ONE of the things artist and author Amanda Thomson loves about the old words she has found for nature and place, is the way they “make the ordinary that we wouldn’t notice extraordinary again”.

Belonging: Natural Histories Of Place, identityAand Home is the follow up to her debut book A Scots Dictionary of Nature. Though ostensibly a memoir, shot through with themes around race, identity and belonging, as well as vivid nature-writing, it’s punctuated with list of words that surface through its contemplative meanderings., telling their own stories or creating poems out of their sequencings. “I wanted these lists,” she says, “to just be these moments of pause. For instance there’s a weather one which goes through words from when it’s dry to when it rains fully, then stops. It’s like a word poem. These are words that just sit between lots of different words in a dictionary but when you put them together they start to tell these other stories.”

Amongst those lists one stands out. “Neither one thing nor the other” is its title and it starts with the word “ambivalence” then moves through others like “grey area” and “half caste”, and onto others like “intersectional”, “mulatto” and “neb-o’-the-morning”.

READ MORE: A Scots Dictionary of Nature - what to read this week

When I ask her about this section she recalls that someone not long ago told her that Belonging was a book about race. “I said it’s not,” she recalls. “It’s about all the things that make us who we are and, of course, your identity is how you define yourself but also how people define you. For me being mixed race or black, that’s a part of my identity - but, as I’m walking down the street, it comes in and out of view. There’s all these other things that come in and out and I think that there are so many grey areas in everything. When you think about the tides and the liminality between the high tide and the low tide. There are so many spaces of in betweenness that we all have to live between.”

Notably instersectionality is something Thomson mentions as “important to her” early on in book, as she observes that much of what she is thinking about is what made her who she is. She also wryly notes how sometimes she has to “choose between boxes that may or may not include ovo-lacto vegetarian/Black British/Black Scottish/ mixed ethnicity/gay/civilly partnered”.

The interest in words that led to the publication of her first book began when she came across an old nineteenth-century Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language in a second-hand bookshop and started thinking about her grandparents and family and the language they used. “I especially think of when I was wee and we used to visit my gran and her family and just really having to strain to get my ear in to understand their accents because it was so different and it was words that I didn’t use or were actually the same words but pronounced differently. It’s gie cauld, for instance.”

With Belonging, she has written a memoir that comes out of “thinking about the kernels of things that I got from family members that made me love nature”. It’s as if she’s answering a question that’s never quite spelt-out, but which seems to me something like, in a Scotland where it’s often said that black or working-class people or even women are less likely to access nature, what was it about her childhood or background that made her feel so at home there? That, however, is just my interpretation.

“It’s the question,” she says, “of what it is that makes you who you are. I’ve always been a bird watcher and I’ve always been a hill walker. That has to come from somewhere and it came from my family.

“You can’t help but think about your childhood, you can’t help but think about your family, you can’t help but think about these moments of racism you experienced and then these questions of belonging and identity all fit in with these other things. So it started to interweave.”

Among the words she has chosen, one she starts with is “snag”, a word that isn’t Scottish, but in fact North American and refers to a standing dead tree. “For me,” she says, “it’s an important word because the standing deadwood and how important that is for the continued health of the forest seemed really a remarkable thing for me to think about. That something that might seem now redundant is actually continuing to feed the forest and not only feed the forest but support all these species that otherwise wouldn’t be there.

“That metaphor of how the dead continue to support the living became a really lovely thing to link how I was starting to think about my family and grandparents to the nature stuff that I was writing as well. That was the thread that runs through the book.”

It’s a book that digs deep into the past of her mother’s white, Scottish family, a clan that had strong roots in the area in which she grew up, in a Kilsyth council house, as well as a childhood that revolved around her mother, gran and papa (her grandfather). Among the most vivid chapters is one in which she describes her grandfather, partly through his fishing and the book of flies she inherited from him.

One of the things Thomson is interested is the moments when things come into focus – for instance the experience of racism. “It’s like when you’re walking sometimes you’re day-dreaming, you’re in your self, you’re in your own thoughts.

Then something will ping to pull you out, back into the real world. And it can be a birdsong, or it could be someone shouting out something sexist or racist, or it could be just something that - there are just all these things good and bad that take you out of yourself. And I think that’s something quietly there in the book.”

Throughout the book she quotes and name checks the authors who are part of the story of who she is.

Among these is Jackie Kay, who she says, was “the first voice who rooted me in me”. But there’s also Nan Shepherd, Norman MacCaig and the nature writer and bird watcher, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson, whose “florid and enthusiastic” writing she credits with igniting her desire to visit Rothiemurchus and the Highlands at a time when, growing up in a family with no car, it seemed so inaccessible.

“He really made me want to get up to the Highlands to see all these birds that seemed incredibly exotic."

READ MORE: Scotland's Makar Jackie Kay opens up about life, love and writing

A stand-out chapter takes her to South Africa where she is sent as part of Edinburgh International Book Festival’s Outriders Africa programme. Race and nature story-telling interweave in her reflections on the trip.

“In Cape Town,” she writes, “I was occasionally addressed in Afrikaans, and I have that same experience of an assumption that I am local, from there, when I visit the US, and it’s not always clear that I am not from there until people hear my Scottish accent. There’s always something nice about not feeling so different.

“You can forget, sometimes, that you can hold a tension without quite realising it, till something helps you let it go. Like how I used to feel when I went to London Pride or how I can feel walking through the forest or in the hills.”

Not everyone of course has that experience when they walk through the forest or the hills – not all people feel safe there, and different people feel safer in different environments. But Thomson feels it. It ripples through her book. These are places where she can be more herself, “take a breath”. Jessica Gaitán Johannesson & Amanda Thomson: Climate Change is Personal and Political is at Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 16