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Interview by James Taylor

Jen Hadfield moved to Heaven when she was in her late twenties. However, she did not experience a thundering Old Testament miracle, as this might suggest. She relocated her life to the Shetland Isles, which, for Hadfield, have become synonymous with this ancient paradise.

It’s an assertion which might cause friction with the accepted ideas of Heaven many might hold; the wild, haunting, soaring, and often unforgiving landscape of Shetland does not parallel many of the assumptions we have of the City of God.

Yet, Hadfield makes a strong case which will change the minds of many; in her new work, Storm Pegs. Storm Pegs is an exploration of her life in Shetland, of its language, and how tightly intertwined this language is with the landscape; to speak of Shetland truthfully is to use the long vowels of the wind, or the clicks and rustles of the heather. In essence, it’s a collection of autobiographical essays and fragments, which, in Hadfield’s ‘animist, pagan’ sense of a ‘proximate Eden’, give us an idea of what some ancient spirits must have done to gather Shetland together from scratch.

Before turning to prose, Hadfield established herself as one of the most lauded poets of her generation, having won a Highland Books Prize (2022), an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award (2012), the Dewar Award (2007) an Eric Gregory Award (2003), and the T.S Eliot Award for her second poetry collection, Nigh-No-Place (2008).

This year, Hadfield has just been awarded the Windham-Campbell prize, a prestigious honour bestowed by Yale University to six artists globally, with a financial gift designed to enable each artist greater creative freedom. The sharpness of the poet’s eye and pen, as well as the ability to render visions of the world with a dazzling freshness of clarity, has reached new heights in Hadfield’s prose debut. It sings like a fiddle and blasts like a gale. Very few writers have the talent to make language breathe and flow like weather, and reading Storm Pegs is not to watch the gales blow from behind a window, with feet planted firmly on the ground; it is to become the elements themselves.

For all the incredible explorations of Shetland’s culture, language and history that Hadfield presents, you close the book, incredulously, with the blush of sea-sting still on your cheeks. It’s the infinity of the present moment, the ‘Now, again,’ as Hadfield puts it, that is most brilliant about this book; the infusing of consistent poetic immediacy into a long and blustering work of prose. And for all that, I finished the book feeling like I’d lived in Shetland for years.

Hadfield uses a dictionary entry from James Stout Angus, in his Glossary of the Shetland Dialect, to epigraph her introduction to Storm Pegs. ‘Ert’ [noun], the direction of a supposed line from any point in the heavens to the beholder. Storm Pegs is a bright flaucht of heaven itself, given as an offering to each beholder who finds themselves wandering the radiant pages of Hadfield’s sentences. This book is a gift, a treasure, and you’ll never read anything quite like it again.

Ahead of her appearances to discuss Storm Pegs, both in Edinburgh (this week, on 13 August) and Glasgow (on 14 August), The Glasgow Review of Books was lucky enough to speak with Hadfield about how she came to write Storm Pegs, and hear more about the glittering Shetlandic universe compacted within each of its revelatory essays.

Glasgow Review of Books (GRB): Before we chat all things Storm Pegs, I have to begin by congratulating you on your receiving a 2024 Windham-Campbell Prize; a monumental achievement. How have you been enjoying the prize so far? What has it meant for you as a writer to be recognised with it?

Jen Hadfield (JH): It’s really wonderful. Shetland is such a lovely place to be staying in, and living in, when something like this happens. I had so many gorgeous messages from folk that I know, and that I didn’t know. There was this real sense that people were proud of me! That meant a huge deal. The Shetland News posted an interview. It was really, really moving, I was quite bowled over by it all.

But Shetland is quite used to being on the international stage anyway. Every time you get The Shetland Times, there’s three or four articles about someone who’s got some kind of international award or opportunity. It’s always looking outwards. It’s really something else. I think it’s sinking in now, after a few months. We go to the States to pick up the award in September, we go to Yale; they’ve got this beautiful festival for four days with all the writers. I guess it’ll be real then! It changes everything for me in terms of my sense of independence; I’m just so happy I’ll get to hang out with my wee boy. I was about to be doing a lot of serious juggling . . .

GRB: I can imagine! Your poetry – particularly the ones we find collected in Nigh-No-Place – are often variations on the theme of the Shetlandic language, and its lyrical potential. Storm Pegs is abundant with anecdotes on how the language of Shetland is as much an emotional, cognitive map of the island as a geo-historical one. Can you share more on how your discovery of the Shetlandic language changed you as a writer, and how it informed your new work?

JH: I was thinking about ‘Shall Gaelic Die?’ [‘Am Faigh a Ghaidhlig Eas?’] the Iain Crichton Smith poem. In earlier drafts, I quoted from quite a few lines from that poem of his, all those lines spoke in a way that felt really true to the situation with language in Shetland; people being punished for speaking Shaetlan, or being mocked for it, or just disadvantaged by their use of it, historically.

I remembered reading his poem, and thinking it felt really relevant. Then I thought, I’m using another language as a reference point to speak about Shetland, it would be really nice to focus on here. So I took all of those out, regretfully, but one line I kept in was, ‘a thousand colours are better than one colour if they’re different’. He has that whole idea, that if your language dies, your world dies, basically, which was something I was trying to capture when I was talking about dictionaries.

I was thinking about this yesterday – who has the nerve to compile a dictionary, it’s such a feat? One of my favourite ones is The Dictionary of Shetland and Orkney Weather Words by Dr John W. Scott: it’s so epic, and it’s just weather words, and the sea. He’s working on another one about the body and medical ailments, at the moment. He must be an incredible mind, I think. I would be so daunted by that! [laughs]

That chapter [in Storm Pegs] on the Shetland language was really hard to write, for me. It was three times the length, originally. I’m not a Shetland speaker, so there’s an anxiety there about just getting it wrong. I get it wrong on a daily basis, and I think you sign up for that when you move here. It is an instantaneous collision, when you move up. The other qualification is Shetlanders will quite often knapp to you; to knapp means to anglicise your Shetland language to make it easier to understand.

There’s all kinds of interesting shades to that, where that can be quite a welcoming, helpful thing that someone’s meaning to do. It’s also potentially a way of you not quite experiencing Shetland fully. If you’re missing out on the language, you’re missing out on the full experience. Some people feel quite insulted if they’re knapped to. I quite appreciate it, but it makes me feel a bit sad if I notice it – sometimes I don’t notice it, because it’s so subtle! There’ll be Shetland words threaded throughout knapped conversation. I really like the old Fair Isle definition of the word knapped, which is, ‘two ponies cleaning each other’s manes with their mouths.’ That might be a coincidence, a metaphor to me, a mutually beneficial thing, quite affectionate. It’s complex.

When I first moved here, I worked in a fishmonger’s, owned and run by Whalsay folk. Whalsay is really different, amongst all the variants of Shaetlan, and they did not knapp at all. Which was intense, wonderful, scary, and intimidating. I quickly picked things up, and they repeated things painstakingly without looking annoyed, but sometimes a bit embarrassed, almost? I didn’t want to create a situation of embarrassment, so I worked really hard trying to hear my way through the language.

That was quite a baptism of fire, in a way. People would teach me words sometimes, my neighbours would teach me Burra words. It’s such a precious thing. A lot of my Scottish friends who stay here say there’s a lot of Scots in Shetland. But there’s more to it than that too, there’s some very, very old English in there, words that Shakespeare might have used but no one else anymore, words like lichtsome. There’s Dutch words from trading with the Hanseatic league (which was really significant at the time), some French, and the massive stock of Norse words, which came from the Viking Invasions. But also, from the time when Shetland was owned by the King of Norway, and then passed to Scotland, as a dowry payment a few centuries ago. It’s a complex thing, language, isn’t it?

GRB: To that end, Storm Pegs is in conversation with the dictionaries and linguistic histories of Shetland from the likes of James Stout Angus and John J. Graham – but even then, Shetlanders have a uniquely fluid, interpersonal relationship with the definitions of the words that make up their vocabulary. As a poet, is the Shetlandic language still evolving and progressing for you, and with you? Even in its endangerment, what do you hope the future of the language will be?

JH: There’s a lot to say here. It’s amazing you had that sensation from the whole book, because when I was thinking back on it the other week, I thought, there’s not enough Shetland in there, in a way. I’m in this difficult situation, that the more I quote it the more likely I am to get it wrong. I was really trying to stick to two rules: one, was to represent people’s speech as closely to what they actually said as they did, and often they would have been knapping to me, of course. If they’d been speaking to a Shetlander, their sentences would have looked quite different.

I sent extracts to everyone that I’d quoted, to get them to check what I’d put down. Some people might still be too polite to correct me, so I’m a bit worried about that! And then my other rule, is that I can use Shetland words if I’ve almost stopped noticing that I’m using them, if they’ve entered my lexicon then. My book will be representing a less Shetland-y Shetland than really exists, I think, because of those things.

When you ask about the future of the dialect, I’m really nervous to speak about it, because I don’t think it’s my place. I did English Language at university; I’ve got some very basic linguistic principles somewhere at the back of my head from many, many years ago. I’m not a linguist, and I don’t feel I should be speaking about a language that isn’t mine to that degree.

I think writers of the Shetland dialect – or the Shetland language, depending on what they call it, it’s called many, many things – those are the people in the position to speak about that. The organisation Shetland ForWirds has been a really interesting force. They’ve pulled an organisation together to celebrate and promote use of the dialect. They put folk into schools to encourage bairns to write and speak the dialect, and they refer to it as Shetland Dialect. They have events that are really well attended. There’s lots of literature already in Shetland, a very strong contemporary literature; the likes of Roseanne Watt, Peter Ratter, and many others. I’m coming from the outside, and speaking about a language that I have a glancing understanding of.

With the Windham-Campbell in mind, I think quite a lot of people in a lot of places might encounter the book, so if [they] don’t know about the Shetland language, I can introduce them to the existence of it. That’s exciting and wonderful, but I’m not the person to be an expert on it. Maybe people will follow it up. I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to become of it.

Languages are changing everywhere all the time. I think to celebrate and promote is the strongest thing we can do, and I think I say in the book, in my understanding, languages thrive when people can use them confidently, and without self-consciousness. Sometimes those gestures to protect and preserve a language, I think, run the risk of making people feel like they’re doing it wrong. I know as a creative writing tutor, there’s nothing like somebody worrying about grammar or punctuation or spelling to put them off writing. When I’ve worked as a creative writing tutor up here, I’ve very much tried to egg Shetland speakers on to write in their language of the heart, if they want to. I think that’s as far as I can go probably!

GRB: Storm Pegs is written with a stream-clear, keen poet’s eye, through the striking imagery and before-your-eyes taming of a wild, vibrant language. How much of your poetic processes informed the prose work of Storm Pegs? Was there anything new you learned about yourself as a writer and poet through this first, long-length narrative piece?

JH: It makes me think about teaching a lot. It’s wonderful working with bairns, because sometimes all you need to do in a workshop with kids, especially if there’s a nervousness around poetry, is just open their ears to the poetry they’re all speaking already, everyday, continually. It feels like this poetry is a found thing, people are saying the most extraordinary things all the time, in the most elegant, visual ways. Sometimes I think our job is just to capture that, in some way. Oh, so prose! [laughs].

I really wanted to write this book, I really wanted to hit a long form with a lyric sensibility in that way. I thought I could do it when I started, I thought at first I could write a series of micro-essays, that was my plan. Prose poems, about home and here. That was maybe ten years ago. I wanted to write a series of essays of some form or other, that would speak to each other. I was thinking a lot about Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , although she maintains that those are not essays – I guess they’re not if she says they’re not! I was ambitious to make something of that sort of shape and intensity, about Shetland.

At any rate, people do always ask me why I moved to Shetland, so I thought we might as well get that out of the way, fair enough! One of the hardest things was to write about seventeen or eighteen years of life, in three hundred or so pages. One of my earlier editors asked me to keep it to seventy-thousand words; I wrote something more than twice that, and then had to haul a lot out, which was quite awful, but necessary, the prose was quite baggy. Then there was a change of editor, and my new editor didn’t mention the word count! [laughs].

The editing has been immense; it’s been years of editing and restructuring and reforming, changing where things happen, because it’s an act of collage, I suppose. That’s felt like a work of fiction, really – all of those things happened, but not necessarily in the order I say they do. I was trying to convey something of a circular sense of time as well, I felt like we think of books as quite often having a linear narrative, the A to B. That’s not what my experience of life is here, it’s seasonal and repetitive, but also changing dramatically every year.

I have these touchstones, of, this is the first mackerel that I’ve eaten this year, when are the sea-pinks coming out this year, they’re late, they’re early. The puffins come back and leave on the exact same date every year, which blows my mind. People say, it’s the 8th of May, the puffins will be back, and there they are! How do they know? It’s been eighteen years of looking out from these treats and anticipations and pleasures. And then all the other forces that act on a place, changing it dramatically, so dramatically, year on year that I’ve felt like I’m living on another archipelago, every time, if that makes sense! That’s quite hard, in narrative!

GRB: I wonder if you made this feeling of narrative determinism more supple in Storm Pegs through stitching through its fabric memoir, poetry, linguistic analysis, history, literary criticism, and other styles and approaches through it. What is it about writing Shetland that invites such a composite array of forms and styles?

JH: I’m not very keen on boundaries! I’m not expert enough in any of those things to situate a book in any one genre or discipline, I suppose. I’ve got quite a butterfly mind, there’s a lot of skimming over the tops of things. I don’t know how to categorise it, and in my heart of hearts I still fantasise over it being a book of essays, a book of connected essays, where there’s an idea that is emerging, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it. Or, a set of ideas about place and consciousness.

For me, it all comes to a head in the essay ‘Bonhoga’ set in Papa Stour. The unifying thing for me throughout the whole book is the question, where am I? I suppose place-writing is what it is, in a way. So I’m wondering what’s the right place, what’s the right way to write about place, how can we ever know where we are, given the complexity of experience, which is something that I try to dig into in the ‘Peerie’ chapter, with the microscopic animals; the microscope and the scalpel; the salmon farm worms, that horrifying passage! There’s a trying to drill down into the place.

When I first moved here, it took me a while to notice there were surfaces, and I was having an incredibly intense experience of place, and that was just the top level, you know? Everytime you meet someone new, or you go to a new event in Shetland (yesterday was the second ever Pride March in Shetland!) because there’s something new every year, everytime you encounter something like that you’ve got another layer of complexity, mystery, and delight. That’s so dazzling, and I feel like it’s infinite, and you’d never get to the bottom of it.

So, how can I say that I know where I am, even when people call it small and even if there’s this clear, apparent boundary around each island of the archipelago. When it’s changing all the time, and when we’re discovering all the time, and you’re personally discovering all the time, and then there’s this mad moment in Papa Stour where I stayed for a week of northerly storms, and I was like, oh this is heaven. I was very convinced – I’m still quite convinced, actually.

This is what we’re all living, it’s not just Papa Stour (it sounds a bit mad, I know!) it’s not just Shetland, it’s wherever we’re centred, with our consciousness, wherever a creature calls home, and they have their ecosystem. What could be more complex and astonishing than that? And why have we ended up with this sense, historically, of heaven as a remote thing, that we can’t access. I guess the historic control, and exploitation, of people is the answer to that question. I feel almost a bit embarrassed about going that far with it, but it was also just such an exciting moment in Papa Stour, and I thought, I’ll leave it in there, it’s a piece of writing that excites me, it feels true to me.

GRB: Time also seems to work differently for you in Shetland – you speak of the ‘ever-expanding Now’, an infinite time found in small moments of recognition and absolution. Can you speak more towards this, and how you realised it in your writing – especially in a form in which linearity and consequentiality may be the expectation?

JH: I guess I’d had moments like that before I moved here as well . . . and poetry gave me access to those moments. I think I’m someone who’s always found life happens a bit too quickly. There’s slightly too much going on for me to keep up with my mental processing, so I can feel quite overwhelmed sometimes, when too much happens too relentlessly for too long. It can be briefly really exciting, and then just a bit battering, and I feel like so many of us are struggling in that fast current. It feels a bit inhumane sometimes, but some people sail it better than others!

Time and pace in poetry is really interesting to me in a bodily way, a psychological way, and when I first started saying poetry aloud at university, and in my MLitt at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, it was weirdly calming. I was so nervous about doing it, and then I stood up to read my one poem at the showcase at the end of the course. I really loved it, and said it really slowly, because it would give me a chance to breathe, and I could calm down.

I felt in command of my spoken language for the first time, and talking about experience in a pace that I could cope with. It was very soothing! I think I started speaking slower and slower, and I speak in my poems now very slowly. People sometimes say that they find it quite calming, but it’s really something I do to get me through a reading. I love giving readings, I really enjoy it. Sometimes I think it’s like an act of hypnosis we’re attempting, and sometimes it feels good for people because of that – you’re working with rhythm and breath, and those are hypnotic tools. Sometimes you can also get in ideas under the radar, when people are in a state of relaxation like that! I’m really just trying to create something that I can say without stuttering or stumbling.

That slowness is something that I really prize, now. I probably came to Shetland thinking, that’ll be a nicer pace of life, I can have time to dwell on things and write about them. It’s the sort of thing you’d think, as a poet, that an island life is an ideal place to pursue inspiration, and boil things down to essentials, which Shetland does. But there are so many folk coming and going, so much going on, sometimes you don’t have time to breathe here either! Especially in the summertime. So it’s not that there’s a slow pace of life up here, not in my experience anyway, people are very busy.

I think if you’re engaged with your community here, you know a lot of folk, folk from different circles of experience, and that’s really rich and lovely too. The thing that I love about poetry, as I say over and again to students, is that it’s made of words and silent words, those two things. The words you see on the page and the silences surrounding them – the line breaks, the stanza breaks, a weird placement of text on a page. Those breathing spaces where you can dwell on mysteries, and literally breathe if you’re saying it out loud. But also where the reader can contribute creatively and imaginatively – it feels like courteous space. So I’m very aware of those spaces, and I tried to put some of those in the prose as well.

GRB: There’s a poem in your collection The Stone Field called ‘Limpet’ – which, as we learn in Storm Pegs, is your chosen spirit-daemon – in which you write: ‘turn the key of / yourself in the lock / of yourself, fasten – / with a hundred / infinitesimal / mortices -’ What has writing Storm Pegs unlocked for you, in yourself? With reference to this poem, are the ways of unlocking ourselves to the world always within our power, like writing?

JH: I think a series of acceptances, maybe – and nothing too dramatic, actually. I began thinking I’m writing non-fiction, I better know some stuff! I better be good at wrangling information, but I know in my heart of hearts I’m not very good at wrangling information. Now Sally Huband is just amazing at writing in a spirit of scientific exploration – you just know when she puts a fact or a figure or a curiosity down that she’s researched it properly! She’s so good at handling that level of detail; and a good friend, so I get to enjoy the things she knows about the world that I don’t.

I’m not good with facts and information, especially numbers; if I’ve got a number in the manuscript I’m questioning it constantly. That uncertainty extends to any kind of fact-based wrangling I do which feels like a failing in non-fiction. I feel through the writing of Storm Pegs that I found a growing comfortableness in not knowing, and I thought, I’ll embrace that actually; why would I know that? Why would I know all these things?

I just started teaching a course called ‘The Passionate Essay’ last night, online for Moniack Mhor. I’ve got a lovely crowd of essayists, and next week we look at not knowing, in the essay. I feel like there’s a genre of non-fiction that is very much about knowing; ‘I’ll open this wonderful world of hitherto unknowns to the reader,’ you know? I thought it would be interesting to embrace and acknowledge my own unknowing; and to seek to understand better where I could, but also just to situate myself in a universe of unknowing.

Maybe that gave me this sense of vertigo, and sense of depth, of where am I, where are we? I found it very awakening – as I said, coming to a head on Bonhoga, just, my God… we’re sailing through the universe very, very fast! We forget about that all the time. Sometimes, the more we try to know things, and to pin them down, and to anchor them with the correct language, to give them the right Latin name, sometimes that becomes a kind of armoury between ourselves and the dizzying nature of experience. I think genuinely something that is something that writing this book has unlocked within me is that sense of vertigo, but it’s so pleasurable and I welcome it so much.

GRB: The book is guided by a central question, where am I? You write towards a sense of locating yourself in the world, ‘and in the Universe’. Even though Shetland is in this ‘constant state of flux’, do you feel closer to an answer to this question, after navigating the landscape of Storm Pegs? Where is Shetland for you as we speak? Where are you?

JH: I think it helped me situate myself in the centre of my own perception; a whirling and dizzying place. I feel very belonging and comfortable in that, by the end. I don’t feel like I know where I am anymore; the big wind farm is close to completion now. It’s not operational yet, but will be soon. The central mainland looks very, very different from when I moved here. We’ve also suffered a series of quite painful cultural losses recently, everywhere is suffering these massive funding cuts, and there’s more to come, I’m very aware of that.

So, for creative people it’s a worrying time, a time for questioning how we survive, for many folk. I’m so lucky I’m going to have this extraordinary, rescue life-buoy in September, otherwise I would have been in trouble; universities are in a state of crisis, our college up here is in a state of crisis, we’re losing our art courses, we’ve lost our book festival up here, our film festival has stopped. It was phenomenal.

It feels like a very worrying and dark time for people in all sectors, but especially in the arts at the moment, and we feel quite vulnerable. So, I feel more at sea in that way, as an artist and a writer here. I’m worried for all my friends. But there’s some really cool grassroots stuff coming up in those vacuums. There’s a really lovely, monthly open mic session which has started up (almost in protest really, as I see it) at The Bop Shop in Lerwick. Tiny little venue, rammed with artists and writers.

We went along with my son when he was really quite small; people were setting things up for themselves, with a real kind of urgency. There was an amazing art sale fundraiser for Palestine about a month ago as well. They raised thousands and thousands. Loads of Shetland’s artists donated to that; excited, because they were all running into each other in this big gallery space, and we’ve lost our own gallery spaces recently as well.

I feel very at sea, in the present tense, in Shetland, and at the same time hopeful, because I think we are a creative and resilient people here. It just depends if we can hold our own against big industry. There will always be industry here, there always has been. So that bit led me to think I would maybe write a sequel . . . I’d really like to write about my son’s first nine months of life. It’s been another way of anchoring myself here, and I’ve met so many lovely new folk, through having a baby professionally, and socially.

Jen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to The Glasgow Review of Books.

Jen Hadfield will be in conversation with Amy Liptrot and Roseanne Watt at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on the 13th of August, with tickets available here.

Jen will also be launching Storm Pegs at Waterstones Sauchiehall Street the following evening, 14th August, which you can book to attend here.

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About our interviewer

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