“Sometimes I’ll finish a session and think, ‘That was rubbish, I’m rubbish,’ and then come back the next day and realise there’s actually something there.”
In this conversation, I chat with Faye Keegan, winner of the Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize 2025 about surviving rejection and allowing a piece to take shape over numerous drafts.
Before ‘Unmoored’ became a prize-winning piece, it went through many edits and moments of doubt. Faye speaks with striking clarity about how distance shaped her relationship to this piece, and how the writing shifted once the experience was no longer raw, but something she could enter and step back from with care.
“Writing from the scar means I can enter those emotions, but I can also step back out again.”
‘Unmoored’ won the Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize, but this conversation isn’t really about winning. It’s about what happens before and after recognition. We speak openly about rejection, self-doubt, and that familiar, aching question many writers carry: does anyone care? Faye shares how this piece began life as part of a rejected book proposal, and how the same work that once felt overlooked later found its place.
Together, we move gently through the writing process itself. Titles, first sentences, instinct, perfectionism, and the way nature changes how you experience time because there’s a slowing, but also an awareness of cycles and seasons.
This is a conversation for writers who want reassurance without platitudes.
“It’s the difference between lowering yourself in on a secure rope and just diving in and struggling to get out.”
If this conversation resonates, you’re warmly invited to like, comment, or share it. Those small gestures help this episode travel beyond this space and reach the writers who might need it most, while also supporting the Wild Muse community to keep growing.
