Norman Bissell - Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth

I recently had the pleasure of reading Norman Bissell's latest book Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth and chatting with him about it. Part memoir and partly an account of the Scottish Geopoetic movement, it's especially timely as it was written just after the death of the man who coined the name 'geopoetics' - Kenneth White - a man who was a huge inspiration to many.

But first of all, what is geopoetics? There are several descriptions in the book, but here are the ones I like best (p.106) - 

seeking a new or renewed sense of the Earth, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world...

learning from others who have attempted to leave 'the Motorway of Western civilisation' as Kenneth White called it, to find a new approach to thinking and living. For example, 'intellectual nomads' or 'outgoers', who approached the world in creative ways...

Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth 

Author Norman Bissell was born in the heart of industrial Clydeside in the late 1940s. He lived in Glasgow’s densely urban environment for most of his childhood, but visits to the Clyde coast and islands introduced him to the vastness and beauty of the wider world and awoke his love of the sea. 

At University in the 1960s, he encountered lecturer Kenneth White and became something of a wide-eyed disciple of White's views. This included the call for a reappraisal of our place in the world, and the need for radical cultural renewal that sees humankind not as a species set apart and free to use the earth and its resources mindlessly and without conscience. 

Rather, geopoetics sees humankind as one integral part of the physical earth and all life on it. This change in mindset is crucial to the understanding of geopoetics. And while there have been many influences and influencers on this philosophy, Norman Bissell is surely one of the most significant – yet most modest – having been for so many years instrumental in running the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and arranging inspirational events within Scotland and internationally.

In Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth, Bissell recounts all this experience and reflects on it. In the opening section, he charts his early life and youthful introduction to the movement in an appealing writing voice which combines factual yet often entertaining prose with poems which express the essence of geopoetics. 

A large part of the book is devoted to documenting and evaluating the wider movement’s history, right up to the present. As well as appraising and applauding the role of key figures like Tony McManus, Bissell also considers earlier influencers such as John Ruskin and Robert Burns and looks beyond the western world to Zen Buddhism. 

Nan Shepherd, Joan Eardley, George Orwell and Alan Spence are among many creatives who feature in Bissell’s detailed survey of a way of living and writing that is underpinned by the geopoetics credo. It’s an informative and engaging account of this significant and growing approach to living. It's also extremely readable and I heartily recommend it!

Norman Bissell at the Atlantic Islands Centre in Cullipool on Luing

Q&A with Norman Bissell

CMcK: Thanks for joining my blog, Norrie. Your new book is called Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth. What drew a Glasgow boy like you to the Isle of Luing?

NB: My pleasure - and thanks for the 'boy'! I write about my childhood in Kelvinhaugh and Partick in my new book and how my parents gave me a love of the coast by taking me on holidays to Dunoon, Kirn and other seaside places. I went just for the day to the Isle of Luing for the first time in 1995, as many day trippers still do, and fell in love with it right away. So much so that I knocked on the door of a cottage that was for sale that first visit and kept going back on holidays from Glasgow until I got one four years later. It was the view west to the long coast of Mull and all the little islands in the Firth of Lorn that bowled me over, and the sense of space and changing light that inspired me to write poems and want to live there once I could afford to. My first poetry collection Slate, Sea and Sky, a journey from Glasgow to the Isle of Luing has both city and island poems in it. There are plenty of walks you can take on Luing and the people are very welcoming, wherever you're from. 'It's not where you come from that matters, it's what you do when you get here,' says one of Luing's oldest inhabitants. And I've done plenty since getting here, as my new book reveals.

CMcK: You’re Director of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. What do you consider the SCG’s greatest aims and achievements?

NB: Our aim is to raise awareness of how the creative expression of the Earth can help to protect the planet and all its forms of life, and can enrich, inspire and sustain human lives as part of that. Geopoetics aims to bring about radical cultural renewal to enable us all to live our lives more fully and be more creative in whichever ways we choose. It's a big idea whose time has come and it is attracting more and more people in different parts of the world to get involved. The International Institute of Geopoetics was formed by Kenneth White and others in Paris in 1989 and the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics was set up in Edinburgh in 1995 by Tony McManus, myself and others. In my view the Scottish Centre's greatest achievement is to have grown in strength and influence in the last 29 years by consistently holding geopoetics days, weekends and even a week long Festival on Luing in 2009. These have led to its publication of 14 issues to date of its online journal Stravaig containing, poems, essays and artwork, and to its publishing imprint Alba Editions bringing out four books so far. We have held a series of online Geopoetics Conversations since the first Covid-19 lockdown and these have helped to increase our membership worldwide to over 140 who include 6 arts and science professors as well as lecturers, artists and scientists of all kinds. We now have an actual Scottish Centre with an extensive library and archive here in Cullipool Village on Luing and I'm looking forward to hosting artists' and scientists' residencies in it next year. 

CMcK: There’s a captivating film in production. Can you tell us a bit about it and when it’ll be released?

NB: It's called Expressing the Earth and we crowdfunded it in 2022-2023 to enable it to be filmed professionally by Glenda Rome, a wonderful film-maker from Portobello. She's filmed and edited it beautifully on the west and east coast to share a variety of perspectives on geopoetics along with some archive film of Kenneth White in Scotland and France. I've worked as its producer with Glenda and it's now in post-production with a view to its release at film festivals and elsewhere in Spring 2025. I think it will have a major impact and will encourage even more people to get involved in geopoetics.

Norman Bissell at the Atlantic Islands Centre in Cullipool on Luing

CMcK: You’re the author of Barnhill, a novel about George Orwell, and you’re also a fine poet. Where can we find out more about you, your books, and the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics?

NB: My website www.normanbissell.com has lots of information about me, my background and my books which can all be bought there. I'm pleased to say that Barnhill has been translated into Turkish and Arabic and hope that Orwell's warning to the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote on Jura about 12 miles from Cullipool, will prove useful to all those facing dictatorship and oppression. The website of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics is at www.geopoetics.org.uk and it contains many articles and essays which explain what it's all about, news of our activities and events as well as online issues of Stravaig and our other publications. You can also read about who some of the members are, and can apply to join there. It only costs £10/£5 unwaged per year! 

CMcK: Thank you, Norrie!