The birth of a book, from trembling concept to out in the world

James Thornton's "Nature, my Teacher"

It’s tough being a writer. You throw yourself at a project for years, shape it, perfect it … then have to switch mode and sell it. Find a publisher. Pretend what you’ve poured your life and soul into is essentially a commercial product.

As a publisher, I exist to remove that agony for just a few. Help a beautiful book into the world without its needing to be dropped or bruised or thrown about. Here’s a brief tale of one such book.

October 2022 and my husband James Thornton was spun away from seventeen years of frontline action, setting up the global environmental law charity ClientEarth. He had six months of sabbatical before a regular working life resumed, no longer the group’s CEO but its president and founder.

We found quiet places in Nature where James could reflect and recover – in the Western Cape region of South Africa, and then in Baja Sur, the Mexican state that runs as a long peninsula down the Pacific Coast. James hung out with birthing whales, and walked among flowers and birds.

And he wrote. Of late his poetry had become prose poetry. How different is that to an essay? Not much. You can refashion such work into the essay form. And perhaps readers are more open to essays.

And so prose poems were reworked into short essays, and new essays flowed behind. James was responding to the natural world, and his writing was in conversation with it.

Along the way, more publishing decisions were made. James’s Zen master once told him that Nature was his teacher. For years James had been acting as the lawyer to the Earth. What does that mean, to represent nature and take lessons from it? What might you learn?

The book became an open enquiry. Freed from the daily rush of fighting for the planet’s existence, James was able to face up to his own climate anxiety. How does it show itself, how do you cope with it, how do you continue the fight, how might you deal with it? In answering these questions, the book took on another dimension. Humans are not separate from the natural world, so this book about nature also became a study of human consciousness.

Buddhist poets are referenced, but you’ll find no overtly Buddhist language in the book – another publishing decision had been made.

And Nature, My Teacher started to find its own structure, fitting into twelve separate ‘books’, each concluding with a poem and a photograph.

You’ll see the structure taking place in the accompanying photo, James with the pages of his manuscript arrayed across a Mexican table. And a smile on his face.

It went out to readers. They reported being moved to tears. Good tears. Something was working. And their corrections and suggestions were folded in.

The book gathered blurbs, from a range of good people who could help the book reach audiences in the USA and the UK, and in Zen and non-Zen circles. Arianna Huffington, for example, does not blurb lightly and always reads what she promotes. Her praise is touching and effusive.

Paperback or hardback? It feels like a book readers might want to carry with them and consult, and keep turning the pages. So a tidy sized hardback. And at an affordable price so everyone can read it.

Bamboo leaves were the initial go-to cover image. Decoratively it was fine, but this book promotes a journey. Light filtered through a forest aims to draw readers in.

Barbican Press has a major campaign going to promote the book, run by an agency in Los Angeles, and separate in-house outreach from the UK. James is airing the book in launches, podcasts, intervies, festival appearances. Still, it’s going to need word of mouth. The next step for the book is for people to love it and share the love.

That, of course, is the bottom line with every book.

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I’ll be in conversation with James for the launch of Nature, My Teacher in the Village Well bookstore, Culver City, April 17^th. And for those in Europe, flock to Watkins Bookstore on July 18^th for the London launch!

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What I’m reading:

Zola’s EARTH was indeed a phenomenal novel. What sweaty, sexual, grasping creatures his French peasants were! The land becomes its own ultra vivid, heaving character.

As maybe an antidote, I’ve now gone to a small platform on top of a redwood tree, following Julia Butterfly Hill’s journey to save it. The book is The Legacy of Luna, which feels companionable with my own forthcoming My Head for a Tree.