Award-winning US poet Zaro Weil finds living in the Cévennes in south-central France pivotal to her work.
Originally from New Jersey, she began her career doing performance art for children.
"In St Louis, I started a children's theatre dance company, Metro Theatre Circus, which is still going strong, I'm delighted to say."
She subsequently moved to London in 1981, where she founded and ran a publishing company called MPQ Books.
"We produced non-fiction books for adults. It grew out of a book I wrote about quilts and quilting. I had a large collection, many of them from Afghanistan, and was fascinated by their history."
She published her first book of poetry for children in 1988, called Mud Moon and Me, and has not looked back, thanks largely to a new life in France that afforded constant inspiration.
Read more: Career change in France: From financial advisor to botanical artist
"We originally came to Uzès (Gard) for a month in the country,” she explained, “but fell in love with the Cévennes because it was wild and beautiful. At that time, it really was off the map.
"Being able to hear a sanglier (wild boar) outside while you're lying in bed, watching huge, astonishing insects, sunsets and sunrises, stars seen from the mountains... all of this is inspiring.
Poetry is about finding the best words to describe things like this in a way that touches other people and makes the experience universal."
Renovation project
In 1991, she and her husband Gareth Jenkins bought a huge tumbledown farmhouse in Sauve (Gard).
"It was completely impractical and needed a lot of work,” she said, “but we loved it."
They began spending more and more time in France and eventually, in 2007, they sold the publishing company and moved to Sauve permanently.
"The Cévennes chose us really,” she said. We never looked at other places in France, we just arrived and loved it.
The area is, she explained, the opposite of where she was brought up: “It is open and free, but to me it is exciting. I love seeing the roses come out every spring. It's a miracle. All the shades of green are amazing.”
It is the first time Ms Weil has lived in the countryside, and she particularly enjoys being witness to “the push and pull of the seasons, the submergence of the day into grey and then the next day starts blue”.
It is, she said, a “magical and very spiritual” place to call home.
“I particularly love the honeyberry trees [Celtis australis]. They say they are sacred because the roots go down to more than three times the height of the tree and the shade protects you. They are perfect trees. All the scents and sounds of the Cévennes are very inspiring."
Young audience
Since moving to France, her career has come almost full circle.
"I had already started writing for children, which felt like a return to my roots, doing creative projects for a young audience.”
In 2020 she was thrilled when her book Cherry Moon won the prestigious CLiPPA prize, an award that celebrates outstanding poetry published for children in the UK.
Judges highlighted the opportunities it offered for sharing poems aloud and, after months of lockdown, addressing children’s growing need for the outdoors.
She has since written a poetry collection about Kew Gardens in London, called When Poems Fall from the Sky. It was nominated for a Carnegie Award and has also been translated into French.
"Children are very attracted to nature; weeds, trees in a forest, bluebells, insects, worms, fish, cats, dogs. Children love them all,” she said.
Her time in France has only confirmed this theory.
“In the Cévennes children can run wild, functioning according to mysterious things, the moon, and the rhythm of the seasons.
“I think children's primary instinct is poetic; they naturally understand poetry. For instance, they see a weed blowing and say the weed is kissing the sky.
“Children express the truth of what they see, given half the chance. They are searching for words, for a cultural home that tells them who they are.”
Read more: Why France is a great place to bring up children
Creative force
With its spectacular panoramas, verdant valleys and majestic peaks, the Cévennes, a range of mountains on the south-east edge of the Massif Central, has long been a rich source of inspiration for writers and artists.
It covers parts of the departments of Ardèche, Gard, Hérault and Lozère and is rich in geographical, natural and cultural significance, with some areas protected within the Cévennes National Park and designated a Unesco World Heritage site.
In 1878, it became a focus for the Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who completed a 12-day, 200km solo hiking trip through the rocky hillsides with a donkey called Modestine.
The book it spawned, published a year later under the title, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, became a classic of outdoor literature and has inspired countless others to follow in his footsteps.
The Cévennes was also adopted by the British poet and novelist Adam Thorpe, who has called it his home for the past three decades.
Three of his books have a French theme, among these the part-history, part-memoir Notes from the Cévennes; Half a Lifetime in Provincial France, which was published in 2018 to much acclaim.
In an interview with The Connexion that year, he said of his decision to move there: “I knew the Cévennes from staying with friends and I found it corresponded to the kind of wildness and remoteness that I was really looking for. I wanted to get somewhere where you couldn’t hear traffic in the background, or jets. A place full of birds and animals where I could look out and see nothing but the woods, forest, mountains.”
