Writing Around The World

Jean McNeill, author of Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet, is an award-winning Canadian-born writer, the first-ever female director of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and a professionally qualified safari guide.

Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy 

Transcript

Peter This week we're talking to Jean McNeill, an award-winning Canadian-born travel writer who also happens to be a professionally qualified safari guide. She's been writer in residence twice in Antarctica. She's also the first-ever female director of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and the author of 15 books. Jean, welcome to the show.

Felice Welcome to our podcast, Jean. Really good to see you today.

Jean Thank you so much, both, for having me.

Peter Now, your latest book, Latitudes Encounters with a Changing Planet, is published this March, and it's fascinating. I'm not sure whether it's a memoir or an exemplary piece of travel writing. Certainly it's a superb piece of creative writing, that leaves one both exhilarated and depressed, if that's possible. It consists of a smorgasbord of seemingly random experiences that gives the reader a tantalising taste of adventure, albeit with a bitter aftertaste of climate change. Now, Jean, when and where did your lust for travel begin?

Jean Yes, thanks, that's a good question. I think it began in Nova Scotia, where I was brought up – in Canada. And actually the moment zero, I think, is in Latitudes; I'm pretty sure. It's just a short anecdote from when I was living in a city called Dartmouth, and we weren't in a good place then, basically, and I was overtaken by this gust of rank fear that I would never go anywhere, both literally and metaphorically, and I just felt very confined. I was a child of eight, nine, nine, ten years old, I'm not quite sure, but around that. I just thought, I have to do something about this. I have to see the world. So it came from that. I don't think I actually even understood the concept of travel, or that there were many other places to go, because I was so young, but it was something quite instinctive – so it wasn't based on reading the newspaper or watching television.

Felice You were brought up by your grandmother, am I right?

Jean So I was brought up by my grandparents, actually, grandmother and grandfather, on an island called Boundary Island, which is really interesting because it's in the middle of a salt sea system. So the lakes that surround it are 75% saline, 25% freshwater. Then it's surrounded by another island, Cape Breton Island, which is not very distant from the peninsula of Nova Scotia. But anyway, you get the picture: it's an island within an island attached to a peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean. I don't think there are very many formations like that in the whole of the world.

Felice Your grandmother, she sounds like a real character. She taught you to shoot a rifle, didn't she, at a very young age?

Jean: That was actually my great-grandma. They were all characters. People really were different then – they hadn't been pummelled into submission, really, by economic imperative and neoliberalism. They were very much themselves. She was quite a fearsome character. You wouldn't want to cross her. So she knew how to do everything; she was man and woman both. So we all learned pretty much everything we knew from her, one way or the other.

Felice And do you have any brothers and sisters?

Jean No, not from that experience, no.

Felice What was the first trip you ever took out of Nova Scotia?

Jean Gosh, that's a good question. I actually think, again, I was a little bit shaky on being brought up in Canada. The one thing that's very, very good is the education system is excellent about giving you a regional education, one that's really rooted in the landscape and the local culture. Canada's kind of obsessed with where you come from, because it's a gigantic country. So I knew a lot about the maritime provinces where I came from, but I think probably the first trip I ever did was to Edmonton, Alberta. That's quite a long way, that's about how many hours on a plane...something like six hours on a plane. So that was an eye-opener, because Canada is so big that you go to another province, especially one as far away as Alberta, and it’s a completely different...almost a different way of life, a different outlook, even though Canada's also quite uniform and there's a lot that holds it together – a lot more than that holds it together, actually, than the United States, in my view.

So that's the benefit of growing up in a gigantic country. But the other thing, when you do grow up in a gigantic country, it's quite hard to leave, especially if you don't have the means to do so, or your family doesn't have the means to do so. You might go across the border to the United States, you might go to Florida, but you're in this huge kind of geographical entity, and it's quite distinct from being brought up as a European when you go on a school trip to Belgium at quite young age or something like that.

Felice When did you first live in another country?

Jean Live properly, I suppose...I certainly visited places when I was 18 or 19 years old, including Britain, but I think this is the country I first lived in. So I came to live in Britain when I was 21. So it would be the United Kingdom, actually.

Peter Then you started to make a living out of travel writing?

Jean I did do some travel writing, yes, but most of the writing that I did...I didn't look at it that way, and I still don't. I think travel writing is fascinating, and there's some very, very good practitioners of it, both old school and more recent. I've always admired the work of effectively reportage, of the previous generation of Norman Lewis and Graham Greene and Martha Gellhorn, but I don't think of it as travel, myself. I did do some, I always went places and lived there, so stayed there with a real intent to get to know them. Because travel, by its very nature, suggests that you're just passing through, and it's actually very hard to write authoritatively about anywhere or anything, if that's what you're doing. So I first started writing some freelance journalism for travel and some travel guides for Rough Guides in the 1990s. So around 1993, '94, '95, '96, that kind of time.

Peter That's when you went to Costa Rica?

Jean That's right. At the time I was given the commission of writing the book solely on my own – the first Rough Guide to Costa Rica. And at the time, I think I might have been one of the very few women writers taking that kind of thing on for Rough Guides. They did have women travel writers, but probably not very many of them doing books on their own in Latin America. I might have been the first.

Felice How long did you live there for...to write the guidebook?

Jean I lived in Costa Rica...I couldn't live there full-time for various reasons, but I did spend good chunks of the year there. I think from 1993 till about 1996 or '97. So I had to come and go for all kinds of reasons, including just logistical reasons. But I did live in Costa Rica for large chunks of time during those years. The thing about writing a guidebook is...nobody tells you this...but it's perhaps clever, cleverer people than myself...took along a friend or family member. But at the time, while I did have friends who came out to visit me and went around with me, I did almost all of that book, well, probably all of it myself. That means a lot of time on your own. I welcomed that, because it means that you have to be very good if you get stuck in some mud bath horror, you've got to get yourself out. Or if you drive into a river that turns out to be deeper, then you get very good four-wheel drive skills very quickly.

I also thought that for me, travelling around alone as a woman was a risk at the time, but it enlivens you. It definitely wakes you up; you have to be extremely observant. So that helps the book that you produce, because many of your fellow travellers, those people who come after you with the book in their hands, they're not going to have a safety net either. So it was a lonely experience, and I suppose that any time one is moving through space and time for that matter, you have to count on the fact that you are going to be on your own. You can't take an entire entourage, your family and your dog, and familiarity. Generally speaking, one can't take those things with you, so you're exposed to space and time in a different way. I suppose that's what I was having, at the time, a sort of premonition about, and that my life has turned out to be more or less that.[caption id="attachment_3517" align="aligncenter" width="2500"] Lewa, Kenya. Photo: © Jean McNeill[/caption]

Felice You became a safari guide. Was that immediately afterwards?

Jean No. That was a long time afterwards, actually. So I did my professional qualifications in 2012 and 2013, roughly, maybe 2011 to 2013. And that wasn't entirely deliberate. It was really interesting because I was actually researching what became a novel called Fire on the Mountain, which is set in an unnamed country. But it's a sort of structural experience, it's a post-colonial experience. So I didn't name the country, but it's clearly Southern Africa. I knew that to write that book, I would need quite in-depth knowledge of a particular landscape, and that was the whole of Southern Africa. So I enrolled on a course with that in mind. Then I thought, Okay, I'm going to do this for real, I'm going to actually pursue this and try to get these qualifications and they're really, really hard. It's like joining the Army; it's one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Felice It sounded like it. With your target practice on a pretend lion and things like that, and lots of exciting stories you told. And at one stage you actually go running and see some lions.

Jean Yes. If you spend any time in the African bush, particularly walking, if you're training to be a walking guide, walking is really genuinely very dangerous for yourself, for the animals if an encounter or a conflict should happen, for anybody who you're in charge of, it's actually incredibly dangerous. And one does see lions, and yes, you don't want to see a black mamba very often in this life, really, the fewer you see of them, the better. But they're there and you have to be prepared to confront it if it happens. So there's nothing unusual about seeing lions while walking. Seeing lions while running is also...it happens. But running in the bush is something generally one mustn't do, but you can do it under very specific circumstances. I don't mean to make light of that, because it's actually very dangerous. But if you know what you're doing and if the people around you know that's what you're doing, it's possible.

Felice When you ran past two young lions, how did you feel? You must have been terrified.

Jean Oh, I think there were three, actually. No, they were quite far away, they were a good 300m away. I don't know, on that particular occasion I just thought, Yes, okay, I see them, but I was in a position where I could run into a structure very quickly. So I just kept my eyes on them and it reminded me a lot of when I went running in Svalbard. This isn't in the book, but I spent a summer in Longyearbyen, in Svalbard, and there in the summer the issue is that there's 1,500 people and 5,000 polar bears. And the polar bears can come into the community in the summer, although generally they stay on the outskirts. Going running in Svalbard, you really do have to have eyes in the back of your head, because you can't outrun a polar bear and it could go horribly wrong. But it didn't, so I've been lucky. I must admit I have gone running in some really quite not-to-be-recommended, don't-do-this-at-home kind of places.

Felice What other places have you been running that were scary or dangerous?

Jean Well, I think Svalbard again, people do go running in Longyearbyen, and it's okay, you're not about to get eaten. But I don't want to over-dramatise this: running on airstrips in Antarctica is also not particularly dangerous, but the cold can be quite penetrating. And running anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa is a really bad idea because you look like prey. So to a predator, anything that runs – lion, leopard, even cheetah at a stretch, anything that runs, it can automatically trigger a chain reaction. Also, you might run into an elephant or you might run into buffalo, which are very good at hiding. So it's really not a good idea. I suppose those are the places that I've run that are actually dangerous: airstrips in Central America when the pilots were possibly landing, so you have to keep an eye out, and there's somebody on the ground with a VHF radio telling you to get the hell off the airstrip. But in the tropics and in the wilderness, there's very few places to run, so airstrips actually become a lifesaver for runners.

Felice You've also been...going to another part of the world, a writer in residence in The Falklands and Antarctica.

Jean Yes. I have had official residences on ships, ocean-going ships in Greenland, in the open ocean itself, the Atlantic Ocean, the length of the Atlantic Ocean, Antarctica, the Falkland Islands and Longyearbyen, actually, in Svalbard. I think some of these residences are official in that you have to be programmed in by a scientific organisation or a government. And some of them I didn't quite engineer them myself, but I made them happen, I guess.

The Falkland Islands was one of them. The Falkland Islands is a really fascinating place, landscape-wise, every everything really, its history, its human settlement, the people there, it's, I think, hands down, one of the most unusual and bizarre places that I've been. Maybe I haven't been to enough really super-remote islands, you never know, maybe Tasmania is like that. But almost everything that happens there, it just makes your head spin and think, Where am I?  Who am I? Who are these people? What are we doing here? One feels very alive there, but also very, almost like a hoax, like you're a character in speculative fiction.

Felice But what made you go from Africa to Antarctica or The Falklands? How come there was this change? Was it soon afterwards or a lot longer?

Jean No, I think, broadly speaking, I spent a lot of my 20s in the tropics, in the American tropics. So the whole of the Americas, South America and Central America. Then 30s, I spent time in the polar regions researching my books, and I wrote, eventually published, four books out of being in the Arctic and the Antarctic. Then very laterally and somewhat mistakenly, I was 40 before I pitched up on the African continent, and I really spent the last 15 years living and working there as much as I'm able, because, again, somewhat latterly I suppose, I found a home – or a kind of home – certainly a lot of sub-Saharan African countries are where I feel at best in the world, myself, although they're very difficult countries and life is extremely hard for Africans.

So that's roughly the division – one didn't lead to the other. I think, like any writer, some writers, of course, they write to fill a gap in the market and they're very clever and they can see a sort of economic opportunity. But I just write to follow my interests, and some people say obsessions. I don't think it's quite that because obsessions is quasi pathological, but certainly my interest and my sense of mission. The fact is, if you put all of those landscapes and areas of the world together, you get a sense of more delicate or fragile areas of the world, the wildernesses, the places that are most under threat. If you go from the Brazilian Amazon, where I've spent time to the semi-arid parts of Namibia or arid parts of Namibia, all of these areas, and all of those in between the two that I've just mentioned, are like everywhere in the world, I suppose – under threat from a huge destabilising influence, which includes people like me getting on planes and pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

I happen to work on climate change from a young age. I was working at Friends Of The Earth, and we did the very first national campaign in 1996, I think it was, on climate change as an environmental threat, and it was known to be a kind of scientific or technocratic issue before then. But generally speaking, the discourse of the day was much more about environmental degradation, plastics and landscapes being ruined by tourism and so on. But I've been working on and thinking about climate change from a very long time. And I've seen, of course, with this sort of sense of static horror – also I'm implicated in this – I am one of those people who are destroying the planet. I've seen the whole issue spiral completely out of control and the planet change in my lifetime.

Latitudes, the working title was Anthropocene Diary, and I started writing it as a diary of the anthropocene, what it feels like to live in the now and the now...when is that? Let's call it the last 30-ish years. Although I myself have been alive for 55. Nobody would consider that title for it, no publisher or my agent. Nobody wants to really engage with the word anthropocene outside of academic circles; it's quite a forbidding, cold word. The theory was nobody would buy the book. So this is a problem when you're a writer because you think, Oh, no, but that's been the title in my head for years. Now I have to come up with a completely different title.

Felice I know the feeling. I wrote a book two years ago and my publisher changed the title, so a title that will sell the book, rather than the one that was in my head. So it's odd when that happens.

Jean Yes, I think, and it's a powerful visual symbol or metaphor. My own suspicion of climate change, which other people who are better informed than I am, who are philosophers and scientists, I think perhaps put it better. But I would say that our brains, while they're incredible computing machines, and human beings are an intelligent species, our brains don't seem to be able to deal with something that is everywhere, always, all the time, forever dispersed – this notion, this grand, huge, overarching reality called climate.

So people are very good at confronting events and dealing with immediate threats, but not processes And our civilisation, basically, I'm sure you both have thought about this before, and this will be news to no one, but my feeling is that our civilisation is too implicated in processes of greed effectively, that profit particularly, we're aligned to a model which we can't turn the ship around fast enough, I'm afraid. Another baleful metaphor is the Titanic – you can see the iceberg in front of you, but a big ship like the Titanic going 21 knots, I know this stuff from having been at sea, the kinetics are just against you. You can't actually shift something that big that quickly. I think we could, but the those people who are – and there are not many there are probably I don't know, let's call it 20,000 people in the whole world, or 25,000 people – who have the kind of power and the resources to put a stop to it, including the oil companies and those people aligned to them, are simply not going to do it. They're not going to do it, because they can't imagine anything different and they will not give up their privilege. So we human beings, our civilisation, we are the Titanic.

Peter Very true and very depressing.

Jean I don't know it has to be depressing. I think it's just very exemplary. It teaches us who we are, what we are, what are we really? We're a kind of plague upon the planet, and that's very hard for humans. We're all very, I think, susceptible to that moral injury. 'I didn't ask to do this. I'm just living my life. I don't want to be a parasite. I don't want to be a plague. I don't want to think that negatively.' But unless you actually face up to what you are, and what we are collectively, then we're just in denial and deluded – and we're going to go down even faster.

Peter Like you, we step on planes knowing we're doing something wrong.

Jean I think it really is a Faustian bargain. I I've thought about it in the following way: I need to know the world. I'm here, not for very long. None of us are. And if I can bear witness as a writer, as a consciousness, and put something back into the conversation and the discussion, that is valuable, then I think that that's how I look at it. I don't approve of what I'm doing, but I take myself back to being that child that I was in Dartmouth, in Nova Scotia. There's no way I can just decide to sit still and take trains for the rest of my life, because I need to know the world, because I might be able to do something about all of this.

Felice I just want to ask you about your writing, because you are a professor and director of creative writing at UEA. And what do you enjoy about that job?

Jean My students, that is an honest answer, because the program is justifiably famous. It really is a very good program and it has helped, I hope we've had a role to play in helping some very, extremely well-known and talented writers make their way into the world of literary culture. I could name names, I'll name a few names, but there's Katsuya Ishiguro, there's Ian McEwan, there's Tracy Chevalier, there's Tash Aw, Ayobami Adebayo. I could go on. But the fact is it's not really about famous people. I think the program is nurturing writers to achieve their inner vision. And so the students, because the program is very well regarded, we get applications from very talented writers, people who already can write extremely well.

So working with them on their writing is really rewarding. I think that's the thing; it's the programme which obviously predates me. I'm the caretaker of it. But it comes with its own mystique, and I think the students really respond to that. They feel chosen, which they have been, because we have quite a rigorous selection process. I feel anointed even, I suppose they feel enabled. So yes, and I think the program's profile allows me to represent it and represent the university and even represent literature more generally, and fiction writing more generally in the culture, in a way that I don't think other academic jobs would allow that. So it's a fantastic job to have.

Peter How do you manage to fit all that in with your travelling?

Jean Well, I don't know the answer, I don't, but it's really hard. I don't know how I've managed to do the work that I've done for Latitudes, although a lot of the research had actually been done, I suppose, prior to starting writing it. But the thing about academic jobs, which is good, is that when you're not teaching, when you're not there in semester, you have a bit more leeway than most jobs, so that you can go away. So we have a research allocation, we can go and do our research, we're on research contracts. In fact, it's the publish or perish model. If you don't publish, you're out. So the fact is there's an incentive to go and do your research. Sometimes that doesn't mean going to another country, so that's part of the deal.

Peter And that gives them funds for research. You get funds for research, which is hugely important to be able to do that.

Jean We get a small amount, actually a small amount actually, most of the time one ends up bankrolling it yourself, to a degree anyway. But you certainly get the legitimacy to do that. Finding the time is hard, and I guess that anyone who has a job or responsibilities would say the same. It's only people who are quite wealthy or retired comfortably who can, I think this day and age, afford to travel a lot or really enjoy travel.

Peter But I think all writing is very badly funded like that. It's very hard to very hard for most people to travel. It's so expensive to travel now.

Jean Yes, absolutely. I and I think what you say about books and publishing, and the way that the industry has changed very much in favour of the large corporations and the publishers themselves. Writers have been treated pretty badly, actually, by the digitisation. There's other very good things that have happened in publishing, but yes, I agree with you. So the model itself is against it. And again, if you think of the classic travel writers or reportage writers, there's a lot of overlap between the two. Many of them were journalists. Many of them worked for the intelligence services, or they were in the war and the army, and they got to see – like. Norman Lewis, for example – they got to see the world that way.

But I think there's always these travel writers who are modern-day pilgrims, I suppose, pilgrims in the wilderness. Jan Morris was that, Dervla Murphy, people who are really quite intrepid and they just are good writers. They could write about the wallpaper on somebody's living room wall and it would be fascinating. So they went out into the world, on this mission, it was also a much more it was post-war era, we had to reconstruct ourselves, we had to understand what had gone wrong and make peace. So a lot of the travel writing of that era was, I think, roughly in that vein or in that enlightenment project.

Felice So another way of earning money, writing about travel, is what you did – being a writer in residence, did someone finance that when you were in the Falklands and Antarctica?

Jean They financed it to the point that I was able to get there. So they underwrote the costs. In the case of the Antarctic Fellowship, that was really extremely well-designed because it was Arts Council England with the British Antarctic Survey, and it only ran for about ten years, I think, possibly eight, eight, ten years. So we those of us who are artists and writers– and generally at the time, for the length of the fellowship they put into either visual artists or visual artists and a writer into the Antarctic every year. The costs of getting there are astronomical. Your body on a plane, if you fly in is, I don't know these days how much would that be worth? £30,000? I'm just guessing, but a lot of money. And the taxpayer pays. So I think one has to take into account that they're doing you a favour just by putting you there. Then we were given a small stipend. But I'd have a lot more money in my bank account, let's put it this way, if over the past 30 years I had been fully funded. There was there's been nothing of the kind. So all like my safari guide qualifications, I funded those, I funded all the travel with that went with them. My university research budget does sometimes support things, but not something like that. It's too big and too expensive. So yes, that's all I can say is I don't know what I'd have. I'd have a larger house, I'd have a trampoline, I'd have a dinghy, camels, you name it. I'd have a lot more things if I hadn't done all this stuff.

Felice You've written 15 books. Latitudes is your most recent one. They're all travel related, are they?

Jean They're not. Actually, no. Again, I don't really think about it as travel. For example, my Polar regions books, they were written on the back of four or five years of intense research and engagement. Yes, you have to travel to get there, but they're not about Travel with a capital T. I don't think I've written any travel books apart from the Rough Guide, that really, if you want to call it travel. Travel guides are a specific class of of travel writing.

I wish I'd been a travel writer, in some ways. Like I said to you earlier, I've always admired travel writing, and there are some people now who do it extremely well, but I think it's a very challenging mode in which to write. Also now that travel has become quite questionable, who has the resources to travel? What is your class? What is your race? What is your sense of self that often goes hand-in-hand with those things? It's a sort of vaguely neo-colonialist way to look at the world. It's easily, I think, illegitimate. But on other hand, as I said to you, one has to know the world and allow others to know the world. So I think it's a very honourable pursuit, even if the post-colonial politics behind it are highly suspicious.

Yes, I wouldn't say I'm a travel writer – eight of my books are fiction, novels and short stories. So I write about a variety of things, but the one thing that is the constant is a kind of interest in, maybe fixation on, how we are formed ourselves by landscapes, not by nation state. I think the nation state is overblown, and it's a dangerous concept in many ways, but not by nation state, but by the land that we engage with or grow up in. That's one thing that really interests me.

Peter You mentioned 'place writing' rather than 'travel writing'.

Jean It's become known now as 'place writing' and 'place-based writing', and I think that's right. It's a bit of a chilly category, and it sounds very sort of academic and stiff, but I think it is about putting...because most fiction certainly puts the human being, the human consciousness, the conflicts and tensions that we have...there in the foreground. And the place is often extremely important and generative. And the story itself, if you think of Annie Proulx's famous short story, Brokeback Mountain – yes, it's about Jack and Ennis, but it's also the landscape, and if the landscape weren't there, there would be no story. So I think we're just reconfiguring in our own civilisation, our own minds and our own kind of aesthetic progress now, as writers in the art form of writing. We're just realigning what's important, and some writers are now putting people in the background and the place in the foreground. I think that's right; that's what has to happen.

Peter Well, it's been fascinating talking to you. Tell us about how we get hold of your book.

Jean In all good bookshops, on Amazon, or directly from the publisher, which is Barbican Press.

Felice Could you tell us the title again?

Jean Yes, it's called Latitudes: Encounters with the Changing Planet.

Felice Do you have a website where people can find out more about you?

Jean I do, yes, there's two. There's my own website which is www.JeanMcNeil.co.uk and there's the University of East Anglia website. If you just go to the Creative Writing department, you'll find me there.

Felice That sounds great.

Peter Thank you very much for talking to us, and we wish you the best of luck with the book.

Jean Well, thank you so much for having me. That's fantastic.

Felice That's all for now. If you've enjoyed the show, please share this episode with at least one other person! Do also subscribe on Spotify, i-Tunes or any of the many podcast providers – where you can give us a rating. You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any of the many podcast platforms. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We'd love you to sign up for our regular emails to peter@actionpackedtravel.com. By the way, we're listed in the Top 20 Midlife Travel Podcasts.

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