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In The Green Hill, Sophie Pierce writes about the sudden death of her son Felix with an aching and gentle honesty. This is a book that will be a great comfort to those who need it.” Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth.

Continuing our series of conversation with writers, artists and thinkers, Richard Povall is in conversation with writer Sophie Pierce in this fourth in the series.

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Sophie Pierce is a writer and broadcaster who worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC for over twenty years. In 2017 her 20 year old son Felix died suddenly and unexpectedly. Her memoir The Green Hill: letters to a son explores how she responded to this devastating loss, navigating the weather and tides of grief. In the surroundings of Dartmoor and the South Devon coast she finds ways to continue the bond with Felix, both in her mind and with physical activity; actively mourning, rather than grieving. The book celebrates the natural landscape and the role it plays in our lives and relationships, as well as looking at how we think about our own mortality. The Green Hill, Felix’s burial place by the River Dart, comes to symbolise the issues that become important in the journey of grief: nature, beauty, a sense of place, and the passing of the seasons.  The book shows how Sophie finds ways to continue the bond and recreate her relationship with Felix, both in her mind and with physical activity: pen on paper, needle on the fabric of the clothes he wore, and swimming and walking. She learns to focus on the landscape around her, the plants and trees, the rivers of Dartmoor and the sea off the South Devon coast, to somehow ‘be’ with him again.

“In The Green Hill, Sophie Pierce writes about the sudden death of her son Felix with an aching and gentle honesty. Struggling to come to terms with the loss not only of the young man he was, but everything that he would eventually become, she finds herself overwhelmed not only by grief, but also by love. Her writing is illuminated by a remarkable attention to the beauty and consolation of the natural world, and by the wisdom and tenderness which has been so painfully acquired. This is a book that will be a great comfort to those who need it.  Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent, Melmoth)”

https://unbound.com/books/thegreenhill/

September 5-9, 2021

These are the times to let our knowings die, to devour our certainties and to surrender our identities as a generative act. Vulture Wakes are opportunities to observe, gather around and get intimate with the practices of modernity that have been causing the trouble.  

This lab is a call to artists, researchers, community leaders and facilitators to gather, an invitation to turn and face the inescapable themes of breakdown and demise that now confront us, and to listen for what might be wanting to emerge. Embodied and experimental, Vulture is an ongoing research project from The Emergence Network that takes the movements and participation of these great birds as metaphor, score and research modality.

Vulture offers a different shape of hope: hope not in solutions or saviours but in the smell of soil, the movements of insects, and the intense beauty of seeing each other dance at the edge of things.

Toni Spencer is an artist and facilitator, and a Curator with The Emergence Network. She is founder of ‘the pause’, a Deep Adaptation practitioner and has worked regularly with organisations such as Schumacher College, St Ethelburga’s, Encounters Arts.

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[Vulture image is courtesy Sean Briggs seanbriggs.co.uk]