How to Love the World #author Ilka Tampke

Perhaps motherhood is always a promise that cannot be kept.

When her children are born, Nellika vows she will be the perfect mother. Motherhood is sacred, mythic: it will remake everything that is broken in her. But as her children grow, something buried is awakened, and the myth begins to crack.

Only the cool, green silence of the forest, where Nellika walks every day, can soothe what is repeatedly torn apart by family life. One morning, deep in a remote part of the forest, she is struck by a falling manna gum branch. Shockingly injured and unable to move, her only hope is that someone will find her.

As darkness falls on what might be her last day, Nellika must reckon with herself and the place where she lies. Is this fallen branch an accident or a punishment? As death draws close, the forest asks her: why should you live? And in the dark heart of her memories, she discovers that there is an answer.

A powerful meditation on nature and healing, How to Love the World finds hope where none seems possible.

To connect with Ilka ...
https://www.ilkatampke.com/
https://www.ilkatampke.com/books
https://www.instagram.com/ilkatampke/

Transcript

0:02

It's good morning. Ilka Tamki, welcome to Yellow Shelf. Hello, Joanna. Thank you for having me. Oh, hey, my pleasure. Thank you for coming on. First time having you on Yellow Shelf. You've got a book out, and I've been lucky enough to read it. Will you tell us all about your new book, How to Love the World? Yes, with pleasure. My book, I hope, is like taking a walk deep into the forest. It's the story, it's a it's quite a dramatic story. It's quite a dramatic opening. The book opens with a branch, a heavy branch, falling on our protagonist and pinning her face down to the forest floor. She's a regular bushwalker. She walks alone in the forest every day as a way to soothe the struggles and stresses she experiences in her daily life, mostly in relation to her family and her mothering. She has this terrible accident, and then the novel takes place over the course of the day as she faces the possibility that she perhaps might not survive and what she thinks about and understands about her life in that in those last few precious hours in the forest. Ilka, that's probably one of the most incredible summaries I've ever had because I I've read the book. And you're right, goes straight into uh to you know action. Um yeah, look, the bush setting was reading it, it was stunning. I felt like, you know, I was almost there in the bush. Um, yeah, you would you acknowledge that, you know, the character, you know, really has to confront the past, um, ultimately about survival as well in in a world of pain. Yes, that's right. So, yeah, obviously there's the incredible um sort of physical pain of the injuries that she's suffered, um, but really what she's what she's going through is more of a sort of psychological journey and a spiritual journey about who she's been, particularly as a mother, um, and uh also her relationship to place. What is this place where she is potentially facing, you know, it's potentially the place where she might take her last breath. Um, so it's also a wrecking, it's a moral wrecking about motherhood, also about belonging and connection to place. And this character, I mean, it all sounds quite um, you know, a little, a little dark and dramatic, you know, she's she's a very poetic character. She's an artist. So um, you know, part of her grappling and her reckoning for meaning is also um, I hope, quite poetic. And and um, you know, there's a there's a sort of um creativity in that as well. Yeah. And Ilke, do you want to tell us a little bit about you as an author? Um, this is your third novel. Um, tell us anything we need to know if we're watching for the first time, we're curious about you, about your work, and even what inspired you to write this particular story. So I started my writing career probably in my I actually started my writing career when I had my first child at 34. Um, prior to that I worked in a completely different field, creative, but very different. And um, once I was sort of uh bedded in at home and I couldn't do everything that I did before, that's when I started to write. So so my writing career was birthed with my with my child. Um, I wrote two books uh previously, and they're both very different. They're both historical novels set in the the British Iron Age about the Roman invasion and and the displacement of the indigenous culture of ancient Britain. So, in one sense, there's a similarity across all the work, which is to do with with a spiritual relationship to place. Um, and then there was a after my my second novel, there was a bit of a gap. I was actually writing a third novel in the same historical period. But as I was in the middle of that one, I was walking in the forest as I do almost every day. Um and I just I was looking around me and and the light was sort of sprinkling through the trees and filtering onto the ground. And I'm always fascinated by what I see in the forest and its beauty. And it this idea just came to me like a honestly, it just appeared in my head. I just went, oh, what if what if a woman was trapped in this forest and she could watch this all day long? What would she think? What would she learn? What would she understand? And Joanna, do you know what? As I started writing it then straight away because the idea really gripped me. And um a little bit later, probably six months later, I actually went and um found a place in the forest and I did actually sit there for 12 hours. Wow. And and just kind of just to have without the catastrophic injuries. Yes. But thankfully, but I did I did do that without without any food. I did have some water, um, just to sort of go, okay, well, what what would that be like? And um, gosh, that was illuminating more than I thought. It was actually really emotional and really um really rich kind of source of um material. And what an amazing writing journey to now have the book out. That's that's beautiful. That's um it's always a kind of, I mean, I've only published three, but it's always a kind of miracle. It's you know, a little bit like a child, I guess. It's sort of you know how it happened and you know all the steps that you went through, but it's still just a tiny little bit magical. Yeah, so well put. Ilka, if we're curious, if we're watching and we're curious about the book, curious about you, your previous work, I'm gonna put some links in to the publisher and where to get the book. But do you are you on socials? Do you want to share how do we connect with you if we want to get curious about you? Yes, I have a my I have my writer's Instagram account, um Ilkatapki, and I have a lovely website that um someone very dear to me has just created for me with lots of my photos from my walks in the forest. And so there's that as well. I will put uh the website and Instagram in the show notes to make it easy for anyone to connect with you. Ilke is the plan to keep writing. Yes, it is. So I'm also a a write, a creative writing teacher, so I teach um in in a few different settings um in university and settings. So I love doing that. I that's really um because that's very people focused. Writing is very solitary and it has to be, but teaching is the opposite, it's very connecting and um it's you know, you can only really teach someone when you do have a relationship with them, when you have their trust and when you have some sort of shared understanding together. So I love I love doing that work. So I'll do that, I'll keep doing that, and um I will I will be writing again. I'm just I'm walking and waiting for the next and and you need to enjoy releasing this book. Congratulations! Any future work, I would love to have you back anyway. That's that's the reason I selfishly ask if there's more writing. Ilka, all the best. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Joanna. Cheers.