About

I didn’t set out to write about grief. I set out to write about weather, and grief came along anyway.

The year everyone here still just calls “the dry” started unremarkably and got worse slowly enough that nobody quite noticed when it stopped being a bad year and started being the thing that changed us. I didn’t handle it particularly well. I don’t think anyone did.

Afterwards I found I couldn’t talk about it in the ordinary way — over a fence, at the pub — without either making a joke of it or saying too much. Writing it down turned out to be the only setting that worked. That became Ten Dry Years, and then it became three more books, because apparently I had more to say than I thought.

These days the work is mostly writing, with talks scattered through the year at festivals and in community halls, wherever people want to hear it told straight rather than dressed up as advice.

I’m not trying to cheer anyone up, and I try never to tell a room that everything happens for a reason. What I’ve got is more modest: a plain account of what a hard, dry stretch actually does to a person, and the small ways you get through it anyway.

I still run the farm. The writing happens around it, not instead of it.

Portrait — fictional subject

For the record

Columnist, The Aldermoor Review (fictional)
Full-time farmer, part-time everything else

All fictional

Milestones

Then

The dry year. Everyone remembers it differently; this is my version.

Later

Fence Lines — some essays about boundaries, written mostly to avoid writing about the dry year directly.

After that

First festival session. Turned out people wanted to talk about it more than I expected.

Eventually

The Weather Book and Small Rain, and a run of community talks on the years since.

Now

Ten Dry Years, the memoir, written down before I forgot how it actually felt.