Working as a lone creative person often feels most heightened in the autumn, the solitude of it more noticeable somehow, followed around by some kind of unnamable longing for everything to be easier, more bearable, for everyone. You can’t think properly with other people around, but you need them around nonetheless, and regardless these early autumn-to-winter weeks leave me feeling better than all the other ones—the springs and the summers don’t promise me things, but the autumn does and I can’t ever thank it enough.
In the mornings when my arms are filled with coffee I think up ideas for series I’d like to paint—the townspeople, you reading in the chair on the sofa in the other chair, the houseplants, the things that get broken, dull seascapes, objects nobody feels are of importance, extinct birds. In the afternoons, after I haven’t gotten as much done as I’d hoped, I look blankly and disappointingly at the computer and move tasks to the following day and think distracted thoughts, or walk, or wonder if I’m doing enough, or doing work loudly enough, for someone who’s just had their fifth book published.
Here, in the UK, it now occurs to me that we might receive better, more animated leadership from a bag of frozen peas, and I think about the people who might not be able to stay warm enough during the colder months which lie waiting—up at a latitude of 56.6 degrees, in line with northern Denmark, certain roads around where we live will get ploughed and others will be intermittently closed, and we have those striped snow poles for hazard avoidance in severe weather. I want the muffled blankets of snow, and the landscapes here expect and need them, but for most people winter tends to lay bare the holes in the fabric. What happens when nobody gives you what you need to mend?
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
This week I’ll be recording an event for the 18th Seoul Wow Book Festival, which this year settles on the phrase ‘Ask the way with kindness’—“With people who work silently in their field and look at the world with warm eyes, this space is where you can share stories that are comforting and sympathetic to those living in hardship.”
(Ah yes, that’s me, working silently in my field.)
I’ll be talking about my book Eating the Sun (Penguin, 2019), which is a collection of mini essays about how we relate to spacetime, plant cells, and everything in between. The Korean language edition of the book came out last year, so I will be warming up my spacetime muscles in the next few days—certainly one of the stranger things about your work being published in book format is the fact, or necessity, of revisiting ideas years after you researched and dreamt and cemented them. Do I embrace this? Moderately, but gratefully.
This week also brings with it a recording for the Slow Stories podcast, which I’m around 50% excited for, this percentage being very high for me. While I try to say ‘Yes of course I’m very calm and professional about that’ to conversations and/or publicity where possible, I’m also one of the least well-suited persons for that kind of thing perhaps in the history of all self-promotion, so it feels good when an opportunity arises that feels genuinely parallel to my thought processes and ways of being. (I feel there are generally reasons why people choose to be writers, not talkers, and if people are intensely-talking writers I become suspicious.)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE (AGAIN) WITH:
Various older and newer things by Cape Town-based visual artist Kirsten Sims, whose work I will find myself returning to from time to time.
“‘I swim every morning ,’ Pen says. ‘Every morning of my life. Two hundred metres before breakfast, or I don’t feel alive.’”
— Barbara Trapido
After an enforced absence from our daily chlorine we returned to the pool yesterday morning, in the half dark, the sky still spitting the leftovers of the clouds which sit in the valley at night, and this took my mind back to the first winter we swam through while living outside of Seattle. Gates frozen shut, those six weeks of snowfall, the grey heron standing next to State Route 900 in a blizzard.
Was I happier, then, am I remembering it through a blur of weather and tall trees and newness, was I so far removed from the familiarity and freedom that comes with living alone that I forgot to be unhappy? Something like that, I suppose.
