Podcast

Culture

S&U interviews

3 June 2023

4 min read

My conversation with... Paul Kingsnorth

Re-enchanting... Nature. Belle TIndall reflects on an infectious conversation with Paul Kingsnorth, the celebrated author, poet and environmentalist. Finding him a particularly enjoyable guide through the daunting landscapes of belief, environmentalism and AI.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A sitting man speaks into a microphone will gesturing with one hand

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What would you get if you were to combine a weighty appreciation for the beauty and power of nature with an unexpected conversion to Orthodox Christianity, topped off with an unwavering aversion to smartphones?

Well, you would get something resembling a Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical. He is, much to my own delight, somewhat of a real-life Gandalf the Gray. If it were not for his London accent, he could easily belong in the pages of Tolkien’s literary world.

And just one final thing to note about Paul Kingsnorth, since 2021 he has been horrified to find himself a Christian.

‘…in the end I just thought oh, maybe I’m a Christian. Damn.’

Well, actually, that’s unfair of me to say. It’s obvious when talking to Paul that the horror quickly dissolved, and wonder and awe became its swift replacements. But nevertheless, initially he could have rivalled C.S Lewis for the title of ‘the most reluctant convert in all of England.’ As tempted as I am, Paul tells his own story so powerfully (both in his writing and in our conversation for the Re-Enchanting Podcast), that I shan’t even attempt to tell it for him here.

But what I will say, is that we need people like Paul: the eccentrics, the contemplatives, the fearful, the awe-filled, the critics, the mystics. They're essential.

The actress Jennifer Coolidge, in her Golden Globes acceptance speech for her (unforgettable) performance in the show White Lotus, paid tribute to its creator, Mike White. It was an oddly insightful tribute. She said,

‘if you don’t know about Mike White, this is what you should know – he’s worried about the world. He’s worried about people. He’s worried about friends that aren’t doing well. He’s worried about animals…’

and she continued gushing in this vein while the camera panned to Mike weeping in the audience.

As I was recording this particular episode of Re-Enchanting and listening to Paul talk, Jennifer’s speech kept playing in my mind. After approximately one hour in his company, I can’t claim to know Paul Kingsnorth well, but what I do know of him makes me want to pay a similar tribute:

‘if you don’t know about Paul Kingsnorth, this is what you should know – he’s worried about the world…’

And, just as Jennifer Coolidge seemed to be towards Mike White, I found myself profoundly thankful that he is.

There was nothing nonchalant about our conversation with Paul, deep fascination seems to be his signature disposition towards most things, and perhaps therein lies the source of so much worry. When one is deeply fascinated or emotionally invested, assured of meaning, or perhaps even continually in awe of something; how can worry for its welfare not also be present? To worry about something is to care, it is to render it worthy of your worry, and Paul seems to render us all worthy of his. Why? Well, in his words, because

‘if God is an artist, which I think he is, then nature is his artwork. And we’re a part of it too, incidentally. We’re natural too.’

Therefore, the fact that we seem to have lost sight of this, and subsequently fractured our relationships with each other, with the natural world, and with God, is a crisis of the most spiritual proportions. And Paul cares.

I feel it is at this point that I must offer a disclaimer: my conversation with Paul Kingsnorth was a delight. It was, to borrow a familiar phrase, re-enchanting and I enjoyed it to no end.

While it is true that he leads us into some weighty topics (the terrors of AI, the disaster of being so divorced from the natural world, the problems woven into the very make-up of our society), he is a particularly enjoyable guide through what can be daunting landscapes. He may have an eye for detecting doom, but he seems to do so with a personable lightness. Like I say, he’s Gandalf, just without the staff.

It also helps that alongside a diagnosis, he so enthusiastically offers up what he believes to be a cure,

‘The more you have to answer these questions: what is a human? What is nature? What is the world? The more people will be ready for actual, serious, Christianity again. Full-strength Christianity. Not the weak version, the real thing. And I think that’s starting to happen, I can feel it.’

Paul’s episode of Re-Enchanting is well worth an hour of your time, his infectious fascination with all things nature is worth infinitely more.

Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”