We present the third in a series of interviews that were conducted by Tom Sykes as part of the research for his upcoming book The Years of Travelling Anxiously, available from Icon Books on March 26. In today’s instalment, academic, novelist and author of Bodies of Water Victoria Leslie discusses the gendering of anxiety, travel to remote islands and the anxiety-reducing power of reading.
Tom Sykes (TS): Do you think there are there forms of anxiety that affect you as a woman traveller, that wouldn’t apply if you were male?
Victoria Leslie (VL): When you’re a woman you get told about general safety when travelling. I’ve travelled at night-time and on my own a lot so I’ve taken the necessary precautions. When you go abroad you think more about letting people know where you’re going and informing them of your travel plans generally. You try to be more conscious of your surroundings. You try to know the routes you’ll be taking ahead of time. I suppose that’s just being sensible and prudent, regardless of gender. Perhaps women having to be more careful is culturally indoctrinated to an extent.
TS: Are there particular places or landscapes that have triggered anxiety for you?
VL: I think you can be prompted to take a trip exactly because you’re stepping out of your comfort zone. You recognise that it’s important to do that. Places that are very culturally different or distant from your own experience often induce a bit more anxiety, but potentially in a good way.
I’ve travelled to a lot of physically remote places like islands. I don’t drive, so I’ve had to rely on public transport or hitchhiking or cycling. I’ve done a lot of cycling in island locations and if you get a puncture you might be miles away from a settlement or the weather might turn inclement. I stayed on my own for a month in a croft house on an island just off the mainland of Shetland. High winds would sometimes stop the ferries from running. That can be quite isolating and cause anxiety. It was winter, so it got dark at about three in the afternoon. I knew that, wherever I was, I had to set off for home at one or two so I didn’t get stuck in the dark in the middle of nowhere.
I’m a city dweller and, for me, the only anxieties in Shetland came from the unfamiliarity of the countryside. But it’s good to ride with anxiety because it opens you up to things that you might not otherwise encounter.
TS: You generally feel better afterwards, like you’ve achieved something?
VL: Yeah, definitely. I was also cycling for miles and miles around this beautiful location. You see so much that way.
TS: Did you ever get lonely while you were there?
VL: I was there to do some writing, on a retreat. I stocked up on books before I left and the weather was so awful when I arrived at the croft house, I couldn’t leave for a few days. But I had reading material – it was all I needed. I had lovely neighbours too who recognised that I was a city person. Sometimes the local shop had hardly any supplies, especially if the ferry wasn’t running, so my neighbours would leave food outside my doorstep. It was very generous hospitality.
TS: Is there more of a sense of community in places like that? I’ve never heard of someone leaving food for their neighbour in the middle of London or Manchester.
VL: I think there was curiosity about why outsiders come, especially if they aren’t working there. I wasn’t being paid to be there, I was pursuing my writing. Local people wanted to chat with me and understand where I’d come from and what I was doing here. In exchange they gave me food – I ate so well – and told me about local customs and traditions. I was invited to Up Helly Aa, a traditional festival nearby. I never had to lock my bike or the door of my house, which I couldn’t get my head around.
I once took three buses in one day to get to a remote island nearby. I didn’t realise there was no public transport coming back, so I got off the bus and started to walk to the ferry terminal, which was miles away. A car came along and the driver asked where I was going. I told them back to Lerwick and they drove me all the way there. That generosity is quite typical as the landscapes are quite challenging. People are there to help each other.
TS: If you’d been with someone else would your experience have been different? And if you hadn’t spent your time writing, do you think loneliness would have crept in?
VL: I quite enjoy being on my own anyway. As a writer, it’s necessary to be able to enjoy your own company, because you spend a lot of time in your own head. When I travel with somebody, it can be really enjoyable, but I always regard it as recreational, whereas when you’re on your own, you’ll be more in tune with your surroundings.
TS: If you’re writing, I guess you have to observe your surroundings and pay attention to things more. Is that easier done when alone?
VL: I’ve done quite a few writing retreats overall and, on another one in Scotland, there was no internet connection. There’s something about being off-grid that is good for writing. But there’s also something amazing about looking out the window at extreme landscapes in winter. You feel like it could be the end of a world. I like stories that touch on those themes, too.
TS: So you didn’t encounter any suspicion from anyone on those journeys to Scotland?
VL: I’ve always been warmly welcomed. It was a bit different to a backpacking trip I did in China with two Chinese friends. They were often perceived as being my guides, so the prices would be hiked up in shops and markets. My friend would have to explain that we were students and friends with each other. Then we’d get the local prices. At another time, I was ushered out of a cafe simply because I was English.
TS: How did you feel about that?
VL: I was a bit indignant. But when I think about friends who are not English or not white, they have it worse on a day to day basis. I’ve just had one experience like that in my whole life.
TS: Why do you think they stopped you coming into the cafe?
VL: I’m not sure. It was in a remote area in the south of China, not a cosmopolitan place. It may have just been general suspicion. My experiences on that trip were always filtered through my friends. They were pretty much always with me. I didn’t feel that I was treated differently based on gender. My Chinese friend’s parents had the same job as one another and the work ethic seemed to be equal across the genders. I didn’t get the sense that women were perceived as being different in Chinese society.
TS: Are you someone who’s troubled by anxiety generally? It sounds like you’re more likely to get anxious at home in the city than when travelling somewhere remote.
VL: During the pandemic, probably like other people, I had an anxious time. When I’ve been at home for a long period, I can overthink or get anxious about catching a plane somewhere. It’s like getting out of practice doing something. If I travel more regularly then it becomes normalised and the anxiety is dispelled.
TS: Do you have a preferred method of transport? You mentioned cycling.
VL: I like cycling. I feel like I’m in control. I like the pace of it. It’s faster than walking so you can cover more ground, but you can see more and you can pull over a lot easier. You can lift your bike and walk places that you can’t access with a car. On a bike you feel the landscape you’re travelling in.
I like kayaking too. I’ve done it in the Thames and around sea coves in Shetland. On one trip we were taken into a cave and I saw the bioluminescence in the water. It was magical.
TS: I wanted to ask about your academic work which associates place with femininity and bodies of water. How do these natural features figure in our culture? How do they relate to female anxieties?
VL: Places are inscribed by cultural resonances that carry layers of experiences. There might be artistic and creative renditions of these places too, which are worth investigating. When you look at a place, there are your real, lived experiences of it and there are stories that have been told by others about that location. The stories might have been written by local people or by outsiders who have romanticised the place. When I was doing my PhD and writing the novel that was part of it, I was interested in how water has so many connections with femininity. It’s symbolic of female biology.
A lot of mythical representations of rivers involve sprightly women sitting in or beside them. Depictions of fallen women in the nineteenth century would place them beside a river because it would represent the metaphorical fall. But actually a lot of women were committing suicide in the Thames during that period. There’s the historical reality of what was happening in these spaces and the myths or stories attached to them. I’m also interested in which places are prohibited to certain sectors of society. In the nineteenth century women weren’t really allowed to play or swim in water.
TS: Was this to do with them not being permitted to show their bodies?
VL: There’s a book that charts the history of women’s swimming. Women couldn’t get male instructors to teach them how to swim because it wasn’t deemed proper. There weren’t enough female swimming instructors, so women couldn’t learn to do it.
That changes by the end of the century with a wave of fiction that’s about women spending time in the water, so it becomes this emancipatory, symbolic journey. It was about breaking free from societal constraints, from the image of the crinoline-wearing Victorian woman. The Suffragette movement was linked to swimming.
I often think about today and discussions about who has access to the water, who owns it, who controls these spaces and who’s entitled to use them. We might think that everybody has access to swimming lessons at school, but it’s not true. Does where you live, your background, your belonging to a socio-economic group affect your access to water?
TS: Your fiction is very anchored in place and engages with the themes you’ve just been talking about. In your novels and short stories are there anxieties that your female characters are afflicted with? And are these informed by particular places?
VL: Over recent years, I’ve zoomed in on the water. I also like writing about islands because I’m from one and I’m interested in their peripheries and edges. In Scotland and in the Shetlands, you can literally see how far the land is from the water. You have to cross the water to get somewhere. In folklore, edges are where things happen, they have liminal possibilities. Unusual encounters happen between two spaces, two worlds.
I’m interested in the way we perceive landscape metaphorically too. I wrote a story about a walk along a cliff that was also about the end of a relationship. I’ve written about burial mounds before as a way to access the past in a fictional narrative. Sometimes the landscape can serve as a pathetic fallacy by enhancing a character or representing ideas to a reader in a shortcut way. Some of the locations I’ve travelled to naturally suit what I’m trying to say in the story.
TS: When you’ve had anxious experiences while travelling are there actions you have taken to reduce those feelings?
VL: The most anxiety-inducing moments I’ve had have been in busy environments. I used to get the London Underground a lot and, as a writer, you’re always catastrophising in these situations. Reading is the only solution I have when I feel anxious about anything. I read and it occupies my mind. It puts things into perspective. You relate to a character in a story or what a writer is trying to achieve with that story. It just makes things more manageable. You don’t feel quite so alone in the moment.
TS: That’s good advice – everyone should be reading more!
The Years of Traveling Anxiously by Tom Sykes is out March 26!
