Writers Who Run: An Interview with Poet Leah Atherton
Photo courtesy of Leah Atherton
By Malissa Rodenburg
Running is ugly truth if you think about it. There’s the sweat. The elements (the rain, the mud, the scorching sun) that find and impress upon you. Then there’s your ability, right out there on display. No faking it.
Leah Atherton, a poet based in Birmingham, UK — the Poet Runner as she’s dubbed on social media — has been digging into the ugly (but also delightfully beautiful) truth of running, relationships, and community through her poetry.
Runners may be more interested in her first collection “A Sky the Colour of Hope,” which has several poems directly related to the sport and was written while running along UK’s longest trail. But her most recent collection “Mycelium” is more connected to the trail itself — what will poison you, what will nourish you, signs of the changing seasons, and the characters you may find along the way.
If you haven’t read poetry since your last lit class, I challenge you to dive into Atherton’s work. It’s witty, inspiring, raw, and wholly satisfying. As she writes in one poem: “No-one speaks about the things // we leave behind in the trees.” Atherton leaves a lot unsaid in her poetry. And the white space is all the more interesting.
Personally, I think Atherton’s work speaks for itself, but hopefully this interview also highlights a bit of the Poet Runner’s unique perspective on creating and running.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Courtesy of Leah Atherton
“Mycelium” is very rooted in nature. Do you have a background in ecology or is that ingrained on more of a personal level?
Because I grew up rural, it's something that I've always kind of learned. You sort of learn what's good to eat. If you spend enough time on the trails, you end up a lot of the time just kind of going, ‘Okay, what am I actually looking at here?’ And having that fascination with the places where you run and the things that you see.
You have to hone that art of observing when you’re trying to write because you can talk about how there’s this big overarching subject matter, but it’s quite difficult to access sometimes. A piece of advice I’ve taken from the poet Guante was, don’t write a poem about war. Write a poem about sitting in your brother’s empty room. It’s taking those specifics. Actually, Taylor Swift does that really well. You know, it’s details about leaving the scarf at your sister’s house or cleaning the vinyl shelf because it has incense dust on it. Those tiny details suddenly ground the experience.
Spending time out on the trails and doing what we do as writers, both of those things sort of require you to observe without judging necessarily.
“Mycelium” starts off on such a strong note with “Field Notes” and “Threshold” (which I personally felt very deeply given what’s going on in American politics at the moment and the final line “Vengeance has always been women’s work”). What inspired you to start writing this series?
The impetus behind it came out of reading Rob McFarlane, he is a naturalist and a writer, his work is incredible. I was reading about a thing called the “wood wide web.” It’s this idea of this network of fungi and roots underneath the forest, and essentially, everything in the forest is communicating with each other, and everything is connected. I ended up becoming absolutely fascinated by this idea of the things that are unseen and not talked about, but which informed the entirety of how you grow and the decisions that you make. The interconnectedness of it all.
I ended up writing a lot of it whilst I was on a couple of writing retreats, one of them down in Cornwall. I basically rented myself a bed in a shed for like a week, and just wrote so much. And then spent like a week on Offa’s Dyke just near the berry ditches, which is like an Iron Age earthworks. And again, spent ages writing my way through these ideas.
Throughout there’s this character of the hedgewitch. She became like a fictionalized avatar for me to explore a few things for myself and essentially question what it is to be part of a community or part of something, but not necessarily of that thing. Feeling this sense of performing a function in whatever community you are a part of, but not entirely fitting in and not entirely being comfortable in that space in the same way that you’ll be walking through a forest admiring the trees and the flowers and then coming across a mushroom that’s bright red and covered in spots. It's that kind of exploration of all of the things that we are kind of haunted by and which inform how we grow as people even if we don't acknowledge them.
“It’s these natural spaces which permeate a lot of what I write, which offer me that metaphor that I was looking for. If nothing else, it’s just a really nice soothing place for you to figure out what you’re actually thinking about, and it sort of lulls your brain into that sense of observation without judgment.”
How did running play a role during those writing retreats?
I come up with all of my best ideas when I am out running, especially if I'm on the trails, because a lot of the time — I don't know if you'll find this with your own process, but do you have that thing where you've got an idea or a concept that's really bugging you and you don't know quite where it wants to go or what it wants to be, and then you'll go out running and suddenly something will dislodge and you're like, ‘oh, oh, that's the thing’? It's these natural spaces which permeate a lot of what I write, which offer me that metaphor that I was looking for. If nothing else, it's just a really nice soothing place for you to figure out what you're actually thinking about, and it sort of lulls your brain into that sense of observation without judgment.
I’d also like to talk about “A Sky the Colour of Hope” because it feels so different from “Mycelium.” What was the process of putting that one together like?
That was a lot messier. There's a lot of much older poems in there. I think the oldest one is from 2014 and the collection came out in 2020.
The biggest chunk of it was written while I was fast packing the South West Coast Path, the longest trail in the UK. It goes from Minehead to Poole. It goes all the way around the southwest coast, around Devon, Cornwall, and finishes in Dorset. It’s — and I say this in quotes — “636 miles.” Those of us who have done it can tell you it’s more like 650. I ran it solo with my tent and sleeping bag and all of my gear over the course of a month in May 2018 to mark the 10th anniversary of my dad passing away. We had planned to hike it together, and we just never got the chance.
The first poem that really cemented it as a collection was “Trail Magic.” That came on like day two of the fast pack. I had this little notebook with me and a pen, and you can kind of see it coming together over the course of that month, like bits of lines.
I ended up being that crazy person on the trail, constantly repeating: “And I never knew that there was so much magic in emptying like this, in hollowing out like this, becoming paper lantern like this. I will run to the sea and let my bones turn to salt in the river of my steps.”
[The collection] moves through the five stages of grief, well, it kind of meanders, because, let's face it, grief isn't linear. It slowly meanders its way towards acceptance at the end in the letters to the wolf — I used to call my dad Old Wolf. And then I deliberately ended it on “Sunday,” which I wrote for and about the trail running community, who were people who had been there for me and believed in me when I couldn't do it for myself.
What’s next?
[Collection] number three snuck up on me, hit me over the back of the head, and demanded to be written. It’s called “Gun Shy.” The thing that seems to be emerging is it feels really fragile, working on it from the perspective of something a lot more openly autobiographical than “Mycelium” was. It's fundamentally a collection about learning to trust and to lay down your defenses and see that as courage, even though you know it's going to hurt you and even when it does hurt you, not immediately slamming those defenses straight back up again. It’s a collection for women who have held onto their softness and held onto their salt.
Rapid Fire Round:
If you could capture the essence of “Mycelium” in one word, what would it be?
Swampy.
Favorite place to run in the United Kingdom?
It would have to be Cornwall.
Favorite place to run outside of the United Kingdom?
There’s a National Park called Saxon Switzerland on the German-Czech border. If you ever watched “Carnival Row” on Amazon, they filmed a lot there. It looks like a fantasy set that someone carved out of foam. It looks like it shouldn’t be real. But it’s sandstone ravines and via ferrata and the trails are flowy and delightful to run on.
If you could go for a run with any of the muses in your poems, who would you choose?
This is going to be really basic, but I would really want to go for a run with my dad.
What are you reading right now?
I am doing a bit of a reread of “Hell Bent” by Leigh Bardugo.
Writers Who Run is a monthly column by Seattle-based reader, runner, writer, and bookseller Malissa Rodenburg.