Milena Schwab-Graham reviews Polly Atkin’s Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023), a memoir which combines feminist disability justice and nature writing.
Who gets to write about ‘difficult’ subjects? How can people living with disability, illness and trauma write about their complex relationship to nature, when this is shaped by their experiences of marginalisation? Polly Atkin’s Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (2023) offers answers to these questions in various ways. Deeply personal, the book states the radical, transformative potential of intersectional, feminist nature writing. It is a call to action, in which the natural landscapes of Britain are tied up with both hope and pain. The book does not follow a conventional narrative structure. There are no redemptive narrative arcs; there are diagnoses, but no miraculous cures. Instead, there is affirmation that ‘in continuation, there is life’ (286).
There has been a surge of writing about disability, illness and nature in the recent years across poetic, fiction, essay and critical forms. Such writing has centred disabled and ill people’s encounters with the natural world, reframing nature writing away from the gaze of the figure infamously referred to by Kathleen Jamie as the ‘lone enraptured male’, whose able-bodied status, much like his whiteness and cis heterosexuality, is implicit. For example, Louise Kenward’s anthology Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability (2023) collects works of poetry, prose and creative non-fiction by writers living with disability and illness. Likewise, Katherine Norbury’s anthology Women on Nature (2021) includes nature writing about disability and illness by Kenward and Atkin, as well as Dorothy Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, whose own experiences of living with disability and chronic illness resurface throughout Atkin’s poetry and scholarship (Much With Body, 2021; Recovering Dorothy, 2021).
Atkin’s book engages with and builds upon influential work which transcends formal boundaries between illness, environment and medicine (Ray and Sibara, 2017; Clare, 2017). She places her ideas within a network of thinking by, for and about disabled and ill writers who continue to find stimulating and surprising encounters with nature, despite it often being rendered inaccessible to those who are disabled or ill. Some of Us Just Fall is, as Atkin said during a literary event at the Brighton Festival in 2024, intrinsically concerned with the interconnections of things, much like the interlocking branches of trees in a forest.
Atkin’s ‘sense of self is defined by falling, by breaking’ (11). Her memoir charts the ways in which this accumulation of bodily and psychological fractures is exacerbated by the gaslighting and lack of understanding she is confronted with by medical professionals when seeking support for her Hypermobile Ehlers-Danos Syndrome and Haemochromatosis. Char Heather has spoken of the radical potential of sickness stories, and Atkin suggests that ‘Illness makes storytellers of us all’ (29). One of Some of Us Just Fall’s many strengths is its naming of the barriers to diagnosis and support encountered by ‘patients [who] know that [their] version of the story is mistrusted instinctively and as a matter of course’ (29).
Atkin recounts her own painful experiences of repeatedly being dismissed and discredited by the gatekeepers of the health system, which are exacerbated by the fact of her being ‘judged [as] too female, too sensitive – just an over-clever girl over-thinking’ (121). Atkin rejects the essentialism of such assumptions, which do not account for the complex subjectivity of living with illness. ‘Most of the time’, Atkin says, she ‘was grappling with what it might even mean to feel human’ (121). Some of Us Just Fall makes such assertions whilst emphasizing that disabled and ill people who face further marginalisation ‘because of their gender, […] sexuality, […] nationality, […] race, […] religion, […] ethnicity, […] ability, [or] […] background’ (39) are likely to experience even greater obstacles to sharing their illness stories and seeking support. Atkin acknowledges that she has benefitted from emotional and financial backing which many marginalised disabled and ill people are unable to access. Some of Us Just Fall calls for intersectional feminist disability justice, which is attuned to the unequal distribution of privilege and resources.
The ‘Wilderness’ of the Sick: Against the Infallible ‘Nature Cure’
At the centre of Atkin’s memoir is a critique of ‘The Nature Cure’, a concept popularised by Richard Mabey’s memoir Nature Cure (2005), about how walking in nature helped him with his depression. Samantha Walton’s Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (2021) and Shauna Walker’s article for The Polyphony on ‘green prescribing’ have begun to explore the ethical obstacles and possibilities for conceiving a ‘nature cure’ which is compatible with disabled and ill people’s lived reality, and Atkin’s book gives especially lyrical form to its interrogation of this concept. Some of Us Just Fall shows how the author’s walks and wild swims in nature have had the capacity to invigorate her chronically ill body, but this is foregrounded by the difficult realisation that any relief provided by such activity is contingent and fleeting. She recounts how her home in the Cumbrian village of
Grasmere was my medicine. I believed in it […] When it began to fail me, […] I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working any more, why I was getting sicker and sicker, despite the mountains, the water, the trees. (205)
For Atkin, belief in ‘The Nature Cure’ is fallacious. It ‘is distraction therapy with greenwash, trailing all the colours of the aurora borealis’ (210). Her prose is lucid and unflinching in its deconstruction of the idea that the disabled body can be readily ‘cured’ by encounters with nature: ‘The ideology of cure makes a cultivated garden of the body […] It wants […] the soil enriched, the pests controlled’ (206). Some of Us Just Fall thus powerfully reconfigures the metaphorical landscape of the sick body as a ‘wilderness’. Atkin re-examines Susan Sontag’s idea of ‘the kingdom of the sick’, to affirm both the ‘place’ of her sick body and the ‘place’ of sickness itself: ‘When I go to the other place that is the place of the sick, I am going into my own body, into its unseen landscapes and undiscovered countries’ (70). There is beauty and defiance in her acknowledgement of the fact that the ‘wilderness’ of her sick body is not a sign of normative failure or condemnation. Instead, it is a landscape through which she knows how to navigate, as it offers up paths which are known to her, and, crucially, she is ‘not alone’ (81).
The Disabled Body as Landscape, the Landscape as Disabled Body
In Atkin’s memoir the division between her self and the lakes and hills of the Lake District and Derbyshire is elided. There are many powerful passages in which she meditates on this lack of boundary between self and other, the human and non-human, and how her experience as a chronically ill person influences this eco-crip relationship.
The work of Stacy Alaimo, a prominent scholar of feminist environmental humanities, is a further touchstone. Some of Us Just Fall offers luminous accounts of Atkin’s bodily movements through natural places and wild spaces, emphasizing how Alaimo’s concept of ‘trans-corporeality, in which […] the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment’ (2008: 238) takes on vital significance when considering the embodiment and subjectivity of people living with illness and disability. For Atkin, the barriers between ‘nature’ and ‘one’s own skin’ seem to dissolve, especially when she undertakes wild swims in the bodies of water near her home. She becomes ‘part of something bigger and wilder than myself […] part of one body, the body of the lake, and many’ (2023: 216). While swimming, Atkin moves her body with greater balance and ease than on land. She is aware of the risks, and, significantly, does not regard her swims as a form of ‘cure’. They are, rather, a means of achieving some form of equilibrium within her bodymind, which helps her to continue existing: ‘a means of maintenance […] [t]o keep myself as level as I can’ (216).
Some of Us Just Fall persuasively calls for disability justice by reiterating the political in the personal. It invokes further instances of environmental activism which conceive of landscape as a living body which is disabled by pollution. While Atkin’s ‘iron levels rise stealthily’ due to her Haemochromatosis, she hears the Indigenous Secwépemc and Nuxalk activist Nuskmata (Water Protector) ‘give a lecture in which she talks about the poisoning of Quesnel Lake in Canada by the Mount Polley mine’ (222), paralleling the pollution of the ‘living body’ of the lake with that of Atkin’s inner landscape: ‘As the earth rusts […] the valleys and lakes inside me grow in toxicity’ (220). She highlights how Nuskmata’s environmental activism is rooted in the Indigenous belief that Lake Quesnel is ‘a person who is an essential member of the community’ (222), dissolving the boundaries between the human and non-human. Atkin describes how the pain of her Haemochromatosis ‘replicates itself like bacteria’, a toxic algal bloom within her system (220). This ‘catastrophe of the internal landscape’ (220) evocatively links bodily to environmental collapse. Here there might have been scope to explore the intersections between disability justice, environmental justice and racial justice further, given the networked and wide-ranging ideas outlined in this book. Rather than this being a criticism, however, it highlights how Atkin’s testimony of her life with disability and illness is inherently concerned with the interconnections between, and immersion in, the environment.
Some of Us Just Fall is a powerful and moving account of ‘not getting better’ and the natural world’s relationship to chronic illness. Atkin offers an intricate, personal response to the question posed by Sarah Jaquette Ray: ‘If getting close to nature is about risking the body in the wild, what kind of environmental ethic is available to the disabled body?’ (2017: 29). Atkin sets out that her reasons for writing this book are ‘To testify that my body is real, that my story is real […] There are many of you. Of us. I believe you’ (39). Recognition and solidarity are thus foundational to Atkin’s contribution to an intersectional environmental ethic which centres people living with disability and illness.
About the Author
Milena Schwab-Graham is a postdoctoral researcher who teaches at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of York, UK. She holds a UKRI-funded PhD from the University of Leeds. Her interests are in feminism, affect, embodiment, environment & health in modern and contemporary literature. Her work has been published in Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernist Cultures and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter @mschwabgraham & Bluesky @milenaschwabgraham.
References
Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237-64. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Atkin, Polly. 2021. Much With Body. Bridgend: Seren.
Atkin, Polly. 2021. Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth. Salford: Saraband.
Clare, Eli. 2017. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Jamie, Kathleen. 2008. “A Lone Enraptured Male.” The London Review of Books. 30.5. 6 March 2008.
Kenward, Louise (ed). 2023. Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability. London: Footnote.
Mabey, Richard. 2005. Nature Cure. London: Chatto and Windus.
Nuskmata (Jacinda Mack). 2022. “InTheFIeld: NUSKMATA (Jacinda Mack) on the Gold Rush That Never Ended [ENCORE] /287.” For the wild. Last modified 18 May 2022. https://forthewild.world/listen/inthefield-nuskmata-jacinda-mack-on-the-gold-rush-that-never-ended-encore-287.
Norbury, Katherine (ed). 2021. Women on Nature: 100+ Voices on Place, Landscape, and the Natural World. London: Unbound.
Ray, Sarah Jaquette and Jay Sibara (eds). 2017. Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 3.
Walton, Samantha. 2021. Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure. London: Bloomsbury.
