Francis Gooding with Andrew Green: The Script Of The Stones
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Come and meet Francis Gooding for the Gower launch of his new book: The Script Of The Stones.
A short clifftop walk becomes an expansive meditation on nature, memory and climate change in this elegant work of environmental elegy.
The Script of the Stones is a book about a single half-mile clifftop walk on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales - one the author has been making his whole life.
It takes fifteen minutes, if you keep moving. But one day Francis Gooding decides to stop and look down. What unfolds is a rare act of attention: to limestone laid down in tropical seas 350 million years ago, to the orchids and gorse and banded snails that have claimed the cliff for their own, to the rocks and caves that hold the bones of mammoths, bears and one ochre-stained man who slept here for thirty thousand years. But the cliff also holds something else: the deep, tangled roots of human history - imperial violence, ecological destruction - rising through the red earth like the old mole Shakespeare knew, unstoppable, asking to be acknowledged.
A book about grief and deep time, about what it means to belong to a place and what it costs to pay attention, The Script of the Stones is nature writing of a rare and searching kind. An elegy, a field guide, a ghost story - and underneath it all, a love letter to one small patch of the world.
Francis Gooding is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and Critical Quarterly and is a regular columnist and feature writer at The Wire. His writing on diverse subjects including art, film, music, politics and colonial history has been published widely, appearing in publications including Time Out, Guardian, The Thinker, We Jazz magazine, and for Redstone Press, the Lisson Gallery, the Barbican, BFI and others. His book on painting and myth, Black Light, was published in 2009. He teaches film and is Head of Research at the Derek Jarman Lab; he also co-runs a record label, Tapestry Works. He is the son of Mel Gooding - acclaimed art critic, author and son-in-law of Welsh Artist Ceri Richards.
Francis will be in conversation with Andrew Green.