Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked. Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

Hello and thanks very much for choosing to listen to this podcast. I'm Helen Needham.

Over the years of doing this podcast, we've talked a lot about nature writing, a genre which

has grown in prominence over the past decade. What we haven't highlighted before is nature writing

from the perspective of people living with chronic illness or disability. Louise

Kenward is a psychologist, artist and writer based in the south of England. For the past few years,

she's been living with chronic illness, which has at times meant she's been completely isolated

and unable to leave their house. Louise isn't the only one. Over a quarter

of the UK population are chronically ill or disabled. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, this statistic

is rising. In a new anthology curated by Louise called Moving Mountains, Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability,

the standard narratives of the genre are challenged, from the idea of nature cure to the dominant

concept of ableism and the idea that there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

I found this collection mind expanding,

especially how the storytelling involving the natural world and the more than human world

is used to express things like pain, fatigue, discomfort and isolation, all common features of living

with illness or disability. I spoke with Louise

recently and we began by discussing the notion of nature cure and the common assumption that we can

all be healed if we just spend more time outside. There are lots of people who get great

...