For many years on the tiny and remote Norwegian island of Fjærøy, Anna Måsøy has tended eider, wild sea ducks that come to nest there. Each year she cleans out their old nests, rebuilds broken ones, waits for the birds to arrive, and deters predators when they do. When the ducks leave, she gathers their downy feathers, which are made into just a handful of duvets. There are other women like her, and these duck women, as farmer and author James Rebanks affectionately calls them, make sure that eider chicks can hatch and stand some chance of survival; it is a species whose population is dwindling.

Anna was the first duck woman James met during a trip with UNESCO many years ago. She stood proud and poised at the coast of her island, which might just as well have been the edge of the earth. “I imagine the last human on earth being a woman on a rocky shoreline,” he writes in the book. “I met someone like that once, a woman right at the outermost edge. A woman still living after everything she knew and understood had ended.”

James went home, but Anna stood at the edge of his mind as well as her island. When it felt like the certainties and stories he carried were crumbling, he asked her if he could come and help. He thought she might have something to teach him. She said yes, but to come quickly – she was getting old, and the next season was to be her last.

I spoke with James about his latest book, The Place of Tides, which tells the story of his time on the island with Anna. I wondered what drew James to write about her years after that first encounter:

I have always felt that the world of books has some massive blind spots. Where is the book about, or by, a hairdresser? Or bus driver? Or nurse? Or farm worker? The answer is that historically they weren’t considered to be culturally important or of any interest. I think that’s pompous nonsense. I want to read those books. And now that I’m lucky enough to be published, I want to write such books. In my first book, I wrote about my people (shepherds) being “nobodies” – the kind of people that do the work. Anna in my latest book is one of the most heroic “nobodies” I have ever met, someone quiet whom no one paid much notice to, but who was a great mum, a cook in an old people’s home, a carer, and then rebuilt an island duck station with wild birds in her unpaid leave. She spent decades trying to rebuild a broken place, and I think we need that kind of heroism and selflessness.

James thinks he is going to Anna’s island to support her efforts and to learn about independence, about what it takes to be tough and resilient. But once there, he starts noticing and picking at threads of history and community and finds that independence is a myth. Resilience comes not from toughing it out but from leaning on others. He writes that going to a remote island did not get him away from the brokenness he felt or saw in the world, and he sees that people care – something he needed at that time in his life. I ask him how we might remember this in an age that seems often to glorify a rugged individualism:

The things that bind us are being broken. Consumerism and materialism have run amok. Billionaires are currently breaking anything that doesn’t serve their interests. And what remains of collective care and dignity is under assault. And I saw people on the island that knew and lived a greater truth, that our lives are made richer by the care we give others, including wild things, and through the work we do, not through personal gain and selfishness.

What did Anna, her island, and the old tradition she is restoring have to show him about his own community?

I know now that community is fragile and has to be built again and again. My world has shrunk somewhat to the people I love, and the work I do. It once mattered to me to “be something” in a more abstract wider sense, and now I realise that has little worth. I only realized that by achieving it and then feeling empty. I’d rather be loved than be some “big man.” If I am ever thought of as a good man, it will be because I cared for my family and helped them to be what they want to be. Book fame is very flattering, but it doesn’t amount to much in the big scheme of things and is often bought through selfishness.

As well as the community that is around Anna which stretches back through, there is an intimate and immediate island community that James finds himself in: Anna, and her apprentice Ingrid. I am curious how he saw the world from that space.

The two women, Anna and her friend Ingrid, were incredibly kind to me at a time when I needed it. I realised I was writing about a female space and wanted to do that by listening and being smaller than I have tended to be at home, than men generally are. They joked that I was an “honorary woman.” Perhaps for the first time I heard women and saw how they related to the men in their lives. And it was uncomfortable because the men were probably not unlike the men in my life at home, not unlike me. These women loved and respected their menfolk, but on the island, they were able to escape a little from the usual rules and norms and be different versions of themselves.

In the book, we learn a little of the mythology of the place, and the ways that Anna seems to point to myth and magic despite her pragmatism. I wondered whether these stories and James’s own experience impacted the way he views belief, myth, story – the unknowable non-physical world:

I thought ghost stories were silly until I went to that place and heard Anna talk about the huldra. Huldra are female trolls that live in the rocks, a sort of shadow race of beings that Anna and other women on the islands believe protect places from harm. The huldra also play tricks on men. These stories helped Anna to make sense of her world, feel safer, and gave her peace about the future. But they also made the rocks and the place alive, and somehow about more than human needs, and human timescales, and I suspect that this is a good thing.

The things that bring James joy often seem to come back to his family and his farm. Reading about Anna’s island and her work often reminded me of the Rebanks’s farm: when I visit, I feel a sense of the more-than-human needs and timescales that James felt on the island. I feel the farm’s history, the many hands that shape it, and its deep rootedness in a soil formed by ancestors and which will help shape the future.

I’m delighted our farm makes you feel something. Some days I think the farm is our best work, and every day I want it to be better and better, a place where our values and beliefs can be made tangible and touchable. If all else fails I’ll know we made one little place better, like Anna.

Anna is a compelling, brave, sometimes improbable character. James observes that people seemed drawn to her, that they were searching for something, and Anna “gave people courage to be more than they had yet dared to be, just by being herself.” He points out that he sought to make from Anna’s life a kind of fable. I am curious why he decided to take this approach rather than, say, something more journalistic:

I like the fable form. Stories are, by definition, simplifications – order imposed on the chaos of real life. And the best stories are the simplest, so I like the fable form because it says to the reader, this is a little tale that came from the truth, but it is simplified, enjoy it and perhaps see the meaning in it. A fable doesn’t pretend to have all the complexity of real life (something I’m not sure any writing can claim to pull off), it is a plain tale with a purpose. I realised on the island how false it would be to try and tell the women’s stories as if I could read their minds, like a novelist might have, that all that was possible was an outsider’s story based on perception. So in a strange way it became the most honest way to write about them.

In sharing their stories of sheep and ducks, of history and tradition and craft, Anna and James invite us not only into their own lives but into the lives of generations before them, and perhaps into what’s possible when we honour those crafts, and our hands, and the communities that uphold these old ways. They fight the age they live in, and they have captured people’s interest as they do so. I am curious about the increasing interest in these stories now.

I think people sense that we have got ourselves in to trouble. We live and work in ways that make us anxious and exhausted, that make us ill, and distracted friends, partners, and parents. We have strange economic and technological beliefs that are robbing people of meaningful work and community. One of the ways to escape this is to look again at the skilled work we once did, and how we once lived in the world. Anna was extremely old fashioned in her beliefs about what mattered. And she was also one of the wisest and most purposeful people I have ever met. Those two facts are connected. Meaningful work and having a sense of belonging are blessings.

James has written in depth about his own meaningful work as a farmer and ecological steward. Whether we farm or not, the way that we collectively approach food, farming and the environment affects us all. Here in the United Kingdom, that approach is harming our health, communities, food security, soils, nature. The United Kingdom is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. James believes that stewarding ecosystems and farming productively can go hand in hand. I ask him about the future of farming:

I think we are set on a disastrous course, moving further and further from a wise and holistic set of policies on food, farming and the environment. I think we are largely powerless now, because we have given power to people that don’t want the change that is needed, and they are dismantling the structures we need to build anything better. I am a huge Wendell Berry fan, and a friend of his, and he told me years ago he had lost the arguments his whole life – I thought that was a sad thing to hear, but with each passing year I understand it better.

And yet Anna’s work shows that care and craft still matter, perhaps more than ever. We can all be part of the work of restoration, of regeneration, of building things – from right where we are, and sometimes amongst ruins. James and his family work hard to tend their farm well, and it is a place teeming with life. I wonder where he turns for his own wisdom each day:

Mostly my wife Helen. She is very different from me, and that really helps give us some balance. She’s very thoughtful about us all needing rest, and balance, and needing care and love. For some idiotic reason or another I didn’t listen to her about any of this for many years and nearly crashed myself. Now I listen a lot more carefully and try to do at least some of what she urges me to do.

And what now – now that he is home, that his book is out in the world, that Anna’s story is traveling farther than the shores she knows? James is single-minded:

I am trying to live like Anna, with a clear and stubborn purpose. I’ve lost interest in most things outside that purpose. I was once high on books and the pursuit of literary greatness. I wanted to be one of those “great” writers and be loved or revered for being such a thing. But in truth, I’ve grown out of it. The love and respect of strangers is a fairly empty thing – we have four kids, and I’d rather be liked and loved by them than be some kind of mythical wise man. Maybe I read too many literary biographies! After a while I realised a load of those men were just selfish arseholes and I grew bored of them. Also, I love my wife Helen, and that other stuff just gets in the way of trying to be a good human.