New Welsh Reader 134: Skate Fever

By Rachel Hewitt, Jay Griffiths and Stephen Gregory

Female-led European literature with a focus on place in nonfiction, narrative voice in fiction, diversity in poetry and panache in photography and visuals. Illustrations by Margiad Evans/Peggy Whistler and Kreg Yingst. This edition celebrates female pioneers, freedom and nature's own laws. In a two-part special on Margiad Evans, we appraise her

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Welsh Review
• Release date: Dec 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913830250

Rachel Hewitt

Rachel Hewitt is a writer and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first book, the best-selling MAP OF A NATION: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY (2010), won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. She was awarded a Gladstone's Library Political Writing Residency for her second book, A REVOLUTION OF FEELING: THE DECADE THAT FORGED THE MODERN MIND (2017). Rachel is Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and received the prestigious work-in-progress prize, the Eccles British Library Writer's Award, for IN HER NATURE: HOW WOMEN ARE BREAKING BOUNDARIES IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS (2023). She loves trail-running and was 1st Female in the Punk Panther Ultra Series in 2020 and 3rd Female in the Hardmoors Marathon Series in 2019. Her longest run to date was the Punk Panther Dales Way Challenge (c83 miles) in August 2021. She lives in Yorkshire.

Book preview

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Contents

IMPRINT

TWO-PART APPRAISAL OF MARGIAD EVANS

Part One Art, Writing and Myopia

Part TWO NATURE Writing

CRESTA RUN, ST MORITZ, SKATE FEVER

CRESTA RUN

St Moritz

Skate Fever

EMMY HENNINGS: CONVERSIONS

THE LATE MR LEWIS

CRUMBS

IMPRINT

New Welsh Reader

New Welsh Review Ltd

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Management Board:

Shara Atashi, Gwen Davies (Director), Andrew Green (Director, Chair), David Michael (Treasurer), Emily Blewitt (Poetry Subs Editor, Vice-Chair), Jacqueline Yallop, Jowhor Ile, Professor Tony Brown (AWWE rep)

Sponsor of the New Welsh Writing Awards: RS Powell

Design: Ingleby Davies Design

Host: Aberystwyth University

Main images: Cover photography by Lizzie Le Blond (LLB) unless stated otherwise. Front: presumed to be of LLB, photo taken on 15 February, 1893 by Captain Bligh. Inside front: ‘Our ledge is amply cushioned’. Inside back: bearded gentleman and short woman with cane. Back: unknown woman with hat and veil. All cover images reproduced with kind permission of the Lizzie Le Blond collection at the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum, Kansas, USA. Contents page images. Top: General Law. BR: ‘Mechthild of Magdeburg’, block print © Kreg Yingst

We acknowledge the financial support of the Books Council of Wales and Creative Wales for a New Audiences grant.

© The New Welsh Review Ltd and the authors

ISBN: 9781913830250

ISSN: 09542116

Views expressed in NWR are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of either editor or board.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, recorded or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher, the New Welsh Review Ltd.

The New Welsh Review Ltd publishes with the financial support of the Books Council of Wales, and is hosted by Aberystwyth University’s Department of English & Creative Writing. The New Welsh Review Ltd was established in 1988 by Academi (now Literature Wales) and the Association for Welsh Writing in English. New Welsh Reader is New Welsh Review’s print (and digital) magazine for creative work. We also publish monthly roundups of online content, including reviews, comment and poetry, and at least one book annually on the New Welsh Rarebyte imprint, run a writing competition (New Welsh Writing Awards), and improve diversity in the UK publishing industry by hosting student and graduate work placements.

Mae croeso ichi ohebu â’r golygydd yn Gymraeg.

Patrons: Belinda Humfrey, Owen Sheers

TWO-PART APPRAISAL OF MARGIAD EVANS

Part One

Art, Writing and Myopia

DRAWING ON PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED ARTWORK AND LETTERS, JIM PRATT ARGUES FOR THE UNIQUE TALENT OF THE AUTHOR AS A VISUAL ARTIST, AND FOR HER GENIUS AS A NATURE WRITER

Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler, 1909–1958, author of five novels and short stories, three autobiographies and two published volumes of poetry, also my aunt) trained as an artist, more notably specialising in etching. Recently discovered diminutive drawings from her time at art school while still a teenager show her to be a highly talented designer and artist, able to depict expression in faces only a few millimetres across. After illustrating for two authors, she turned to writing instead, and art became subsidiary (but still important) for the rest of her life, itself cut short by cancer. Her tastes in subjects were catholic, but much in this author’s possession are in the form of black-and-white sketches, mostly of landscape and architecture. The last pieces, made before and after she was diagnosed as epileptic (caused by a brain tumour) are curious, almost primitive renditions of allegory in which perspective is dispensed with. At the same time, she was able to draw touching realistic sketches of mundane objects such as her daughter’s baby shoes and her neighbour in the maternity hospital.

The diminutive drawings, made when she was a student, raise some issues relating to her acute myopia, which may be tentatively linked to and have inspired some aspects of the nature writing that characterised her wartime life in Potacre, Llangarron¹ (Herefordshire) in her seminal work Autobiography (1943), and also in her hitherto unpublished letters to her brother when he was a prisoner of war (PoW 1940–45). Her detailed observations and vivid perception of the natural world are detailed in the second part of this extended essay.

The earliest record of her myopia is in a letter written to her brother Roger