The Draw of the Sea

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Award-winning artist Jonathan Newey teaches you to transform simple shapes into characterful creatures including dolphins, clownfish, crabs, jellyfish, whales, sharks, turtles and more. Across twelve beautifully written interlinked chapters, Menmuir explores the many aspects of our relationship with the sea. Combing the beaches for things that have washed ashore, rock pooling and free diving just lend themselves to an idyllic and peaceful life. We're used to stories of the sea being a grand voyage; a tale of derring-do; perhaps a romantic escapade. It's grim reading in places, but we do also meet people who are trying to make a difference - and the author admits that there can be a sort of syncronicitous beauty in the bizarre findings from beaches, even in all that plastic.

The connection and affinity certain people have for the sea comes through strong and is so beautiful to read about. I have always been drawn to the sea, whether spending time at the beach watching the waves gently lap the sand or being in awe at the power of a storm crashing into the rocks.He is the author of the Man-Booker nominated novel and Observer Best Fiction of the year pick,The Many, and Fox Fires. In this beautiful collection of essays the author journeys from place to place, person to person, examining his own relationship with the sea and encountering others who hold a mirror up to his own feelings and experiences. This is the plastic that is breaking down into ever smaller particles in our seas, being eaten by the fish we eat, making its ways into the stomachs of birds and whales, all the way up the food chain, leaching into our bodies, our organs and which will almost certainly outlast all of us.

The Draw of the Sea invites those of us who live near the ocean to see it in new ways and is a salty tonic for those who pine for the scent of seaweed on the air. He knows this intimately – his house was constructed of Nigerian iroko wood that fell from a ship off Penzance. WINNER OF THE HOLYER AN GO AWARD 2023 Wyl Menmuir’s The Draw of the Sea is a beautifully written and deeply moving portrait of the sea and the people whose livelihoods revolve around it, examining the ephemeral but universal pull the sea holds over the human imagination.

He intercuts his own story – he moved to Cornwall in 2013 and he and his family now live a watery existence, swimming, surfing, rockpooling and beachcombing – with a broader consideration of the lives of a motley collection of seafarers. In the specifics of these livelihoods and their rich histories and traditions, Wyl Menmuir captures the universal human connection to the ocean's edge. Diving deep into a largely unknown territory as ancient as Deep Time itself, he emerges with stories of grief and mermaids, of ghost-plastic and hard-won wisdom, of harpoons and treasure and longing and precarity and the eternal quest for meaning: gifts that evoke both the richness and the strangeness of a precious world within a precious world. Really loved it and would recommend it to anyone who appreciates the feeling of putting a book down after turning the final page with the satisfying sense that your world has been beguilingly transformed. As I made my way west along the beach from the lobster pot, I set about making my usual internal bargain.

Today, we’re going to show you how to draw an aquarium, so you can have your own under-the-sea adventure! By including such an interesting range of stories, it also expanded my perspective of other people's relationships with the sea too. Definitely one to hold in one's hands and read, I think - though if you're actually going to take the book onto those Cornish beaches you might want the e-book too.Menmuir weaves together thoughtful portraits of people he's spent time with, the shell seekers and wave riders, swimmers, sailors, fishers and divers. Folk memories, maritime history, the contribution of the sea to mental health and recovery from trauma and illness all feature. In The Draw of the Sea, Wyl Menmuir investigates just that - the invisible force that pulls some of us to the coast, whether to simply gaze in awe at the vastness of the ocean or to fully immerse ourselves in its watery depths, to dive in, to swim, surf or sail. There’s a wonderful story of the traditional method of hunting conger eels in Scilly – you suspend a small boy in front of the hole in which they live, wait for the eel to wrap itself around him and then pull the boy up. It feeds us, sustaining communities and providing livelihoods, but it also holds immense destructive power which can take all those away in an instant.

In this book, he travels around Cornwall and Scilly Isles and all the way up to Svalbard finding out the stories of the people who live and love the coast in the same way that he does. Menmuir’s evocation of our love-affair with the sea is a sublime work that stands as both a masterpiece of nature writing and a fearless exploration of the collective psyche contemplating its relationship with the Earth.Highly recommended if you like the Cornish coast, the sea, or contemplation at a remote shoreline spot.