Iva Rennard
I write about the things that have to work before anything else can
Water, freight and power lines, at the length the subject actually needs. Mostly for magazines, mostly reported on foot, and usually somewhere it is raining.
In my own words
I am interested in the sentence nobody finishes. A town says the water comes from the reservoir, and stops there, and behind the full stop are ninety years of argument, a drowned village, four pumping stations and a man who drives around at night listening to pipes. That is the piece. I am not a campaigner and I am not an engineer; I am the person who goes and stands next to the thing, asks who decided, and then reads the minutes. It takes months and it does not scale, which is why I publish four or five times a year rather than four or five times a week.
Iva
Start here
Five I would want read first
If you have never read anything of mine, these are the ones to try, and the first is the one I would defend hardest.
Everything arrives at four in the morning
A night shift at an inland rail freight terminal, and why the hour you are asleep is the hour the country is loaded.
Ashmoor, under
The village at the bottom of the reservoir, the families who still hold the deeds, and the summer the water went down far enough to argue about it.
Low water
A river that is mostly pipe, followed from the moor to the tap. This is the essay that turned into the book.
Nine thousand amps over Brantwick
What it is to farm underneath a transmission line, and what an easement is worth when it was signed in 1961.
A barge called Mercy
The last working cargo barge on the Dell Cut, her crew of two, and the arithmetic that keeps her moving for one more season.
Right now
What I am open to
The book takes most of the year. What is left is roughly one reported piece a quarter and a small amount of everything else.
I
One long commission a quarter
Reported features of three thousand words and up, with the travel agreed in advance. I am booked to February and taking enquiries beyond it.
II
Shorter work, occasionally
Essays, columns and the kind of report or catalogue piece that needs somebody who will actually go and look. Four or five a year.
III
Talks, readings and teaching
On long-form reporting, on infrastructure as a subject, and from spring on the book. I teach one week a year and enjoy it more than I expect to.
Published in
- The Long Field
- Ballast
- Stanchion
- Overspill
- The Meridian
- The Kettering Review
Something that needs more than a phone call
If you are an editor with a subject that will not fit in fifteen hundred words, write to me and tell me what the full stop is hiding.