Author and 'spirit guide' embark on coastal pilgrimage
Festival date for Jake Morris-Campbell
Life’s been a bit of a whirl for South Shields writer Jake Morris-Campbell since his first book – if you set aside his 2021 poetry collection – was published in March.
Since the official launch of Between the Salt and the Ash at The Common Room (formerly Mining Institute) in Newcastle, he has given talks around the country, obviously in the North East but also in Manchester, Liverpool and Oswestry.
There was enthusiastic coverage not just locally but nationally in publications as diverse as The New Statesman and The Church Times.
Eighteen month ago, between the writing and publication of a book which could hardly be more rooted in this region, he moved with wife Kate and their two young children to her Shropshire home town.
He was worried, he says, that he would be addressing an empty room in Oswestry.
“But about 40 people turned up and it was a really warm crowd.
“There were people saying they used to live in Bishop Auckland or had relatives in Morpeth and one guy said he was from South Shields but had left at 18 and moved to Wolverhampton.
“People seemed to want to know about the North East. Perhaps it’s because of programmes like Vera but I think it’s sometimes seen as this difficult-to-pin-down region between Scotland and Yorkshire.”
Jake certainly nails it in his book which describes a coastal pilgrimage he undertook in stages from Lindisfarne to Durham, beginning and end points of the journey taken by Cuthbert’s disciples when carrying the saint’s remains away from Viking raiders to safety, where eventually a cathedral would be built to accommodate them.
It is, as David Almond says on the cover, “a beautiful and significant book” whose “blend of history, poetry and travelogue gives a complex and compelling vision of the strange and lovely land of the North”.
Attempting to define it himself, Jake calls it “a piece of narrative non-fiction, creative non-fiction maybe?
“In essence it’s travelogue meets poetic memoir meets socio-political-historical comment, I guess. There’s a lot of stuff in it.”
There certainly is. It makes for a richly rewarding read.
On most legs of his 90-mile pilgrimage Jake had a walking companion, someone to help him get under the skin of the area.
They were people a bit like himself, with an artistic sensibility, such as artists Katherine Renton (Alnmouth and Amble) and Narbi Price (Ashington), and musician Aaron Duff who performs as Hector Gannet (Tynemouth and North Shields).
He’d done a bit of this sort of thing before, he says, tracing the footsteps of the Venerable Bede back in 2015 for a project with artist Mike Collier and reviving a mini pilgrimage once undertaken annually by the late Sunderland poet, William ‘Bill’ Martin, to Durham Cathedral.
(Recently Jake and fellow poet Peter Armstrong co-edited Marratide, a selection of Martin’s poems published by Bloodaxe Books to mark what would have been his 100th birthday.)
“So the model for the book was there, in terms of walking with people and discussing landscape features and thinking about the historic context and tapping into what makes people tick now,” says Jake.
“Often there’s an ‘n’ word, nostalgia, that saturates the region and it can be difficult to overcome because the North East has suffered a lot and changed a lot in quite a short time.
“I wanted to try and get beyond that. OK, it’s important because it informs stuff but the present is really what I’m interested in.”
Jake’s most constant travelling companion, his ‘spirit guide’, was the treasured miner’s safety lamp which had belonged to his great grandfather, pitman Nicholas Moore – and affectionately called Nick in his honour.
For Jake the journey was personal, too. He had been “struggling a bit” during lockdown, he tells me. In the book he talks of having been “burned out and afraid”.
However, the pilgrimage had “rekindled my spark” and given “great clarity” to his motivation. It ended, like his beautifully crafted book, on an uplifting note.
And now it sits, a handsome hardback (publisher Manchester University Press having done him proud) on the shelves at Waterstones and independent bookshops across the region.
It’s vindication for a writer who has worked hard and come a long way since his early teens when he vaguely fancied becoming a fantasy writer, inspired by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.
At university in Chester he studied English and creative writing and got into poetry as “an artform that could speak to my life and experience”.
He sought the poets of his home area, including Bill Martin and the late James Kirkup, from South Shields, whose literary executor he now is.
A Northern Writers’ Award, given by New Writing North in 2011, was key, he recalls. “It was incredibly validating and buoyed me to take my poetry seriously and knuckle down.
“I started sending work to magazines and turning up at open mic nights to read poems about what it was like to grow up in South Shields. It snowballed from there, I guess.”
He gained his PhD at Newcastle University, submitting a thesis inspired by poets of the North East, and had his debut poetry collection, Corrigenda for Costafine Town, published by Blue Diode Press.
In 2023 he began teaching creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University, meaning his life now involves rather longer journeys than that described in his book.
But he’s looking forward to returning to the North East to take part in Books on Tyne, where he’s due talk about and read from his book at the Lit & Phil on Thursday, November 27 (7.30pm). He will, of course, be happy to sign copies.
“I feel truly privileged to be asked. It’s a big thing in the region’s literary calendar and the last event I’ll be doing this year so the chance for a bit of a retrospective.”
The paperback edition of Between the Salt and the Ash is due out in May.
Find the festival programme, embracing the Lit & Phil and Newcastle City Library, on the Books on Tyne website.