No.208
Two nights ago, during a finally break in the grey and rain, we made a small fire in our piece of garden, inside the dry stone fire-wall-pit-gravel-thing we undertook not long after moving to this town, in a fit of likely madness which involved manually digging a large, deep, impossible circle of soil out of the sloped grass area, and then heaving a selection of wildly heavy and irregular-shaped stones here, there, and everywhere to form a semi-ish-circle of low wall, nice to sit on if you don’t mind the ancient coldness of the stone, or its dampness, or the fact that in the warmer months huge ferns will be reaching for your neck and body.
I tell you about this purely to set the scene for a magnificent thing, which was a frog. As the slightly damp wood hissed and flamed gently, and after I’d ceremonially burnt a small, crumped piece of paper, we both caught a movement out of our eye corners inside one edge of the stone wall.
We then sat as statues might, and watched as a frog cautiously—though with some amount of certainty, perhaps even a blasé attitude—pulled its leathery legs out of a gap in the shaded stones, squatly walked its way a short distance across the pea gravel, then squeezed itself back under another stone in the wall.
This felt remarkable for a couple of reasons. Firstly because it felt like we became one single, silent statue in anticipation of seeing something, in a way that didn’t require a verbal confirmation of intention. We just stopped moving, stopped speaking, stopped needing for anything else to happen. It felt in fact as though I might have never needed to move again. The second was the weight of magic accompanying a moment in which a wild creature feels comfortable and safe enough to continue with whatever it was doing. We are, as humans, so loud, so intrusive, so barbaric, that it feels deeply remarkable when we can appear still and safe enough—allowing for wild things to simply proceed with their wild.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
I had a dream this morning (instead of getting out of bed at 6am I got out at 8:05am, and the gap between was entirely filled with strange disjointed dreams) in which the next issue of Orion Magazine was a sort of anthology, and that it was entirely orange. Deep, planet-on-fire-orange, all the pages in that uncomfortable shade. Burning orange cover, burning orange table of contents, burning orange instead of photographs and burning orange behind all of the essays, poems, and other contributions.
The current issue of Orion is the summer one, and my ‘Root Catalog’ column within centers around the Italian fiabe italiane, or Italian folktales. You can read the column in full inside newsletter No.203—if you enjoy reading thoughtful, nuanced pieces about our environment and our confusing place within it, then a subscription to the magazine may be just the thing for you. It is, whether oddly or not oddly, the only magazine I will sit and quietly read cover to cover, often heart-sunk, always left with a sense of astonishment, bewilderment, and determination.
Next year will mark the 10 year anniversary of Lost in Translation, my very first book. On the one hand it is completely baffling to think this much time could have possibly passed, but on the other I’ve had the time to live in four different countries, publish five other books, and become at least ninety-two different versions of myself.
Given this upcoming book-versary, I’m seriously considering a project to commemorate and expand on all the things that people so loved about Lost in Translation. Even now I still routinely receive emails from readers asking whether I know of a word for this feeling or that emotion, and while I often don’t know at all, I feel incredibly fortunate that the small, unsuspecting book has connected me in an ongoing way to so many people who also wish to celebrate language and all it can hold and expand for us. It is a testament to how together it is possible to become despite all the things which instruct us to fear.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Very texturally satisfying painted snippets from Melbourne-based artist and designer Amber Nuttall.
I’m currently reading Homesick by Jennifer Croft, and have been quite overcome by it, by its tenderness and poetic tones, its unusualness and soft edges surrounding deep, sisterly things. As a person who identifies hugely with this sentence from Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond—
“I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.”
I’m most struck by how Croft tucks into the book, like small feathers or secrets, mentions of particular word origins or translations, which to me have felt like landings amidst a time of incredible and general unknowableness i.e. living in the present tense (tense) world.
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The regular, numbered newsletter is currently still free for everyone to read, with paid supporters now receiving several additional posts each month, including short stories, previously archived writings, and more detailed looks into creative processes. The Weather of Elsewhere was the second of these paid posts, an excerpt of which is readable below: