Emmy the Great on her favourite author

Folk musician Emmy the Great's Emma-Lee Moss guest-blogs in our continuing Authors We Love... series with her favourite uncle, the poet Peter Suart.   

I'm near the end of the writing process for my second album, and have recently set up an office in my parents' landing, which doubles as a library. A few weeks ago, I identified a feeling that I wanted to turn into a song: that there is a world somewhere that exists in our intuition, and it is in striving to see the beauty of that world which drives much of our activity in this one.

I didn't expect to be able to convey everything I wanted in a three-minute, chorus-led piece of indie pop, but I thought that maybe if I crammed enough research into the writing process, I'd have gained something from trying. Knowing that my song was called North, I set my sights on the library. By some coincidence, the first book I found was called North. It was written by my uncle, and the opening quote, from Herman Melville, began 'Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel...'

My uncle's name is Peter Suart, and he is, amongst many things, the author of a series of children's books about a boy called Tik, and his dog, Tok. Tik and Tok are adventurers, crossing borders, coming across big questions, meeting all manners of knights, mariners, scientists, philosophers, animals and sages. They inhabit a sort of personal Narnia, Oz, or Wonderland, and undergo enormous discoveries with quiet wonder and enquiry. I always think of Calvin and Hobbes when I read them, if Calvin and Hobbes possessed ancient souls and a rabbit hole.

North is the latest of the series, and it follows an episode whereby the heroes become dogged by paparazzi as a result of literary fame. At the beginning of the book, they find themselves hounded from their home, and make a break in the direction of magnetic north. I won't tell you if they find it, or where they end up, because, for my purposes, that's not the point - it is the search for North, and its promise of peace, that impels them to move at all.

Someone told me recently that, ten years after the Odyssey ends, Odysseus gathers a team, hops a boat, and goes out to sea again. None of the things he had seen were enough to quell the feeling, that there was even more to be found. Tik and Tok will encounter this feeling too, I'm sure, as my uncle continues to seek new worlds within. As for my song, it is not, as I predicted, anything near what I wanted to say, but it's one more attempt, keeping the taste of discovery alive for the next.

As a postscript, the book I found after North was called Travels, by WS Merwin. In it, in a poem called 'Manini', I found this passage:

'I wanted the whole valley for a garden
and the fruits of all the earth growing there…
as each day reminded me and I longed still for a place
like somewhere I thought I had come from.'

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