A Page in the Life: Sara Maitland There is another crucial distinction she makes between Grimms and the modern fascination with magic as exemplified by J K Rowling's Harry Potter books. They are all about people who have magical powers, and who use those powers to fight evil, even if it leads to them being socially isolated. But in European fairy tales that sort of magic just doesn't exist. It is often the place or what is encountered there that is magic. And first and foremost among such beguiling places are forests. That is what has led Maitland to make a dozen journeys, through the seasons, to forests, woods and thickets around Britain to investigate the hold they have exerted and continue to exert on our collective imagination, with their closed-in views, their darkness, their ability to swallow us up, and their ghouls. "The starting point for me was my own father's profound boy-scoutishness," she recalls. I was one of six and grew up being sent out with a copy of I-Spy on woodland. He taught us the names of trees and was the one who would tell us stories, whereas my mother would read to us from books. Gossip from the Forest, she believes, is the first book she has published that would have pleased him. "He's long dead now," she laments, "but when my first novel came out I sent him a copy. Next time I saw him he said, "I've read your book and it is totally pornographic. But then I read a review in the newspaper and it said it wasn't pornographic. So it seems I just haven't read enough modern novels."" Continuing the family connection, her companion on several of the treks in her new book is Adam Lee, her photographer son. Maitland's marriage to an East End of London Anglican vicar ended in the Nineties. Lee's pictures illustrate the text and the mother-son camp-side chats bring a warm, intimate rootedness to the whole project. But surely that's not what she means by "shabby silence"? "No," she explains with characteristic frankness. My core problem is that I have no money and there are a limited number of things you can do to earn money sitting in silence on top of a lonely hill. I have a computer so I teach a distance learning MA in creative writing, but when it came to writing a book the sort of abstract ideas I had that would enable me to stay put just wouldn't have worked. One obvious solution surely would have been a return to fiction. Maitland published five novels after Daughter of Jerusalem, but it is now 15 years since the last one appeared. It is, she says, something she both regrets and misses. "I have still not been able," she explains, "to resolve the tension between a life of silence and the cause-and-effect narrative in fiction. The more I go into silence, the less time matters, but in fiction the opposite is true. In A Book of Silence she put it more succinctly: "weakened boundaries prevent the creation of strong narrative." For fans of Maitland's novels, though, Gossip from the Forest does include a partial return to her roots with a dozen retellings of traditional fairy tales, one to accompany each outing to a wood. Some of her destinations are close at hand - there is a wonderfully funny, scary and absorbing account of a trip to the nearby Purgatory Wood on December 24, where she is shot at as she tries to steal a Christmas tree (becoming in the process the baddy of the tale) - but most involved her travelling farther afield and, once again, diluting her life of silence. To write about forests, I knew I had to go to specific forests and readers would not have taken kindly if every single one I visited happened to be in Galloway. In theory I set aside X number of days each months when I am not silent, but I have ended up whizzing around the country so much that I have been less silent that I want to be. If you add to that the fact that three years ago I made a ghastly mistake and acquired a dog, I am making it hard for myself to lead a truly silent life. I need to get back to it. She speaks with such longing that it makes me feel guilty even to ask another question, but I am still struggling to reconcile the gregarious woman in front of me in the Manchester café where we meet - she is en route for her hermitage after leading a retreat in Sinai in the footsteps of the (largely silent and solitary) third-century Desert Fathers - with someone who can go days and weeks without speaking to another human being. Doesn't she ever hanker after company, even a "significant other"? Though she converted to Catholicism 20 years ago, she is not, after all, a nun. "I have deliberately and consistently taken no vows of celibacy," she replies, "so I am open to that, but the chances of a suitable someone coming along - and, more to the point, me noticing they have come along - grows less and less likely." The things she misses in her shieling, she says, are simpler and very specific. "The first is physical contact in moments of stress, not the big ones, but when I come in from a walk and it has been raining and I am soaked and I have a deep desire for someone to be there to say, "God, you're wet." And the second is when someone has annoyed me, usually by email, I have no one there to let off steam with, and so frequently I find myself telling the person I am angry with my reply. I need someone to puncture my rage bubble. The other thing she finds herself hankering after, she says, is the sort of catch-all conversation we are having. I'm a profoundly frivolous person and I grew up with smarty-pants dinner conversations. If I am ever asked to be in Who's Who, I will put as my hobby deipnosophy, banter-like exchanges round a dinner table. Couldn't she just break silence once a month and invite local friends over for a good set-to over supper? "You don't understand," she protests, a look of mock horror on her face, "there is hardly a soul within spitting distance of where I live." Their loss is my gain.