It has been a while, perhaps a month, which is nothing and everything, and I'm approximately six hundred miles north of where I was the last time I wrote a newsletter. As well as literally moving myself northwards, it also feels as if I might be six hundred miles to the north inside my head—a good thing, a hard-to-keep-up-with thing. The last two weeks have been spent in the Scottish Highlands, a place of vast, reassuring emptiness and, at this time of year, snow and sleet and winds strong enough to wash you from the side of a mountain.
Not yet done here though, and at the end of it twenty-three and a half days will have been time enough to think about a wide assortment of things, of problems. When stood in landscapes so devoid and large and absorbent, clarity can arrive like an on-time train you were expecting to wait hours for. The air is clean, clean enough to grow species of lichen nowhere else has ever heard of, and people seem to understand here, know how fragile it all is. So hours were spent in the botanical gardens, hours were spent walking up and down steps carved into the side of a hillside, hours spent reading Natalia Ginzburg, who makes all the small things look astonishing, and a hundred years later I'm here, not there.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
Something that I wanted to share two weeks ago, and then wanted to share last week, and then life was just everything and all over in the way it often s, and unfortunately the newsletter can be top of the list when it comes to streamlining work tasks to make room for the rest of living. But I'm straying from the point already, which is that Eating the Sun has won the 2019 Whirling Prize from Etchings Press.
They present two awards each year, one for prose and one for poetry, with the 2019 theme being 'Space: Our Connections to the Universe'. I am a whole delight at Eating the Sun being recognised, and the news was made all the more surprising given the fact that I didn't know someone at Penguin had silently entered on my behalf. In the next week or so I will be taking part in a podcast conversation-sort-of-interview with four of the undergraduate and graduate students that read and chose the book, addressing things such as 'Do you find space a daunting concept?' and 'Any recommended accompanying music to listen to while reading Eating the Sun?'.
In other news, I have moderate-to-large excitement about a new book idea, conveniently different to all of my other ideas thus far. This means a new proposal, quickly quickly now, send off to my long-suffering Wonder Agent, Jennifer, and then a brief imagining of the entire world population crossing their fingers in unison. (Winter has been a very long season for me, I feel positively wrecked by it—note, positively—and now, some landscapes and some mountains later, I feel like I can recognise what it is that I'm looking at.)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Paintings by Jeremy Miranda (a fairly frequent falling).
'... the sea is broken' — Anna Akhmatova
(Left me thinking about how it could have been, how it could be, how we can't ever get to there, but we are already here so let's stay and grow uncontrollably, how little really matters, how much time begins to look like water, how we want to say but can't, how much swimming we all do, staying afloat, staying at all.)
The end.
Copyright © 2020 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.