night visions

At night places take on a different personality. The busy sounds of daytime activity  are replaced by the stranger sounds of night. And as daylight gives way to darkness we can lean more easily towards interior thoughts, reflections, and questions less often asked during the daytime. Daytime reason slips into nigh-time visions. What then for a writer, visiting the Forest at night? What reflections, what intersections of personal and place histories, emerge? In a wonderfully sound-rich feature for BBC Radio 4, Bristol-based writer Zakiya Mckenzie visits the Forest of Dean at night and reflects on the experience, her memories of Jamaica, and her response to the true tragic story of an African slave-boy in the Forest. Zakiya was appointed as one of two writers in residence by Forestry England in 2019 to mark its centenary, and she chose to spend much of her time in, thinking and writing about, the Forest. You can read her Forest of Dean-inspired writing  here. In this programme, Night Vision, Zakiya visits the Forest again, this time at night. Meeting Reading the Forest's Roger Deeks at Lydney station she travels to Littledean to hear about the Pyrke family, and an awful event in the eighteenth-century that, local tradition says, continue to reverberate through the hours of darkness to this very day. As she travels into the Forest she also links to its rich literature, in particular through the voices of Winifred Foley and Dennis Potter as they too talk about the relationship between past & present - something hard to ignore in a forest haunted by the remnants of its past, whether that's during the day...or at night. You can listen to Zakiya's programme on BBC Sounds here. 

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