back on my work over the last fifteen years or so, I think that my writing is primarily about two things: connection and loss. The connections are those between people and places, people and power, people and nature. Here in the West, we have built (or, more likely, accidentally slid into over time) a strange culture of disconnection: increasingly cut off from nature, from our history and provenance, from each other, from the wild reality outside the bubble of our civilisation. We have built a culture of consumer isolation, and I am haunted by the losses which this has brought about. I want to know what has been lost, what is left, what it means.
I have published two books of political non-fiction and one collection of poetry. Two novels sit unpublished and unloved on my hard drive. I am currently finishing a third, which I hope to publish in 2012. I have also written a lot of journalism and far too many blogs, and am co-founder of a literary and cultural movement, for which I wrote a manifesto and edit an ongoing series of books. More on all of this can be found scattered across this virtual space.
What’s your background?
Someone – not me, as it happens – has written a Wikipedia entry about me, which at the time of writing seems reasonably accurate and doesn’t contain any egregious insults. It seems a good place to start.
Do you do anything other than write?
I have ventured into other areas over the years, which tend to either grow from or feed into my writing. I have been involved in starting up and running a number of political and environmental campaigns, for example, including the Free West Papua Campaign which I co-founded in the early 2000s and which grew out of work I did in Papua for my first book.
My most recent venture is the Dark Mountain Project, a cultural and literary movement for an age of global disruption, which I launched in 2009 with Dougald Hine, and which is making waves across the world. Amongst other things, we produce collections of writing and art and hold events around the UK and the globe.
Taking all this into account, I don’t have a lot of what is so mechanistically referred to as ‘spare time’, but when I do I like to get away from my desk. Recently, after many years of practice, I have begun teaching courses in the use of the scythe. This is part of a wider personal project of learning and passing on land-based skills. I do this for many reasons: because I find that they provide a depth and engagement with the real world that talking into screens does not; because they connect me to my past and that of my homeland; because I love being outdoors and getting my hands dirty; because I think that the near future is going to be a lot more hands-on than the recent past; and I because I plan to get some land soon to bring up my family on. To this end, I am also learning green woodworking and permaculture, and teaching myself about horticulture, coppicing and smallholding. Badly and slowly in most cases, but it’s a start.
What are your politics?
Eurgh. I can feel my mind narrowing just thinking about this one. But I understand why people ask it, especially given my past writing. So let me try and answer.
I am left wing. That is to say that I am opposed to obscene concentrations of land, power and wealth, I instinctively favour the underdog and, like anyone else who is paying attention, I am anti-capitalist. Capitalism is the name applied to an economic and cultural machine which makes paper profits for agglomerations of private individuals by externalising its costs onto nature and the weaker bits of humanity. It functions by turning living things into dead things and calling this process ‘growth’. Capitalism is like a tank: it’s a death machine which feels safe and warm as long as you’re sitting inside it rather than in its way.
I am also right wing. That is to say that I am suspicious of ‘progress’ when that word is used to denote the onward march of the industrial machine (see above), and I think that a feeling for place and locality, the meaning of land and our space in history and human community are things worth paying close attention to. I am instinctively suspicious of the state, I don’t have a problem with private ownership of things (in principle and with limits) and I am suspicious of the increasingly rudderless liberal project, which seems to me, rather ironically, to be growing more illiberal as its ideology runs up against the buffers of contraction and decline.
Perhaps this just suggests that I’m confused, but I prefer to see it as a hint that things are changing fast, and we ought to keep up. Isms and self-definitions tend to bind the hands and limit the imagination. I’ve stopped worrying about them, and it feels good.
Can I use, reprint or share your work?
All of my writing is copyrighted, but I publish it on the web under a Creative Commons licence. You can copy, share and distribute it for free and without permission, as long as you attribute it to me and you don’t cash in on it without asking. The full terms of the licence are here . If you’d like to use my work in ways which aren’t covered by it, please drop me a line.
Could you come and speak at my event/festival/conference/campaign meeting?
I do a fair bit of public speaking, at events ranging from big literary festivals to local book groups, and it’s always a privilege to be invited. My forthcoming events calendar is here. I appreciate any interest in my work, so do get in touch if you’d like to discuss a potential event. I will, as a rule, ask for payment and travel expenses ’ this is how I make a living, after all. But I’m always open to discussion.
Do you have any advice for aspiring/young/beginning writers?
Some of my thoughts about the writer’s life can be found here.
Can I connect with you through social media?
There is a Paul Kingsnorth Facebook page which I administer and which you can ‘like’ if you want to be kept up to date with what I’m up to. I also now have a Twitter account, if you like that sort of thing.
How can I contact you?
All my contact details are here
Do you have a mailing list to which I can sign up, swiftly and easily, to receive occasional email updates about your work?
I’m glad you asked! You can do that here.
Set in Prociono and Linden Hill Italic, both by Barry Schwartz.
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