COILING plants and tendrils, like ivy running up the wall or a twining grapevine, respond deftly to the structures they grow along.

This phenomenon, known as thigmotropism, doesn't have an equivalent definition in the way humans respond to, and are shaped by, plant life.

However, Jessie Cole, who has lived in Burringbar, submerged in the forest, since the age of three, is somewhat of an example of how we as humans can grow in concert with nature.

Ahead of her appearance at the Byron Writers Festival this weekend, Cole, the author of novels Darkness at the Edge of Town and Deeper Water, spoke to the Tweed Daily News about Staying, her acclaimed memoir in which her Burringbar home is at the centre.

Tim Winton described your memoir Staying as "a wounded, lovely, luminous book about grief, trauma and the strange healing potential of words.” How would you describe Staying?

I think it's an expression of what I've been through and what my family has been through. It is an example of one way of dealing with trauma. I think it's really common in our culture when people experience difficult circumstances to move way, leave somewhere behind and start again. I think this is a story offering another option: to stay. To stay in the place of your unwinding.

Place and home play a prominent role in Staying.

I have lived in the same house since I was three years old, and now I'm 40. When the house was built my family planted the gardens, which have grown around me and we grew together. I feel bonded to my natural environment in the sort of kin sense. It's not just that it is beautiful and a nice place to be. It's much more of a strong connection. The sense of being part of a landscape and belonging, which gives a sense of comfort, sustenance and pleasure.

In your writing you are able see in the environment what many others can't. When did you start to grasp your own comprehension of nature and the power of what was around you?

It was a slow awareness. It was something I never really noticed because I'd never lived anywhere else, and the way I lived was isolated, so I wasn't getting much feedback or contact with different ways people were living. It was only when I had my first two novels published and started to go to festivals, and out of the forest, in order to publicise those novels that I started to notice the way I lived was unique.

Staying has received universal acclaim. How have you found the reaction?

It's been amazing. I couldn't even imagine a better response, which has been really affirming, especially because the memoir covers some difficult territory that isn't often talked about.

You've had a few Byron Writers Festival appearances. Are these forums something you enjoy participating in?

The Byron Writers Festival itself is such an incredible site to have a festival - it's so beautiful and the weather is so good that there's no better place. I often spend time between sessions laying somewhere in the grass in the sun.

- Jessie Cole will be taking part in several sessions at Byron Writers Festival including Living Wild and Making the Beast Beautiful on Friday, Shaping Life into Story on Saturday and First Open a Vein: Writing Through Personal Pain on Sunday.