Author John D Burns talks to us about his reasons for adventure
During 2018 GO Outdoors are celebrating the different reasons that we all go outdoors, proving that adventures can be sprawling epics or simply stepping outside to enjoy the fresh air. In this feature, we sat down with mountaineer, author, actor and blogger John D Burns about how he uses his own adventures to inspire his stories.
The outdoors can be a wonderful place to clear the cobwebs from your mind when life gets too hectic, but it can also be a source of inspiration as well. With many artists, poets, authors and more channelling their love for adventure or their adoration for nature into their works it’s important for anyone to stop every once in a while and take in the beauty around us.
We spoke to John D Burns ahead of the release of his second novel ‘Bothy Tales’
Q. After some fantastic feedback on your first novel ‘The Last Hillwalker’, you’re about to release your second with ‘Bothy Tales’ – For those who may not have read a John D Burns story, what can they expect from your books?
A. “When I began writing about the hills and my experiences as a climber and hillwalker I wanted to take the reader into my world. The reader can expect to glimpse the things I have seen, meet the people I have met and to share in my journey, to feel the wind against their face and the texture of the rock against their finger tips.
My life has been enormously enriched by the challenges I faced and my time in the outdoors and that is an important part of my writing. For me there is a deeper message in the stories I tell of life and death battles in the hills or wild bothy nights underneath all these things is the contact with nature that they bring. We don’t just come from nature, we are nature”
Q. Has writing always been a passion of yours or something you discovered later on?
A. “I think that I was always a writer although it’s only over the last ten years that I have been able to explore that aspect of myself. When I was a boy I used to fish small pools with my father and round the water’s edge I would imagine fantastic underwater cities and civilisations.
Later, at University I was fascinated by theatre, poetry and literature but I never considered that these things were something I could create, I thought they were for other people. I grew up in a working-class background where you were lucky if you could find work and fanciful things like becoming an artist were discounted.
Oddly it was my daughter’s struggle with Autism, a disability which makes language a uniquely challenging part of life, that rekindled my interest in the meanings of words and how they pin us to reality. This became a fascination and opened the door to a creative part of myself that I don’t think I’d be able to close now even if I wanted to.”
Q. Your book ‘The Last Hillwalker’ is an account of your own adventures in Britain over a 40 year span, as you grew into your love of the outdoors, did you always have an idea in your mind that you’d eventually like to get your experiences down on paper?
A. “I never dreamt I’d write a word about the outdoors. When I started to write it was at a time in my life when I had deliberately stepped away from my outdoor life. I had decided to turn my back on that part of my life to pursue other challenges such as acting and writing. My first book began for me as a way of saying farewell to the hills. I thought if I wrote about it I could put it all in a book, close the pages and walk away.
What happened was the complete reverse. As I wrote The Last Hillwalker I began to relive my experiences in wild, remote places and recalling how being out in the natural world rekindled in me a desire to go there again. I think my need to have a relationship with wild places is now stronger than it ever was.”
Q. Humour is a big part of your storytelling, do you find the outdoors is often portrayed in a very serious light? It can often be the small moments along the way that make the trip more memorable. It seems it’s the attention to these smaller details that your readers seem to resonate with.
A. “Above all, being out in wild places should be about joy. After all that is where we come from, when you are on a mountain ridge, in a forest, or spending a night in a lonely bothy, you have come home. When you are at home, with your friends and family, isn’t that where you should enjoy yourself most and fill the silence with laughter.
Humour is very important to me. I enjoy making people laugh and I think laughter connects us to something inside ourselves and with each other in a unique way. Bill Hicks, the great American stand up, used to talk about the ‘healing laugh.’ I think there is a way that laughter helps us deal with the darker parts of life. There is something absurd in the small details. Picture the mountaineer who, finally stands on top of a majestic peak that has been his life’s ambition, only to be acutely aware that his big toes are cold. There is something very human in that image.”
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