What is Psychotopography?
I’d like to say that the name psychotopography was something I thought hard and carefully about – and worked on, physically – like a designer or an engineer making a new machine or a thing, but it’s not the case. I did a lot of hard and careful thinking about term, but it came afterward, when I’d already decided that I needed a name for the writing I was doing when I came back from fell and trail running in the Peak District. While what I was writing was similar to psychogeography – the classic, Lettrist and Situationist writing mode – however, it just wasn’t the same. Psychotopography was a word I found wandering the spaces between thoughts and feelings – that place beneath who you think are that produces magic and weirdness in the world and on paper – and took it as a sign that it should stay: psychotopography became the name I settled on and chose.
Psychogeography needs to be in the city and I’m out in the countryside. It also needs a kind of surreal, guiding map, and while those are present in my work, I’m also using a guiding map that’s real and solid, so I don’t get lost and have to stop running, because when I stop running, I do a very different kind of writing. A lot of my work is blended with Nature writing too – like Nan Shepherd, but nowhere near as beautiful – because I find writing about architecture dull and flowers and birds hillsides gather my thoughts into a kind of multicoloured sentence-heap that I like to try to unravel while I move.
