"What is a history teacher? He’s someone who teaches mistakes" ❤️

How Do You Differentiate Between Bioregional Writing and Regional Writing?

Reflections on Graham Swift | On his birthday today

Hardy’s The Woodlanders vs Swift’s Waterland

#onhisbirthdaytoday

4th May 2025

Well, bioregional literary studies focuses on how literature engages with particular bioregions. Added, it explores how literature can foster a deeper understanding of and commitment to a specific bioregion.

In other words, instead of a generalized view of the world, bioregional perception emphasizes the specific realities and needs of one’s local environment.

It would be helpful to quote from the highly perceptive book on the subject, titled, The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology & Place.

Here goes -

As Tom Lynch argues in Xerophilia -

Conventional regional literature is most often composed for an audience of outsiders rather than for the residents of the region and thus is more likely to be a “literature of tourism” that highlights the odd and exotic and relies on generalities and stereotypes.

As he explains, the authors of this literature tend to be “former residents of the hinterlands [who] move to the big city and write stories about the colourful if rapidly fading life they left behind” or “writers from the big cities [who] may move (often temporarily) to the hinterlands to write stories about their new abodes for the amusement and edification of an audience back home”.

Bioregional literature, by contrast, is more likely to be oriented towards those who live in that bioregion. As Lynch puts it, “the implied reader is more likely to be a neighbour than a dweller in a remote city”.

To support this point, he discusses Thomas Hardy’s 1887 novel The Woodlanders, in which the “villagers’ basic life- rhythms have scarcely changed for years and seem unlikely to do so in the future,” despite disasters that befall individuals.

In contrast, he offers Graham Swift’s 1983 Waterland, in which the residents of the East Anglian fenlands experience the world as a less stable and more porous place and are clearly affected by the “shock waves” from political and technological developments of the wider world, often in ways that affect their whole region.

The novel is narrated by Tom Crick, a history teacher in Greenwich who is being forced into early retirement. Facing the skepticism of his students about the relevance of history, he abandons traditional lessons and instead tells them the story of his own life and family, deeply intertwined with the history of the Fens.

The Fens hence, are not just a backdrop but a central character in the novel. Their unique landscape – reclaimed marshland, crisscrossed by rivers and drains – shapes the lives and histories of the people who live there. The constant struggle against the water, the cycles of flooding and drainage, become metaphors for the ebb and flow of history and personal lives.

The novel fosters a strong sense of place. The characters are deeply connected to the Fens, and their identities are tied to its unique environment and history. In fact, the novel’s unwavering focus on the Fens as a living, breathing entity that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants firmly positions it within the realm of bioregional literature.

Graham Swift himself says in the introduction to his novel that –

Waterland, in short, would teach me never again to regard location as a mere incidental feature of fiction. I could look at my preceding novels and see how important location and something going beyond just physical location—locality—is to them. Novels are there, I believe now, to be true to, to insist on, sometimes to celebrate, the inescapable locality of existence.

Another explosion in the genesis of the book was to make its narrator, Tom Crick, a history teacher,

says Swift, and adds –

And what does your history teacher do? He presses his ear closer to the keyhole of his own door; attempts to repulse the assaults of his heartbeat; to interpret silence. A tell-tale silence? An incriminating silence? A guilty silence?

And the way in which he so beautifully describes a history teacher –

What is a history teacher? He’s someone who teaches mistakes. While others say, Here’s how to do it, he says, And here’s what goes wrong. While others tell you, This is the way, this is the path, he says, And here are a few bungles, botches, blunders and fiascos . . . It doesn’t work out; it’s human to err (so what do we need, a God to watch over us and forgive us our sins?).

And that’s exactly something that Bioregional Literary Studies does!

It helps us learn from the mistakes of the past, and gently nudges us to proactively engage with the region!

And the next quote from Waterland is real epic. And I quote –

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man—let me offer you a definition—is the story-telling animal.

Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trailsigns of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep on making them up.

As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall—or when he’s about to drown—he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Why wait? Do grab for yourself a copy of Waterland by Graham Swift, and start paying attention to the LifePlace that makes up your region! 😊