LUKE TURNER
The author talks to Margaret James about exploring forests and sexuality in his acclaimed memoir
”I know very few men who are engaging with the difficulties and complexities of masculinity. I am hoping this will change.”
Idon’t often get the opportunity to profile the authors of memoirs, so I was delighted to talk to young British writer Luke Turner about Out of the Woods, his candid and engaging account of his fascination with one of the UK’s most ancient forests.
What first prompted Luke to write Out of the Woods?
‘It wasn’t so much a prompt as an impulse that emerged over a period of time,’ he says. ‘I’ve loved the Epping Forest landscape since I was a child. When I moved close to the woodland in the early 2010s, I started visiting it a lot more. I read as much as I could about it and soon realised nothing new had been written for years.
‘Originally, Out of the Woods was intended to be a straightforward social history of the forest. But I was writing it at a time when my life was falling apart, and soon mere social history no longer seemed enough to make a book. I had neglected to deal with difficult parts of my life, but I found that entering the landscape – both in present-day reality and in the strange histories I was uncovering in archives – made me realise that here I might start to understand our human relationship with all forests.’