Liz Jensen's Blog, page 3

Book Talk – ‘Your Wild and Precious Life’

Join us for an evening where filmmaker and anthropologist Adam Paaske talks to Anglo-British novelist Liz Jensen about her memoir ‘Your Wild and Precious Life’, the story of how a mother rebuilt herself, reoriented her life and rediscovered the enchantment of the living world.

Liz Jensen’s son, a zoologist, conservationist and ecological activist, was twenty-five when he collapsed and died unexpectedly. She fell apart. As she grieved, forest fires raged, coral reefs deteriorated, CO2 emissions r...

My Son’s Ark

‘The future we expected has changed shape.’ For the third entry in our Kinship With Beasts series, we bring you a story originally written for our special issue ARK, in which Liz Jensen tells of staggering personal loss in the midst of the world’s cascading crises. A writer and founding member of Extinction Rebellion’s Writers Rebel, her book about her biologist and activist son, Your Wild and Precious Life, is launched today. With an image by Angela Cockayne from her series ‘Radical Fauna’.

Rea...

The books which have inspired Liz to write Your Wild and Precious Life

My son’s death will never make sense to me. But it has taught me that it’s possible to find meaning, collectively and individually, in the loss of what we love. And in finding them, transform. Resilience is a seed that we all bear inside us. It germinates in emergencies. It sets down roots in astonishing and unexpected ways. And if we notice it, and tend to it, it blooms.

Liz Jensen’s son, a zoologist, conservationist and ecological activist, was twenty-five when he collapsed and died unexpected...

Dear Reader: a letter from Liz

Dear Reader,

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this, too, was a gift.

A friend sent me those words by the poet Mary Oliver after my son Raphaël, a wildlife biologist and climate and environmental activist, died suddenly in February 2020. He was 25, and my world had collapsed. Was my friend actually suggesting that his death might be gift?

But after the first excruciating months, I began to see that there was deep wisdom in Oliver’s poem. N...

Your Wild and Precious Life video

You can read more about Your Wild and Precious Life and pre-order here.

The post Your Wild and Precious Life video appeared first on Liz Jensen.

Hear Liz on the Arts and Ecology podcast

Arts & Ecology is a brand new podcast about the vital role art and culture play in creating a regenerative future.

This week, we speak with writer Liz Jensen. Liz is the author of eight novels including the eco-thrillers The Rapture and The Uninvited. She is a founder member of Extinction Rebellion’s Writers Rebel, a literary movement using words and actions to highlight the climate and ecological emergency. Her work has been short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Award, nominated three times for...

The best books about psychic powers, consciousness, and the quest for the numinous

Liz writes on ‘The best books about psychic powers, consciousness, and the quest for the numinous‘.

 

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The post The best books about psychic powers, consciousness, and the quest for the numinous appeared first on Liz Jensen.

How Iggy Fox inspired me to take action

By Rachel White

After experiencing burnout in 2018, I took time out from a stressful job and as part of my recovery, in June 2019 I travelled to France to walk the Camino Frances. After completing this five-week solo trek across northern Spain, I returned to the UK very much a changed person. I had learnt to be grateful for the trees that shaded me from the sun, for the company of the birds, bees, mice, butterflies that were always found alongside me daily on the stretches of paths, where there...

The write way to fight

A protest against BP at the National Portrait Gallery in London CREDIT: Jamie Lowe

WHEN WRITERS REBEL (WR) formed to become Extinction Rebellion’s (XR’s) literary wing in the summer of 2019, our aim was to put literature in the service of the threatened ecosystems that sustain us.

One of our inspirations was the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement, which criticised literary fiction’s failure to address climate and ecological breakdown.

“It’s our job, as writers, to ma...

Remembering Fox by Danae Ave, founder of XR Greece

I cannot even begin to tell you how much of an impact Fox had on me. Individuals like him drive the wheels of civilisation forward and for that you need a formidable spirit and a magnetic personality. I sensed that a lot of people I met from XR felt completely lost after his passing, so I know I’m certainly not the only one. Fox was XR for me. I could not see XR the same way after his passing. It was his energy and his passion that drove all of us to him it was the fact that he saw our potential...