best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.
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The Nomination: Rebecca Hooper
“When I learned that Rebecca was a writer, poet and evolutionary biologist (specialising in bird and primate cognition, no less) I was naturally intrigued. Then, upon reading her work, I realised that she’s one of those rare beings who inhabits not only a body, but an entire landscape. The veil is gossamer thin on her small Scottish island, and her wide-angle field of vision takes in its many and varied layers. In her piece ‘The sky is not blue,’ an abandoned house, full of starlings and coincidence, beckons, seemingly wishing to be known; sparrows, folk tales, hauntings and all.”
The Excerpt – “The sky is not blue”
"It is funny, isn’t it, how we create realities based on assumptions, and how we become attached to those realities. I had fallen in love with the house, but only with the version of it I had constructed. A place of love and laughter and light. Of a long-ago selkie, or at least a woman who had saltwater on her lips and wildness on her tongue. Knowing the truth, I had to abandon the reality I had constructed and add a darkness to the story, a layer of shadow and grief and horror.
I am fascinated with this; the way memory and history and language and perception interact and intersect and weave in and out of one another. Of the way we must abandon versions of the reality we have built for ourselves over and over again.
Learn, unlearn, learn.
There is something beautiful in it, isn’t there? In abandonment. In letting go. Nettles growing around the aga. Starlings swirling through the roof. A woman going back to the wild. Light becoming fringed with darkness. Looking to the sky and thinking: I wonder what shade of violet you are today."
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