Read the Winner of the Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize

Labour, landscape, and the primal power of place.

Joanna Mary Wolfarth, winner of the 2024 Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize

Over the next several months, I will be publishing some of the longlisted essays to the Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize for you to enjoy. My hope is that you’ll also be inspired by, as we gear up to launching the prize for 2025.

Make sure you’re subscribed to be the first to know about our judge for this year and when we open for entries.

This week, I’m thrilled to share ‘Imprints’, the winning entry by

Joanna Wolfarth

, which takes us on a journey through the profound experience of giving birth to her first son, interwoven with the rugged beauty of West Kerry's coastline.

Our 2024 judge, literary agent Sarah Williams, felt this was a tour de force essay, saying:

“From the very first lines, where the pulse of the narrator's birth contractions act as a kind of primal, natural heartbeat; the depth of the voice and the exquisite phrasing did not leave me for days. The beauty of the West Kerry coastline sprung off the page, and the intricate threading of this natural landscape with the act of childbirth was incredibly moving. I was immersed in this story and was reminded of my own mental escape routes that are provided by nature and how these become ingrained in us even when we have long departed that particular space. The meshing of memory and anticipation in Imprints and its perfect narrative arc within two different time periods and polar opposite environments was simply stunning.”

Following the essay, you'll find a short written Q&A with Joanna, exploring her creative process, the inspiration behind her work, and the challenges she overcame to craft this deeply moving narrative.

Joanna will be joining me on the Wild Muse Podcast in March.

Now, I invite you to immerse yourself in this stunning piece!

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Imprints

by Joanna Wolfarth

It is midnight. I’m at home, my forehead pressed deep into the rough nap of the sofa as another contraction swells up from my womb. My baby is coming.

It is also a late summer afternoon and I am climbing to the ruined fort. Ahead of me, over the cliff edge, I hear the roar of the open ocean. My baby is coming.

Bone cradling bone and my body, like rice paper, is dissolving into an untameable tide. I pull in a deep breath, bracing myself for the steep ascent that lies ahead as another contraction begins at the base of my spine. The force of it burns a path down my thighs and up to my heart. From somewhere on the wind-scoured grass behind me I hear my husband and his slow, steady count, beating a rhythm of inhales and exhales.

In labour, the ruined fort that was once my husband’s childhood retreat has become my own refuge. With each contraction, I rise and retreat along that mountain edge towards the fort, as if on a funicular, precisely timed and running like clockwork. Up for a count of six, down to a count of eight.

Many hours later my child was pulled from me in a windowless hospital room in south London. But he was also born by the sea, as my knuckles whitened against purple rock, my knees cushioned by tussocks of thrift . With each surge, I was carried up the cliff edge where granite slices into the sea at Ireland’s most westerly edge. As the force waned, I descended back down the headland, held by the folds of Ballydavid Head, West Kerry. The near-symmetrical inlet at Feohanagh was beneath me, waters flowing into Smerwick Harbour and then out into the vast Atlantic that beats the island as if it were a rug.

For a time - who knows precisely how long; the elastic morass of labouring - I existed in two places at once: my darkened living room and this very specific, shimmering landscape.

I have only walked to that fort a handful of times in my life, yet this was where my mind determined to flee, taking my heaving body with it. Powerful forces dislodged memories with wild vividness, just as I’ve watched hungry waves devour the soft cliffs that edge Feohanagh Bay. Still, the clarity with which the sense of this place came back to me surprised me even then: I was there on the slopes, my fingers tracing white lichen on serrated rock faces. There are cracks in the West Kerry coastline here where the magic seeps in, just as there were cracks in my bounded self, as my own borders became porous and flesh and bone opened.

My husband was there with me too and not just with his quiet counting. Feohanagh was his home and, as a youth, he would be inconsolable when, at the end of each long summer, he was wrenched back eastwards, across the sea and to the flat suburban landscape of the Home Counties. For him, this place was a timeless constant in an otherwise shifting world that, like a widening pelvis, cleaved loved ones and places.

Why did this place become so firmly lodged in my memory? Why did I return at my most vulnerable, my most primal? Was it the irrepressible peace that came over my husband when he first led me away from the hairpin bend of the road and along a stuttering boreen that took us towards the sea and then up and up towards the ruined fort? That trip came so early on in our relationship and was perhaps something of a test. Just as I had laid out my hopes for eventual parenthood, he needed to confirm I could handle the soft rain and hard coastlines.

As it was, from the moment we left the tiny airport at Tralee on that first trip, I angled myself both forwards into the smoky haze emanating from the driver’s seat and sideways into the passenger window, desperate to take it all in. I drank in the scattergun introduction to West Kerry, delivered in lyrical monologues by the man who would become my father-in-law and who was never without a cigarette or story. We’ll go to the creek, he told us, where Saint Brendan and a small group of monks set sail in the 6th century, striking out in search of the Garden of Eden. They made it somewhere, but where we can't be sure. We do know eventually they made it home.

I remember that drive from the airport with the same crystal clarity that came to me in my labours. At the dogleg turn, just past the sweep of Inch Beach, my future father-in-law took us forward by centuries, telling us of the many who later also made the journey west, leaving their famine-stricken families in search of opportunity. How history and geography conspired to shape the landscape and its communities today. How the landscape, like my own body, is a palimpsest of love and loss.

Stories of arrival and departure are common in West Kerry. The peninsula is so narrow there is nowhere else to go once you are there, except out into the sea or back the way you came.

But at least that is two possible directions of travel.

Five years after that car ride, there was only one way for us to travel. And the peninsula came back to me, unbidden. This was not what I’d rehearsed on the advice of birthing books and podcasts, which suggested gentle waves or a flower opening and closing by the beat of the sun. In reality, neither petals nor tropical waters matched the slow, violent schismatising of those labouring hours. This was not a peaceful blooming. So I found myself seeking the soft buoyant bounce of moss and thrift, the verdant fields that - if you know where to look - betray millennia of history. I sought the salted whip of cold Atlantic spray.

In the laborious abridged memory, I hadn’t the vision to recall the way our first walk began at the shoreline, at the white house of childhood, overlooking a beautiful tangle of a beach, carpeted in seaweed. On that day, we crept up to the windows and peered in. But my husband and I were looking at two different kitchens, me unable to see what he saw superimposed on the broken floor tile and dusty windowsill. The air was thick with soft smells of the shore, salty and metallic, grassy and lightly animalic, sometimes a waft of something more putrid. Across the bay, our eyes traced the outline of the An Triúr Deirféar, a trio of sisterly peaks that hurry the landscape out to the sea.

We continued our walk out onto flatter moorland, where uneven clods of grass threatened our stability, until we began our climb, ignoring the wires that separated field from cliff. Edging closer to the brink, we looked down to the grey slabs of stone reaching out across the water and rocks shot through with bands of pale quartz: Kerry diamonds. From here the curve of the land gives the illusion of clear passage, making the clefts that slice into the headland invisible. Kittiwakes gathered beneath us, readying themselves for a winter at sea, fussing and noisy. As the terrain grew steeper, my throat constricted and my tight quads resisted each upward stretch. We had spent our evenings rolling thin cigarettes outside pubs in Dingle. I paused frequently to catch breath, under the pretence of surveying the heights of Mount Brandon that roll out to a patchwork of irregular fields below us, each demarcated by a low stone wall.

The Gulf Stream blessed my first trip that late October. We rolled up our jeans and let the heather brush against bare skin. Later, once we reached the fort, we peeled off our tops and wondered what pale flesh might look like from the farms below.

Now I wonder again: why did I travel here when poised on the cusp of life and what felt like death? Why West Kerry? Were my husband’s memories, stored within his DNA, leaching from our child into me? For nine months my baby and I had been locked in an intricate and invisible dialogue. Before I even knew of their existence, they had been sending bubbles of their DNA into my bloodstream, interlopers which could not only alter the function of my bodily organs but lodge themselves permanently within me. My child was already part of my husband, who was a part of this landscape. Me, a monstrous chimera, not knowing where my own self and memory end and that of others begins.

If not something lodged in our bodies, what drew me back to that place? Was it the angle of that ascent which fit so precisely with the sensations of my contracting body? Was it the shape of the declivity at the summit of the ruined fort, which cradled two reclining bodies so perfectly? The ground we lay on that sunny afternoon is made of the very same rock found on the other side of that great expanse of ocean. The earth once ripping apart like a piece of paper, edges torn and lifted. Now, it is also where mother and child came apart, our own jagged edges not so visible, the shock of our parting still raw beneath the surface.

That precious walk from Feohanagh had been wrapped neatly away in my mind until, on a night of a crescent moon, it unspooled, again and again, opening me to the sea and releasing my child towards the cliff edge of home.

AUTHOR NOTE: The ‘ruined fort’ to which I travelled back and forth to in my labours is actually the remains of a 19th-century signal tower which sits on Ballydavid Head on the northern edge of the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula. The tip of this thirty-mile finger of land is mainland Ireland’s most westerly point. As children, my husband’s family referred to the ruins as a ‘fort’ and that is now forever its name.

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‘Bone Cradling Bone’: A Short Q&A with Joanna Mary Wolfarth

What inspired you to write your piece, and how did you approach capturing the interplay between the human experience and the natural world in your narrative?

The piece is the true story of giving birth to my first son, but the writing of it started with playing with phrasing and liking the imagery of 'bone cradling bone.' It's how I recall that part of labour feeling. I'd been reading a lot of nature writing that involved people—primarily men—going off on extraordinary adventures, conquering mountains, or exploring distant caves. I wanted to think about giving birth as a comparable feat of physical, spiritual, and emotional endurance and exploration. To think about how the natural world is not separate from us. The West Kerry landscape had, unwittingly, become such a vivid part of my birthing experience and from there, the mirrors between physical landscape and human experience came easily.

What challenges did you face in crafting your entry, and how did you overcome them to create such a vivid and evocative piece?

The different temporal registers were difficult to arrange in a way that allowed the reader to orient themselves, and the opening paragraphs of the original drafts were too opaque—such that it wasn't clear I was even talking about giving birth. I first shared a draft with a writing group a couple of years ago who pointed out that it was too oblique but had potential. And then, more recently, I shared a draft with my Writing Bedfordshire gang, who gave such useful critiques. They helped me see how I needed to make the jumps between present and past tense more rhythmic and systematic, and also separate out some of the 'factual' stuff. A lot of that history was deleted or condensed, and I experimented with footnotes. There was A LOT of cutting and pasting and rearranging until I was happy with the piece.

What role does nature play in your life and creative process, and how do you think immersing oneself in nature can influence storytelling?

It's more and more important now as I realise how much I need to focus attention on nature for the sake of my mental wellbeing. My children are the teachers in this respect; the focus and excitement they have seeing a blackbird, or a frog in the pond, or a dandelion clock helps me to slow down. Motherhood—from birth to breastfeeding to fierce hormones—made me confront my own animal self too and, after I had my first baby, my sense of perspective shifted. I was less afraid of what other people might think and more driven to return to the creative writing I'd loved since I was a child. There are so many ways nature can inspire us, but I don't want to think about it in purely extractive terms, so I ask myself: what can writing and storytelling do for our planet?

Please do share your own thoughts on the themes explored in Joanna’s essay, or perhaps you’d like to reflect on your own experiences with nature and personal endurance.