Poet and author Jen Hadfield on her love of Shetland

Jen Hadfield, author of Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland | Pic: Contributed

Yesterday was Out Skerries, tomorrow will be Yell, but right now Jen Hadfield is talking to me from her partner’s boat moored off Fetlar. A fortnight ago, she, baby Robin and partner Euan had sailed it to Fair Isle. Nineteen years ago, that’s where, to all extents and purposes, both her career as a poet and her love of Shetland began. 

Both are spectacular. Last month she published Storm Pegs, about her life on Shetland, and it’s hard to imagine a book more suffused with a love of place. And next month, she and her family will head across the Atlantic to Yale University, where she will be presented with an award worth - gulp! - £140,000. 

That three-day trip to Fair Isle in 2005 as part of a year-long writer residency in Shetland changed her life. “My sister [Natasha, a doctor, who now also lives on Shetland] and I were talking about this the other day and we both thought that island life  was something that we almost weren’t allowed. I don’t know where we got the idea from, that it was something for other people, not us. But those three days on Fair Isle encircled by fog, but in a wee sun spot of our own, and the welcome we got ... that was the real turning point.”

Until then, the thought of settling on Shetland hadn’t crossed her mind. Scotland, yes: she’d left England to study, first at Edinburgh and then Glasgow universities. Even then, when working part-time at a Glasgow cheesemonger’s, she knew what she wanted to be. She’d been giving a talk about cheese when a customer asked her just that very question. “I want to be a poet,” she said. “Oh dear,” the woman replied.

In 2005, although her first collection had been well received, she had writer’s block and if she was going to live anywhere, Canada – where her Cheshire-based family had relatives – looked a stronger bet. But Neil Thompson, then the skipper of the Fair Isle ferry, gave her a photocopied booklet from 1945 – anonymous, incomplete – about old Shetlandic words used on the island. It set her mind racing. “It felt like I could suddenly, like a bee, see a brand-new spectrum of colours,” she writes.

These days, she admits, when there is greater sensitivity about cultural and linguistic appropriation, her reaction to Shetlandic might be somewhat different. Back then, though, “those new words were such a springboard off into seeing things anew”.  The example she picks is the Shaetlan verb to knap, “which basically means making the language easier for a non-Shetlander to understand. Yet in that booklet Neil gave me, the definition of the word doesn’t refer to language. Instead, ‘knapping’ is defined as two ponies cleaning each other’s hair with their mouths. There’s clearly something that is mutually beneficial and symbiotic, and whether or not there’s a connection with language, it’s a beautiful metaphor.” 

But if the inherent poetry of Shaetlan (pipper, to shake, sprikkel, to flounder, as a fish out of water or a woman in her lover’s arms) first drew her to island life, the landscape soon cast a spell. “I stopped writing love poems to unavailable men and started writing love poems instead to ootadaeks” [adv: outside the hill dykes, used metaphorically to mean a place that isn’t someone’s normal place of abode]. “Praise poetry was all that I could write.” Why leave civilization? her grandmother asks. “Because it’s heaven,” she replies.

It wasn’t just the vastness of the skies or the ever-changing landscape which made her swearing softly, continually, under her breath at the impossible beauty of the islands she was now learning to call home. Heaven was in the detail too: foraging for whelks or razor-clams on the shore, exploring every last living thing around her. 

“I’ve always loved microcosms and tiny models of things and what Annie Dillard writes about in her chapter on intricacy in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That’s all part of where the wonder is for me. I sometimes make things out of found objects in clay and I suppose it’s the same with my words – I’m just trying to make a replica of life right down to the finest detail. I love the fact that I’m always going to fail,” she laughs.

What sort of artwork does she make? “I print seaweed into clay tiles and cast puffballs and fallen apples from roadside verges in porcelain and tiny little boilersuits from bits of beach wrack. I paint a bit as well. It’s all a bit random. In Shetland there’s a culture of honesty boxes. My friend has one for art and I’ve got a sort of craft one next to hers. I don’t really sell through a website - the honesty box is my main outlet.”

Not everything about Shetland is perfect. “The island has lost both its book festival and its film festival,” she says, “lots of folk in the arts are losing their jobs, and the cost of heading south is really high.” 

Still, as we chat, and seemingly without trying, or listing, or sounding either platitudinous or like a tourist brochure, the blessings of island life fill Hadfield’s conversation. The sheer extent of creativity (The greatest in Scotland? Discuss) among a population of only 23,000. The quality of the musicianship. Random chats at passing places. Casual offers of free mackerel. The acceptance of difference. The readiness of neighbours to help. Unlocked doors. Honesty boxes.

Downsides? “In summertime, I always struggle when I’m teaching on Zoom because I’ll be sitting looking out of the window and there might be a gorgeous day or a sparkling sea and I’d be chomping at the bit to get outside. But winter is a good time to hunker down and go inward spiritually and creatively. And I really love midsummer and simmerdin and the birds and ... I can’t really think of a time of year here that I don’t like at all.”

Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland by Jen Hadfield is published by Picador, price £18.99. Jen  Hadfield will be appearing along with Amy Liptrot and Roseanne Watt at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday 13 August.