James Canton, THE OAK PAPERS

[2:01]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, moms don't have time to read books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen vaccine research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Doctor. James Canton is the author of The Oak Papers. Doctor. Canton runs the Wild Writing MA at the University of Essex and is the author of Ancient Wonderings and Out of Reimagining a Literary Landscape. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Essex and writes for the Times Literary Supplement Caught by the River and Earth Lines. He is a regular on British TV and radio teaching and lecturing frequently. He lives in Essex, England. Welcome, James. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss the Oak papers. You're very welcome. It's nice to be here, Zibby. It really is. Where are you Zooming in from, by the way? You're in London or where are you? For all the New Yorkers out there or the Americans,

[3:18]James Canton: I'm actually in that little Old Island, England, about an hour Northeast of London where I come from. But I've I've kind of now kind of camped out in a field for the last twenty odd years. Not exactly, but in a really lovely kind of little English village in a very old cottage that was once used by farm laborers. Yeah. Really nice. Well,

[3:40]Zibby Owens: that sort of jives with your whole sort of Sure. You know, treat us on on nature and books and sort of the old school way of living, if you will. Why don't you tell listeners what The Oak Papers is about? Okay. Sure, Sylvia. So

[3:54]James Canton: a few years ago, I was working in a secondary school, in a high school in rural Essex where I live. And I just decided one day that I would go and visit an 800 year old oak tree. And it wasn't completely out of the blue in the sense that I was, by then I was teaching a master's class in wild writing. And I come from a kind of literary background. So I really wanted to build my knowledge, my skills as a naturalist, as an ecologist. So I thought this might work out as a really good project. Thought, well, you know, I could spend some time with this tree, kind of get to know some of the bugs and the beasties that kind of live around this tree. So, you know, so I got in touch with a guy who went under the title of curator of trees on this small English estate. Lovely guy called Jonathan Jukes. And I literally contacted him out of the blue and said, look, I've got this plan that I kind of want to come and sit by this tree. You know, for all different times of day and night and through seasons, you know, in the rain and the snow. And I met him and he doesn't say too much. There's a lot of what men and women do as I realized. But he just kind of like nodded a bit. And then he was kind of like, yeah, I get that. I get that. And the estate very kindly agreed that I would have kind of free access. I could kind of go in through this little, literally a small gate at the back of the estate whenever I wanted, which was just a kind of really quite incredible ticket to freedom as it felt at the time. And so that's, I mean, is how the project began that I literally went and sat by this 800 year old Oak tree that, you know, that was still a big tree four hundred years ago when the English civil war was taking place. You know, this kind of thing, it had this incredible history. I mean, I mentioned that because we know, we have documentary evidence that there were parliamentary troops, camping up by this tree as they went to siege Colchester in the 1640s. So incredible history. And this

[6:00]Zibby Owens: kind of enticed me into spending some time with this tree. Yeah. Wow. And I love how you did it as a journal, how you had like different days and you would you felt so in the moment with you. Like this whole book was like an exercise in mindfulness sort of. Wow. The fact that you wrote it in the present tense and you just had us there with you. Like, I am sitting I mean, I think it was in the present tense or at least yeah. Lot lot of sections of it. I was like, did I make a mistake? But the the immediacy of it and the way you experience nature brings us in as if we are sitting there too. Not to mention that you must have found every single literary reference to an oak tree, like in the planet.

[6:42]James Canton: Yeah. My background was, I just, I'd fairly recently completed a PhD. So the idea of doing research was still very, I mean, it's still very much part of my world. So after I spent a bit of time with this tree, after a few months, I started thinking, I need to know more about kind of humans and oaks. And in The States and in Britain and in a number of countries around the world, as learned, we have this very special relationship with oaks. You know, we might have slightly different species of oaks in our different kind of lands, but often people do feel this close connection, this close affinity to oaks. And obviously often to the most ancient and most kind of magnificent examples, individuals, if you like, of the oaks that we kind of hang around with. So yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. As soon as you start, as soon as I started spending time in the British Library exploring this incredible cultural history, I mean, I realized you could go back to the earliest written texts in Western civilizations. So you could go back to Homer, you go back to the Odyssey, and we're reminded that Odysseus, before he can set sail back to Ithaca, he has to get the word of truth from the gods in the Temple of Dodona. And how does he get, how are those words given to him? They come through the susurrations is the word, the susurrations of the oak leaves, the whisperings of these leaves that is then interpreted by the priests. And they told Odysseus to go home. So, right, I mean, right through, as you say, I spent a lot of time going through as many kind of cultural references as I could. And then I just wanted to kind of place them through the book as much as possible. So that's, yeah, that's very much what I did.

[8:34]Zibby Owens: A lot of them are really beautiful. So who knew? Odysseus. Oh my gosh. I read the Odyssey for school in like seventh grade and now you're taking me back to like taking me back to that whole time. Yeah. I mean, ancient Greece. The way you wrote about oaks, the book is not simply about trees and nature. Right? It's about our relationship Yeah. To the world is really what the book is more about. It's not just about the history of trees. Right? It's about what it means when we spend time in nature and when we are with the tree and what it does to our own reflection when things around us sort of pause. Sort of interesting that this comes out at the end of the pandemic where things have actually paused for a while. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that's absolutely right. And this was something that I kind of started to experience.

[9:21]James Canton: And and I think this is how the the nature of the book shifted from me, from what I'd initially envisaged as a kind of as a study of the oak and its kind of habitations and the creatures that it lives with into something that was far more human centered. Because I realized that every time I went and sat by this ancient oak tree, I felt calmer and more peaceful and more at ease in my world. And as much as anything, I genuinely I mean, for a while, I just kind of bathed in that, it has to be said. And then part of me started to sort of say, well, why? What's all that about? So I've done this research into and the whole process was kind of ongoing. But as you know, in the book, what I do is I kind of go and talk and interview informally a number of kind of experts. So I spoke to an environmental psychologist at one point and you know, and kind of literally said, look, Mike, you know, why do I feel calmer when I'm sitting next to an oak tree or sitting in an oak tree? And he kind of explained some of the kind of current science to do with, you know, our brain patterns the shift that is scientifically proven that takes place as we step into green spaces, natural spaces out of more urban kind of human created spaces. And what the scientists call stepping from stressed states to meditative states, you know, and things started to kind of make sense. You know, I kind of genuinely realized that, you know, that there was a genuine sense in which my well-being was being improved by being with the oaks. Yeah. Defined an oak tree, pronto.

[11:02]Zibby Owens: Yeah. All right. Well well, this like this is basically what you were just saying, but you said, I became even closer to oaks. I made being beside an oak tree part of my daily ritual, like a religious practice. Rather than merely visiting the honeywood oak on the way to or from work, I now sought to spend more time each day in that still world beside an oak tree. I would turn from all that troubled me in life and work in order to sit beside an oak and focus my thoughts on the presence of that tree. By an oak tree, my mind became calmer. It was a form of meditation. I spent more and more time in the company of oaks. I leaned on oak trees for support. In many ways, it was a stepping away, a withdrawal from my own species. I can see that now. The silent sentient ways of the oak becoming something I strove for as though there were personality traits that I could take on if only I spent enough time beside or within an oak tree. It was a deeply meditative way of being that I searched for. I believed such a state would keep me sane. Whether I was fleeing from being human or seeking to be of the tree, I still do not know. At times, it felt as if I was drifting too far, like sailing too far from the shore. And I did turn at times to the thoughts of others. I sought out those sympathetic souls who kindly offered me their wise words on what oaks meant to them, how it was that Oaks offered us peace and calm and even what it meant to be the Oak. So beautiful.

[12:15]James Canton: Thank you. I was just thinking I should add for the listener that there was a kind of personal aspect to this. I was kind of you know, going through the breakup of a long relationship and, you know, I went through kind of some kind of difficult times through the five years or so that I ended up taking to write this book. And as you put so well in that passage, you read it really nicely. There was this sense of time. And I think most adults through their life at some point will experience difficult times and also hopefully experience the solace that you can get as a human by stepping into the natural world. And for me, that was kind of linked with stepping into the enveloping embrace of oaks or something like that. So I started to go not just to the 800 year old oak tree that was a drive away and near my work, but, you know, to a local oak that was just a walk away that I could step up into and actually sit within as well. And that was, again, a kind of step up in the kind of experiential experience, if you like, that I was undertaking getting to know Oaks.

[13:33]Zibby Owens: So yeah, it a powerful process at times. It really was. Yeah. Well, it's so funny because and this is how, you know, like the power of a good book, right? This weekend, I went to a wedding in Virginia, which was like a seven hour drive or whatever. And it was on like in the middle of these rolling hills, in the middle of nowhere with like this vast expanse. And it was called the Inn at Willow Grove. So there were all these Willow trees when you first like go in. And I would normally not even look twice at a tree. I mean, I'm a New Yorker. I know that sounds terrible. I just don't really notice them. I mean, I notice if one is strikingly beautiful and I'm like, Oh, that's so pretty. But after reading your book and finding myself on this gorgeous piece of property for this wedding, I kept going over to all these trees and looking at them in a new way and imagining similar to the man who owned the land where you would go for your first oak tree and how he put in his will that the trees not be felled. It turns out that they were, one by one, all around the land except for the one remaining tree. And how it was that that I was standing there with all these original trees and like, what if all the ones around me had been taken down? Anyway, it was like a whole I went down a whole thing in my head about That's wonderful to hear. I mean, is praise indeed.

[14:49]James Canton: Know what I mean? That kind of because I love that the book has kind of turned your world a little bit or your vision for a while. That's so nice. Yeah, that's lovely. Yeah. Thank you. I like how books change the way you see everything. Yeah. I mean, was chatting to someone yesterday and I was actually selling books on a little market stall in a little craft fair just down the road from me, which was really sweet. And it was just really nice to chat some people. And someone came up and they said, oh, I've read this. I read this last summer. And they were really nice. And I said, well, I wrote it. And we had a lovely chat. And they were saying, you know what? You wrote it. And it went slower and slower. The pace of the book kind of And I just became calmer and calmer as I was reading it. I was like, Oh my goodness, that's so lovely to hear. Because that's exactly what I kind of strove to kind of create in terms of a kind of a tone, a kind of pace to the book, that it was hopefully not too slow, but kind of meditative in that sense that it kind of offered a kind of oak time reading. You kind of, you know, if we all operated in kind of oak time, think we'd be a lot calmer, lot more kind of chilled out perhaps. So, you know, that was really nice to hear from someone. Yeah.

[16:04]Zibby Owens: Wow. Living in Oak time. I like that. Yeah. I have to say I was expecting a little more about your life when I because I read, know, I think in the description or something, it was intersection of a memoir and da da da. But you were very I mean, KG sounds negative, so I don't want to use that word. Like, you just obliquely referenced some of the things about your life, but there was no detail into that, which is fine, you know? But then I wondered, what was that about? Was that obviously, it was a conscious decision at some point. But Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still easy. Quinn says beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand mark up. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and three hundred and sixty sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zibby.

[19:30]James Canton: Yeah, it's a good point, isn't it? I mean, I think I teach quite a lot of books that are nature based. And often, people are very, very open. They use nature as a kind of a background to their own kind of personal disclosures. And I kind of talked with the editor about this. And we wanted to include that personal narrative. And I was like, I'm really happy to do that. But I don't really want. This is not meant to be a book about me. I mean, obviously, I'm the storyteller. I'm the narrator. But it's a factual book about Oaks and my experiences and time with them. And I don't want people to get caught in my story because what I really would love is people read this book, and then it affects them in the sense that they start going to trees and they start to appreciate their local trees, a bit as you did at your lovely wedding. That was really what I would like to happen in terms of the book, rather than people think, Oh, you know, and follow it as some people brutally call a misery memoir type thing, you know, a nature memoir. I was like, I don't really want that. I want it to be more uplifting than that. I want it to be more centered around a more kind of meditative pace of, you know, of recognizing the value that the natural world can have for us as humans and how it has had that through our history, you know, from the first time that we kind of stepped into becoming farmers, away from the kind of hunter gatherer narrative of our lifestyle. And, you know, this was very much more what I wanted to create in the book. So yeah, it was it's a good point because there was an editorial meeting where I was going to be kind of told, look, it will sell a lot more copies if you, you know, if you if you tell us everything about what happened in the breakdown of your relationship and, you know, But they my editor was great. My editor was great because I was like, that's not really what I want to be doing. Yeah. Well,

[21:31]Zibby Owens: what you really did well also was set the stage for sort of the sadness or that's not even the right word, but how it was almost like a tragedy when all of the trees were cut down and the flippant way in which those decisions are made and the repercussions of that and what we're taking away when all these trees were cut down just for local timber and what that does to a community and what that does to the people who get ancillary benefits from that. And just so many other ripple effects from one generation's decisions forever.

[22:09]James Canton: Yeah, that's right. And I think, I mean, exactly. I say about that first meeting with Jonathan Dukes at this, you know, literally under the oak. And he told me this story then and there, and I didn't know it. And as you hint towards, the story was that he put it something like this. If we'd been standing here sixty years ago, we'd be standing with about 300 other Oaks of a similar age, 300 other. You know, I didn't know this. I mean, live in this, you know, nearby and I didn't know the story. And so, you know, I was kind of genuinely quite shocked and you kind of initially you think, oh God, know, what were they doing? That's my grandfather's generation. Now, what were they doing? Then, you know, down the line, kind of pause and you think two generations down, my grandchildren, what are they going be saying about what we've done or haven't done in terms of climate change, in terms of an environmental narrative, etcetera? And this was something that I just realized this needed to be part of the story as well. I have to do that. And one of the people that I met and introduced this kind of voice in the story was someone who worked there as a teenager. And he's a very, very lovely guy. I met him at one point, and I talk about it in the book, collecting money for those who fell in the First World War, etcetera, and their generations on. But he wouldn't talk to me about what had happened in those woods with the 300 dead trees. So very powerful, very powerful in that kind of calm, kind of quiet, silent way that often these wood men and women that I met have. You know, that you're tempted to think they become tree like in their ways, if you like. Become wise and, you know, calm and quiet.

[24:08]Zibby Owens: So as an English teacher, I'm sure you have a bazillion pieces of advice for aspiring writers. But what would you what would you say as advice and what pieces of that advice did you use when writing this book? Like what tricks and tools did you employ to

[24:27]James Canton: create this one yourself? Well, that's a good question. When I was talking to teaching my second years this, you know, in the last academic year, obviously we're all teaching on Zoom, etc. And with one class in my second year, so I teach creative non fiction to, I actually pulled out the files that came, the oak papers, just to kind of illustrate. And I don't have them here, but they're about nine inches thick of folders of paper. Not all of it is my writing, but a lot of it is. And that idea that this book went through three solid edits and a number of versions before it became this final version. That's something I think I always try and stress to students to work at material, to write on a daily basis if you can, you know, even if it's just small bits. I mean, you see that I include quite a lot of diary entries that I wrote, you know, in situ at the Oak. And often they're just small little snippets, but it keeps the writing process going. And if you can be writing on a on a daily or a weekly basis, I always think that's sort of the best advice you can give to people. And then if you can leave it after one and go back and have a little reread of it, edit it, work it, evolve it, you know, which is what The Oak Papers was all about. That's why it got called The Oak Papers because I had so much paper about oaks.

[25:57]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. And what is coming next for you now? Any more books in the future? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think probably a number of writers might say this, but pandemic's

[26:06]James Canton: been, you know, been really hard and obviously in a terrible thing in many ways, but it's allowed me more time in my day. So because I'm not commuting into the University of Essex. So it's meant I've been writing and I've, you know, so I've completed another book a bit ahead of time. So I've got a meeting with my editor on Friday to talk about getting But now we'll be coming out with Canongate hopefully next year and with Harper One as well. We've signed all the contracts. So that's really good. That is really good. And I'm currently working on a book that's more to do with rewilding and the idea of kind of helping the natural environment individually, you know, whether it's in a nice flat in New York, whether we can have some flowers as window boxes or, you know, not mowing your lawn in May or persuading farmers to be planting more wildflowers.

[27:00]Zibby Owens: Well, thank you. Thanks for chatting about the Oak papers with me, and I'm glad that you consolidated them into a nice slim book that I can have all the way across

[27:10]James Canton: the ocean. So, you know, thanks so much, and I look forward to seeing your next book when it comes out. Well, thank you, Zibia. I really appreciate your enthusiasm. And I love the fact that you were distracted at your wedding by some gorgeous willows. That's really, really good to hear. Good to hear a thing. I'm so glad.

[27:29]Zibby Owens: All right. Well, a great day and thank you so much. All right. Thanks so much, Bye. Thank you. Take care. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.