afterword

Here's the absolutely gorgeous 'Afterword' from the 2015 Picador Classic edition of William Fiennes's The Snow Geese. (How many times have i raved about this book already in just the last 6 months???)
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It's so inspiring -- and not just a writerly kind of inspiration either. It's an utterly human kind of inspiration -- inspiring in the way that makes you think, i want to be the kind of person who can say something like that, who can think in that way, see the world with those eyes, live life with that kind of spirit.
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‘Illness is an imaginative as well as a physical constriction, and I wanted to spread my wings. I thought about home, and about the different ways in which that sense of belonging might be conceived. I thought about how our longing for the familiar, the known, exists alongside our appetite for the new, the undiscovered, and how we all have to negotiate a path through these contrary impulses. I watched the swifts on their exhilarating vespers flights. I dreamed of a return to vitality and independence. I imagined an adventure, a quest. And so a book was born out of the confluence of many streams of thought and experience -- home, illness, recovery, poems, nature, science, love of language, and a great longing to drink down the world in gulps after such a period of deprivation.
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No elaborate plans. It was only by writing and rewriting that I found myself at home in a form -- a sort of poetic form, in which the images would do most of the talking. Similarly, a structure emerged -- eight movements, which I thought of as an octave, a scale that begins and ends with the same note: home. The third movement set entirely on a bus, the sixth entirely on a train. The rhymes of birds and words ghosting between the lines, and echoes sounding throughout, a pattern of images, so that a book about nostalgia would always be remembering itself ... I ddin’t worry about what kind of book I was writing. I didn’t understand the post-publication pressure to locate The Snow Geese in a particular category or genre. It’s not as if we inherit six or seven templates into which we have to shoehorn our way of seeing the world. I’ve loved seeing the book appear in different provinces of bookshops, and still relish the fact that a friend in New York found it in the Pet Care section.
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I remember the kindness so many people showed me along the way. And how that generosity included stories: Jean’s forehand winner, Rollin’s joyful flight under the Golden Gate, the Viking’s skirmishing with widows, Marshall’s wild garlic, Sam’s rivermouth swim with beluga whales. I remember writing in the small back room of a friend’s house, the table shuddering beneath my forearms whenever the washing machine entered the spin cycle. Or in the flat in Gospel Oak, hearing the playground clamour of a nearby primary school dissolve into the sound of geese roosting on a private lake. For days, a symphony orchestra and full chorus rehearsed Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in All Hallows Church across the road, the cases of double basses standing outside the door like sentries, or smokers. I was often anxious, even afraid. Sometimes writing seemed little more than an arena for self-criticism. But even then I felt a strange rightness about The Snow Geese, as if there’d been a hole in the universe the exact size of that book, waiting to be filled.’
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