Ceda Parkinson’s Threadworks was recently published on Guillemot Press. It’s a work that weaves together the biology of spiders with a satellite view over the web-like patterns of a sprawling, fragile world. In the following interview, Elliot Ruff speaks to Ceda about her new book.
ELLIOT: Is writing a kind of threadwork?
CEDA: I think most creative work is a weaving of different threads. When it came to materializing this project, I’d been collecting those threads for quite a while, probably about a year before I started writing. I was really interested in the feeling I would get from spiders. The energy they emit triggered my imagination. So, I had this big document with pages of things – quotes from books, poems, scientific journals – and that was so helpful as a resource to keep coming back to when I was writing Threadworks. I found I was able to link them together. It wasn’t just words I was collecting; it was also images and music. I kept coming back to these things, and that is how the weaving aspect started.
E: You write that: ‘in order to know a creature, we must first turn around and meet it. If this isn’t possible [...] we must allow ourselves to be tangled in the web it has spun around us’. Is this a good description of how you went about researching and writing the book?
C: That was a line that came quite early on. I definitely feel like that was the process – I think the natural world is full of entanglements. There are no borders or lines that can’t be crossed – so that’s what I wanted to achieve. I wanted it to feel vast, sprawling and intertextual.
E: You’ve described the book as ‘poetic non-fiction’. I’m wondering if you were reading or writing poetry as part of your practice?
C: Definitely, I was reading a lot of poetry. I was reading a lot of Peter Redgrove and Erin Robinsong. And I was writing poetry as well. I was intrigued by this idea of ‘biomimicry’, which I’ve read about in the context of architecture, where natural infrastructures are used as a template for buildings. I wondered if language could be used in the same way and if I could recreate a spider web using language.
E: Did you have to spend much time around spiders for the writing? And are you afraid of spiders at all and did you have to pull on your own fear of them whilst writing?
C: A good thing about spiders is that you don’t need to go far to be around them – they are everywhere. So I definitely spent time with spiders when I was writing. There was one under my desk and it was interesting to watch what was going on in that web. It was through watching that spider under my desk that I learnt they shed their exoskeletons. I thought this spider had died, but I then realised she was somewhere else and she had just left this form behind.
Spiders didn’t bother me at all as a kid. It wasn’t until I became a teenager that suddenly they became the most terrible thing I could ever come across. I felt frustrated with myself. And it was the same with my friends; suddenly spiders were bringing up these intense reactions.
I guess I was frightened of them, but also curious as to what was going on here? Why was this tiny creature creating such a hysteric response in people? It was interesting and quite gratifying to do some research on this, and then to find out about tarantism and all the mass hysteric reactions that people have had throughout the centuries. So, I was afraid of spiders, but through this project and researching them I found that I actually enjoyed being around them again. Writing this book kind of cured me of my fear of spiders.
E: The book seems to celebrate poetic imagery – finding new angles and views – new ways of seeing things.
C: That’s definitely something that excites me about nature writing – finding new ways of seeing. I’m interested in the ways the natural world is constantly entangled and how we can use language to tap into that. I watched a talk by Silvia Federici, and she talked about language as a way of being in disruption of narrow ways of thinking and being. And to me that’s really important, and what I will always try and aim to do. To use language to disrupt stagnant and narrow ways of being and thinking. It feels important in these times.
E: And did you practice with textiles and that kind of thread-work at all for the writing?
C: I was interested in weaving, so I started to learn how to weave on a loom, which was fun and definitely helped to inform my thinking. I can’t say I was very good at it, but just working with thread as a material is gratifying. And that helped to inform my ideas of creative work as threadwork.
E: What do the intricately woven comparisons say about the ecological divide between human and spider?
C: What struck me after doing all this research was that the divide is not as big as we think, and how closely we live alongside each other. We exist in the same spaces and there’s something intriguing about that. This creature that is often hated and feared, also lives alongside us. I think there was a study that said in an average house there’s probably over a thousand spiders living there. So, I guess the divide became a lot smaller when writing Threadworks.
E: You talk about how in the context of ecology the thread is a powerful image for ‘considering how far-reaching and impactful a threaded network can be, as well as the consequences of destroying even just a section of this network’. Was there a politically ecological drive behind your use of the thread as imagery?
C: It wasn’t conscious, but what I’m most interested in is shifting between ways of seeing and framing things. So, if we can find ways of seeing and exploring nature that could fundamentally change the way we think and be then I think that’s what I’m most intrigued and excited by.
Threadworks by Ceda Parkinson has been illustrated by Martha Harris and is available here.
