I spent Saturday evening with writer / forager/ favourite human Tamara Colchester, chatting about (broadly) animal tracking and language with David and Sal from Dispersed Holdings as part of their programming for NY Printed Matter book fair.
Our talk takes off from a short text I wrote for this beautiful publication, hot off the press and available here: https://www.dispersedholdings.net/
I’ll post a link to our conversation soon, but for now here’s Tamara tracking badgers.
Tamara Colchester is a writer and forager interested in the paths between the symbiotic worlds of plants, animals and the separated human. She is currently pondering the usefulness of writing as a mode of exploring the mystery of engagement with other living beings, and is more than a little concerned that writing is always going to be a ‘method at war with the content.’ She hopes not, and is spending as much time as possible away from the computer to follow animal, mushroom and plant trails, seeing where they take her.
She has co-written a film called Tawai – A Voice from the Forest, that explores the wisdom still held in the rapidly declining old-growth forests of the world. Her first book explored the ancestral patterns within her family system, and her second is set in Scotland and explores the dynamics between predator and prey, and the paradoxical idea that hunters are those who love animals the most.
Working with wild plants and animals keeps Tamara sane and is the way in which embodied silence (not speaking/writing, just tracking) is given formalised attention in her work. She does not believe that there should be any gaps between our work and our life, and is hopeful that the juddering systems of the modern world are opening pathways back into deeper, coherent modes of engaging with the world.
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF OTHER ANIMALS 