"Savage Gods" by Paul Kingsnorth

Some writers never get over writer’s block. Paul Kingsnorth turned into a personal, high readable memoir. 

Savage Gods, published in 2019, is a memoir, a meditation, a search for understanding, a discussion of writing and words, and a reflection about a father, concisely presented in a 2 126-page book. But don’t let the short length mislead you. Thinking I might read it in a day, I was surprised to find myself rereading, reading slowly and carefully, and thinking about the other writers and thinkers Kingsworth was quoting and discussing. The expected one day gave way to four days.

 

But for a writer, it’s time worth spending.

 

Kingsnorth and his family moved from England to the west of Ireland. He considers the move part of the compelled restlessness he’s maintained in his adult life, a restlessness that is more like a hunger for place, and belonging to a place. He’s brutally honest about himself; he understands that the desire to disrupt his own life is somehow intrinsic to his writing, He considers what it is that writers do, this appropriation of words to create something. And he considers how words, those “savage gods,” as he calls them, have directed his life.

 

And then he experiences the time when the words stop, even when they’re not supposed to. And that leads to a meditation upon silence. 

 

Paul Kingsnorth

He draws upon thinkers and writers as diverse as Russell Means, the Native American activist; the culture of the highlands in Papua New Guinea; mythologist Colin Campbell; the poet R.S. Thomas; cultural ecologist David Abram; D.H. Lawrence; Rainer Maria Rilke; and many others. Kingsnorth is searching here, and he mines the experiences and words of other writers and thinkers to understand what is happening in his own life.

 

Kingsnorth is the author of three novels, The Wake (2015), Beast (2017), and Alexandria (2020), and a collection of poems, Kidland: And Other Poems (2011). He’s also the author of three non-fiction works: One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (2003); Real England: The Battle Against the Bland (2009); and Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (2017). He blogs at The Abbey of Misrule. He and his family live in Ireland.

 

Savage Gods tells a story, the story of a writer experiencing a struggle. It may be a struggle ostensibly about writer’s block, but it is really a larger struggle, and a larger story, of self-understanding.

 

Related:

 

Beast by Paul Kingsnorth.

 

Paul Kingsnorth: The Poetry of the Future Landscape.

 

Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth.

When You Hit the Writing Wall

I’ve learned there is more than one kind of writing block. 

I’ve been blessed with never to have experienced writer’s block, that immobilization that often afflicts writers and stops them cold from writing another word. I’ve sympathized with people who’ve had it, and I know it’s real. They stare at a blank page or screen, and – nothing.

 

The sources of writer’s block are legion – stress, tension, deadlines, family tragedy, accidents, illness, writing one’s way into a dead end with no resolution, finances, success of a novel (creating high expectations for the next one), the end or beginning of a relationship, and more. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it. So did Herman Melville. So did composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Writer’s block is so well known and so well-documented that there are scores of books on the subject, classes you can take, and writing coaches who can help guide you through it. 

 

Most writers experience it to one degree or another.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at American Christian Fiction Writers.

 

Photograph by Ryan Snaadt via Unsplash. Used with permission.