An epiphany in books

A round up of reading October to December

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. My Sunday posts are always free. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

You might find this easier to read in the app or online as some mail providers will cut off the text.

A book is a heart that beats in the chest of another

Rebecca Solnit writes.

Always when we come to a book we are seeking an encounter — with the creature who wrote, the creatures (human, animal, plant…) contained in the pages, and the creature of ourselves as we find resonance, mirrors and shadows in the unwinding of a sentence or the vision of a poem.

It’s the eve of epiphany and I love that story of searching — for something that hadn’t happened before, for something that would change those searching. I love the metaphors of how we notice and follow the stars that guide us, what we are prepared to let go and how far we will journey to search for what will inspire and transform us.

We make such journeys in so many ways, and one of them is through the books we immerse in.

In 2024 I read a lot. I’ve always read a lot, but some years the pile becomes intimidating or I start reading so many things at once that the attention scatters. I set out with an intention to have no more than 3 books by the bed (poetry, fiction, non fiction) and to try to read across these more evenly. It had seasonal rhythms. In Spring I craved poetry. By autumn I had an enormous hunger for story. Encounter. Vision, Nourishment. These have been the gifts of reading in the last year.

Non-fiction

In the autumn I wanted less of non-fiction, perhaps because I’d filled up already and was working on a non-fiction project myself. But those I read were nurturing and insightful, challenging and perspective-altering. Amongst them was a book of Christmas recipes — Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles, which not only is a diary of food from the beginning of November to the end of January, but also full of place and story. And Flora Collingwood-Norris’s Visible Creative Mending, because darning fascinates and soothes and to mend feels so much more than the sum of wool and thread. And these:

Anna Chapman Parker, Understorey, a year among weeds

A young mother with little time for her art, Anna Chapman Parker begins to sketch weeds as a

way of drawing nothing -- as near as I could get to that. No time to think -- just drop down and draw whatever was growing there.

What unfolds is a project that connects her to moments of deep attention, the resulting line drawings quick and loose and lovely, some of them lines and dots, like October's broom, others emerging from pencil marks as delicate as the plants themselves like February's snowdrops and others singing off the page like August's rosebay willowherb and meadow cranesbill.

And the art moves out from these weeds, that persist in cracks and on waste ground, the way a mother's creativity persists in the cracks between sleepless nights and feeding and comforting...

We learn about the plants as we learn about a life, following the diary of days across a year of ordinary extraordinary moments. And we learn about the art of others as images and information on how others have integrated weeds into their art winds another thread through the tapestry of this book.

My one wish was for colour images of the art of others that is featured, but it's an otherwise splendid book and beautifully produced. Full of quiet and yearning.

Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie, The Use of Photography

This is one of the strangest and most mesmerising non-fiction books I've read. It's the story of a passionate affair told in diary entries and photographs. Going from a diagnosis of breast cancer to intensive chemotherapy followed by surgery and radiation, the affair evolves across Paris, Venice and Brussels. Largely it's domestic and every photo pictures the clothes the lovers have torn off and abandoned.

Each of them takes their own shots. The pictures are only ever opened by the two of them together. Each of them comments without showing the writing to the other. The formula is staggeringly simple. The images are real and unbeautiful. And the effect is powerful.

The conception of the book is innovative and stratling. But more than this, the tenderness of these intimate objects without the bodies that clung to one another is palpable. The vulnerability and lack of display is its own eroticism in the face of mortality.

The whole is a snapshot, a tiny glimpse that gets and doesn't need a resolution. Completely fascinating.

Angus Hyland & Kendra Wilson, The Book of the Tree, trees in art

There are a lot of plants in this quarter's reading. I picked this one up in Dartington on our way to the ferry for what promised to be a rough crossing and it was perfect. Mostly pictures, exquisite and ranging across many artists. There were names I knew, artists whose work I've seen up close -- Klimt, van Gogh, Friedrich, Paul Nash, Spencer, Monet -- and names I was familiar with but not well-acquainted. And there were many artists I'd never discovered, including Harald Sohlberg, whose 'Fisherman's Cottage' was the stand-out piece for me.

Between the lavish pictures were pages about the artists and literary quotes about trees. What could be more soothing trapped on a tossing ferry wanting to be home in the forest?

Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

The first part of a three-volume 'living autobiography' this is a powerful, sharp-eyed, suprising memoir, brimming with quoatable insights. When she finds herself in tears on escalators, Levy decides it's time to take time out of her life and flies to Majorca in winter where she finds herself

literally lost when I was lost in every other way.

There, in a cold off-season hotel where the owner is undergoing her own life crisis, she begins to unravel the question of why she writes. An answer to Orwell's same question.

Levy's story is complex and freighted with grief from a childhood in apartheid South Africa and gives her a keen sense of justice that she applies to all of life, and especially to intersections of gender, race and class in the lives of women. A devotee of Marguerite Duras, Levy applies her feminist thinking to her role as a 'mother' -- and the ways in which it is structured as a delusion of neo-patriarchy, that

required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were Strong Modern Women whilst being subjected to all kinds of humiliations.

Writing, on the other hand, is a way of,

learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion.

And writing, she says, quoting Woolf, should be done calmly, without rage.

I had told the Chinese shopkeeper that to become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to speak in my own voice which is not loud at all.

How that voice develops will be the subject of the next volume, which I suspect will be a return to South Africa. But for now this quiet, profound epiphany -- to make ourselves heard in even the softest voice.

Alain Baraton, Dictionaire amoureux illustrés des Arbres

Another book of trees with many gorgeous pictures. This huge and handsome tome arrived as a gift from a friend and is structured as a dictionary featuring trees by letter -- some are whole species, some are individual named trees like the famous 'Mathusalem', a bristlcone pine chasing his 5000th birthday and one of the oldest organisms on the earth.

The pictures and botanical drawings are exquisite. The French of non-fiction books that are highly factual is, I find, much easier to follow than trying to read fiction in another language and so much easier than most poetry. And it's a book to go back and back to -- afterall, it's full of trees.

Kurt Jackson, Botanical Landscapes

With a foreword by Tim Smit and an introduction from Robert McFarlane, this lavish full-colour art book is a treasure-trove. Jackson's style is impressionistic (pushing towards abstraction, Adam reliably informs me) and the book covers two decades of painting trees, plants and fungi. I love every image in it -- a book divided into sections for

foxglove
weeds
gorse
fungi
oak
apple
vegetables
thorn and brambles

And what stands out above all else is the aliveness of the plants and landscapes. Jackson is painting images of a thousand beloveds. The land and plant creatures he depicts watch us as we watch them, feel and ache, have rhythms and seasons. They are family and they don't have to be all sweetness and light to be adored family -- they can be spiky and prickly, gnarled and sharp. They come as themselves, imperfect and gracious, piercing and exquisite. Every image bears repeated viewing and viewing, will pull you in and entrance. I am completely beguiled.

Novels

And then there was story. I loved every one of these dozen novels. Two were very much focussed on Christmas / midwinter, and written for children and adults willing to read such profound things. The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston was a December read-along with Katherine May. It's a gentle ghost story with atmospheric earth-magic in a story of family, ancestry and the complexities of loneliness and connection. It's magical, full of hope and takes children and old women seriously and was a delight as the world darkened.

And Jostein Gaardar's The Christmas Mystery, the story of a magical Advent calendar found by Joachim, a Norweigan child. Each window reveals the next part of story that gathers a pilgrimage of shepherds, sheep, angels, Roman officials, wise men and a little girl who disappeared from Joachim's town in 1948. A pilgrimage that moves across land and water from Norway to Bethlehem and backwards through almost 2000 years of history to arrive at the nativity. It's odd and unique and even if this is not your faith journey, it has important things to say about love and belonging and about displacement and how we treat refugees.

And the other ten in brief:

Cynan Jones, The Dig

I discovered The Dig in Foyles -- a rare visit to real bookshop. The prose is remarkable, spare and lyrical for all its darkness. And it can be very dark! The minimalism is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, as is the willingness to go to shadowy places with complexity. In a landscape that is as beautiful as it is bleak, a bereaved young farmer's grief is unspeakable. His sorrow is worsened by his exhaustion as he battles the impossibility of small-scale Welsh sheep farming, the daily losses that explode into his bigger loss. There is a constant tension between being alive and loving in world of emotional pain and physical violence.

And his story is threaded with another -- the badger baiters whose cruelty is appalling yet banal (as Hannah Arendt would say). The understanding that these are people who are marginalised, baited by a society that regards them as scum, just as they regard the badgers in turn, doesn't make the horror easier to read. But it gives a compassion and complexity that is both profound and disorienting. The powerless find power in ways that are violent and ghastly, yet predictable and, for them, ordinary.

It's a short, intense book and not an easy read, but it continues to haunt me not only with its raw honesty, but its profound tenderness.

Garth Greenwell, Small Rain

I read Small Rain while going through a process of diagnosis, which only intensified its effect. The protagonist, a poet, and the main character in earlier books, is hospitalised and ends up in intensive care after an episode of agonising stomach pain. The pain is so great that it dissolves his fluency with language, his sense of self and soul and it's unclear what the cause is.

The novel reads like a procedural. We witness every drop of blood taken and every test in detail. We live through hospital days with their completely warped sense of time. The language of his body in the hands of strangers becomes the new currency of this cloistered life.

The cast of characters is tiny. The protagonist, the carefully managed visits from his partner, L. (the timing is curing the Covid pandemic), the medical staff. The days are repetitive and yet the story is completely fascinating and there is no room for boredom either within the narrative or as the reader. Pain:

had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence; I wasn’t impatient or bored, there was something fascinating and dreadful about the experience of my body. I began negotiating with it, with the pain or with my body.

And in this different world of pain and timelessness the sense of letting go is extraordinary. The sense of being levelled by pain is deeply moving. And in this state, the value of small things, small moments, and of love shine through -- a profound and tender novel.

Sara Mesa, Mon Amor

When the protagonist moves to a sleepy, out-of-the-way small town to rent a small place in poor state of repair from an uninterested landlord, she expects life to be quiet. She expects to be able to do her work of translation while trying to forget the mistakes that led to her former life unravelling. But nothing is what it seems.

The quiet place seethes with unquiet. The dog she adopts is unruly. She doesn't fit the local conventions. And her expectations of people founder. Into her increasing sense of unease comes an offer. One that is strange and discomforting and will upend her life further, challenging the judgements she makes about others and who she thinks she is.

There's an uneasy restlessness to this story that lingers. It's odd and challenging and fascinating and, like so much from Peirene Press, unique and compelling.

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

I'm in awe of Olga Tokarczuk and this novel had me hooked and full of anticipation all the way through. It's described as a mystery and a noir, but Tokarczuk is a maven of literary story-telling and the novel is laced with references to Blake, not only in its title but in the interests of the characters and the deep concern with the natural world.

The protagonist, Janina is an odd character. Reclusive and ill-at-ease with the local culture of hunting, she is woken in the night at the start of the novel by a neighbour who has discovered another neighbour dead. Janina, erudite, witty and sometimes ornery, sets out to unravel the mystery with the help of astrology as the body count begins to mount.

Amidst dark themes there's an expansive and mischievous humour that runs through this deft and passionate novel. But this is also a lament for our relationship with non-human animals and a cry for justice. When it was published in Poland there was political outcry at Tokarczuk's views on how we treat marginalised people and animals, even death threats against her. This is intelligent, entertaining, subversive story at its height.

Daisy Johnson, Everything Under

A complex, dark and accomplished novel. At one level it's the story of a lost mother -- lost for many years through estrangement before being lost again to the cruelties of dementia. At another level it's a retelling of the Oedipus story in which the mother becomes Jocasta, using the original story inventively to also explore themes of belonging, fate and gender fluidity.

It's a story that constantly twists, told in language that innovates and unsettles and cleverly weaving in the spectre of an underwater creature that mirrors our human monstrosity. But for all this, it's neither harsh not judgemental. It has a lot to say about language and how we use it for both secrets and deep bonds and ultimately it's about love and all the ways it can haunt and undo us and yet remain essential.

Paul Auster, Baumgartner

There's a seam of autobiography running through the last novel Paul Auster wrote. Baumgartner is an aging philosophy whose mother's family name was Auster and who was married

to a translator—Anna Blume (the name of the unresolved character from his 1987 novel, The Country of Last Things).

At heart, the book is a meditation on grief. Baumgartner's wife has been dead for ten years, but she is present with him in a way that someone might experience a phantom limb and her study is preserved, a sanctuary.

Events in this novel are secondary. Baumgartner's days are routine and even when apparently dramatic things happen, like a fall down the cellar stairs, the incidents are insignificant weighed against grief. The accident that a friend has, the pan that is burnt through, the phone calls from his sister... pale in comparison to the great love that is gradually pieced together. Even when a strange phone call, apparently from Anna in the afterworld, gives Baumgartner permission to love again, there is an inevitability to how the new relationship will play out. His present has stagnated and the book ends, rightly, without resolution.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others

This is a powerful novel that interrogates what we mean by freedom and responsibility, particularly in harsh times. It's set on one night with multiple flashbacks as Jean Blomart, a political activist and resistance leader against the German forces of occupation in France, attends the death-bed of his wounded lover, Hélène.

The memories of each of their lives are vivid and neither Jean nor Hélène are sympathetic characters. They are each intense. He is committed to his views and activism above all else. She is individualistic and determined to be with Jean no matter who stands in the way. Both have illusions about what freedom might mean. Both are trying to negotiate their way through a terrible period and risk being crushed in the struggle against fascism. And, as flawed as they are, we are completely pulled in to their story and their dilemmas.

I began the novel in mid December but as Solstice and Christmas approached I was reluctant to read the death that you always know is coming. I put it down for some lighter reading before the end, but I'm glad I read it. I love the way de Beauvoir's mind works and the existential questions she challenges us to ask.

Clare Keegan, Small Things Like These

Clare Keegan has a brilliance for packing a huge story into a small space and saying important things without didacticism. It's a Christmas story that echoes de Beauvoir's questions about responsibility for others in a very different time and setting.

Bill Furlong is an Irish coal merchant, the child of an unmarried teenage mother who is saved from the Magdalene laundry by a kind employer. Bill's life is good -- full of hard-work and routine with his wife and five daughters, but with a sense of security and respectability.

But when Bill makes the Christmas delivery to the sisters running a school for girls at the local convent, he begins to fear that things are not what they seem. His meeting with a girl who says she wants to kill herself only deepens his unease and then her meets Sarah... Is Sarah mentally ill or is this the kind of abusive place that his mother was saved from? And what will he do? Turn a blind eye and not risk the wrath of the powerful local church? Intervene? And where would that lead?

Read it and find out. It's a tiny novella with a huge story.

Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

Jay had been the darling of the art world in London in his youth. Now he's living in his car in upstate New York, delivering groceries at the height of the pandemic, sick from long Covid. When he makes a delivery to a rich, highly surveilled estate, the door is opened by Alice, his former girlfriend who disappeared years ago with his best friend and rival artist, Rob.

Alice hides Jay in a barn on the estate, aware that her housemates, Rob -- who is now her husband and a major art commodity -- and Marshal, Rob's gallerist who is there with his girlfriend, Nicole, will not want him there. And aware that the house owner, Marshall's paranoid billionaire backer, will also be less than thrilled at anyone being added to the party taking refuge from the plague devastating those without safe places.

And so the stage is set for the drug-fuelled back-story of Jay, Alice and Rob; the corrupt, commercialised state of the art world; the unravelling mess of society as Covid and the early days of Black Lives Matter explode.

Race, money, class, state-of-the nation jostle with personal baggage and intimate relationships. It's a gripping read that moves fluently though time and complex relationships and maintains its sense of surprise. It is full of intelligence and flashes with humour, however dark. It asks huge questions and exposes so much that is rotten, and yet there is a tenderness for the characters even in their worse moments.

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

When the protagonist goes to stay at a small convent of ageing nuns, she's there becasue she's exhausted, no longer certain of her city-life and fast-paced eco-activist job and breaking up with her partner. She has no religious faith, but something about this quiet, reclusive existence draws her back and she finds herself moving in after the community has ceased taking guests.

But quiet can be disturbed anywhere. The area is beseiged by a plague of mice that devastate the life of the community. The tiny creatures eat through cables and decimate food stocks. They are terrible and unstoppable.

And then a skeleton is returned to the sisters -- the remains of one of their members who had left to work in slums and was presumed murdered. The remains of someone who had been loved by those left behind, who also harboured other emotions that have gone unresolved. And the body returns with Helen Parry, a woman the protagonist has a difficult childhood past with and who is now a celebrity nun, an eco-activist, doing the work the protagonist has abandoned. And to complicate things, Helen is also a brusque and unsettling person.

So much is explored here -- shame, how we confront the person we once were, what belonging and women's relationships might mean within a patriarchal institution, how we balance taking action in the world with intimate moral questions... All of this is powerful, but the heart of the book for me was its exploration of devotion in the face of not having a religious faith. Can there be prayer without a traditionally-conceived God? What are the shapes that a contemplative life might take?

All of this is embodied in what feels like being given privileged access to the real lives of real people. Wood is an exquisite story-teller with a gift for hypnotic prose and this book will resonate with me for a long time.

Poetry

Katharine Towers, The Remedies & Oak

The Remedies is a small, beautiful object that begins with 'The Roses', a poem about the loss of her father. As someone who also associates roses with my father, it resonated deeply and it's a beautiful beginning to the first section of the collection, which ranges across disparate themes united by a thread of imaging what is hard to pin down. There is a constant sense of something just beyond the normal field of vision, yet the poems are never abstract, but filled with the senses.

if we stand in woods after rain when the trees are iron and purple, like wine, we'll wish we could stay, not to wait for the woollen comfort of dusk, nor to hear the wind flinching back from the heart to let it be quiet and still ... but to stand in the iron and purple of evening, our stories behind us like toys we've forgotten or lost...

The second section is a sequence on herbal flower remedies, beginning with agrimony, which is the herb I'm spending this January with.

all summer I cough up
umpteen tiny yellow blooms
I can't help looking cheerful
but in my heart of hearts

I'm troubled. [...]

from 'Agrimony'

Spare, lyrical, gently haunting poetry, followed by Oak, published six years later. This long sequence follows the life of an oak from acorn through its many stages of dying. The images here are sharp and the metaphors of seasons, cycles, death and renewal are immersive, so that we find ourselves in real encounter with the oak, another creature like us, for all his differences... Above all, the ways life expands and contacts —

the oak will suddenly find itself lowly
and look up at the sky
at the birds swiftly passing
and will hunker down like a hare to her form

Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows to the North

At the heart of this lyrical, compassionate collection is memory. Not the attempt to constantly analyse life, but rather to face how fragile our reconstructions are and make peace with that. There's a tenderness here and a lack of hubris that faces uncertainty, not knowing, imperfection and mortality... yet still honours the world's beauty.

its hard
to believe in them,
the beautiful colors
of extinction; but
these are the colors

from 'Regime'

Like memory, the poems capture what is no longer tangible

Wave-side, snow-side,
little stutter-skeins of plovers
lifting, like a mind

of winter—

from 'Record of Where a Wind Was'

There's a quietness here, a vulnerability that is not performed and an eye for the small moments and shifts that transform us.

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

I was amazed, entranced, appalled and brought to tears by this collection. Everyone should read it. It's a narrative poem set in an occupied territory that seems to be far away and maybe long ago, though who can tell? Told as a play and with a remarkable and strange puppet theatre at its centre, tragic and brutal events are catalysed by the shooting of deaf child. The shot that kills him sets of a mass deafness in the population and silence, augmented by sign language becomes a means of resistance. As events unfold we become deeply entwined in the lives of the characters, fall into the love story of Alfonso and Sonya, waiting for the birth of their baby, and cannot believe that so much injustice and inhumanity can continue in the same world as such love...

But it does, of course. And the deeper shock lies not in the war-torn, atrocity-ridden Deaf Republic, but later (now?), in a peaceful country, a place with dentists and schools and birds and bright skies... a place where we might live —

Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours

Even if you do not often (or ever) read poetry, read Deaf Republic.

Raymond Atrobus, Signs, Music

Staying with deafness, in this case the poet's own, Signs, Music is a meditation on fatherhood, reflecting on the before and after of this life-changin event. It's honest, accomplished and full of love. But there is no sentimentality. From the desperate fear of not being good enough, stirred up by the baggage we bring to parenting from our own childhoods and handed down traumas to the towering hopes and dreams we dare to conjure as we set out on this extraordinary journey... this is beautiful, tender, sometimes raw collection. But Antrobus doesn't stop there — the personal is vital, but the political winds through it — shadows of empire and colonialism, current racism...

my black child plays
with the brown child
of a politician
who is closing
the country to
black and brown
children. ...

And how his son learns to sign:

I love how he clings
to my shoulders and turns
his head to point at the soft body
of a caterpillar sliding across the counter,
and signs, music.

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, Food for the Dead

Combining British and Ukrainian heritage, at the heart of this searing collection is famine and all the way it keeps on resonating through generations. What does food conjure for us when it is haunted by ghosts, when scarcity and fear are always close, when genocide and war are never far away?

everything surely comes back to hunger
& I am swallowing sand thinking of a child
the weight of her cantaloupe head in my arms
the idea that my body could feed her body
when it can barely feed itself

from 'While My Mind is on Makeshift Graves'

The world we're taken to is both strange and utterly recognisable. The metaphors and images are vivid. This is a collection about how we live and die, about what we carry from the past, but ultimately about love.

Kathleen Jamie, The Keelie Hawk

I work with a poet who sometimes produces pieces in Scots and am married to someone who can slip into fragments passed on by his father, but Scots in an English-language world is, as Kathleen Jamie notes,

like seeing wildflowers flourish in cracks in the pavement

Like much of Jamie's work, we're in a wild, natural world here -- with kestrels and sandpipers, sparrows and fierce weather. Each poem is translated into English (in prose) and each one is a sound scape of culture, place, connection. As hard as they are for an unaccustomed tongue to read aloud -- there is so much sensual pleasure and music to be gained in doing so. And reading them aloud also slows the pace, attunes us to such bright shards of beauty

we see ye kythe,
leamin abuin the Black Craig,
stern o the bricht stern stare.

(we see you appear, glowing above the Black Craig, star of the bright stern stare)

Ben Lerner, The Lights

This is a dense and intense collection. Prose blocks and long lines demand acute attention. The sequence has been a long-time in the making (15 years) and asks the timely question of how we make art and how we find meaning and go on loving in a world of escalating crises... including the Covid pandemic that is vividly conjured here. It offers no platitudinous answers. But it delves deep into the light, into small acts of grace and compassion, like the woman who offers him a handful of ice after a hail storm —

I have been saving this for you since the pandemic began
and I took it. I experienced it as warm
ice she pressed into my hand, warm ice is a thing
I made a note to remember, the press of her
is a thing now, ...

from 'The Circuit'

And it delves into love —

I wish I'd know
you were a fan of light
I would have saved some for you
Moonlight on pavement
set aside for you, in factories
in prisons, obviously,
the Moscow burning obviously
in the throat I left
a light on for you. ....

Lerner is a poet in love with a beautiful, burning, aching world where the terrible and the exquisite dwell side by side.

Romalyn Ante, Agimat

This was a collection that hooked and held me. British born and of Filipino heritage, Ante is a nurse during the pandemic -- hailed with weekly clapping but not with adequate resources. Subject to racist slurs on trains and juggling a family who are not pleased when she falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage (her father holding tight to memories of brutality during World War II), she navigates a space of daily life in Covid-ravaged Wolverhampton all the while holding a remembered mythology close enough for solace.

An Agimat is a talisman of protection and empowerment and this metaphor of hope and connection runs through the poems.

A child bears many faces, but mine
was overcome by the panic of dusk.
So my father chanted, transplanting
a spell to my blood. Agimat ko
hiningáng-bugá sa aking noó.

from 'Agimat'

What matters most winds through this collection, alive with images strange and familiar.

Join me to write Calmly by Candlelight

In addition to seasonal writing workshops in 2025, I’m gathering with paid subscribers each month around the time of the dark moon to share a litle of our writing journey with some inspiration from a poem, time to write quietly (with a prompt from the poem or any writing you wish to bring) and a final inspiration to take away.

The next Calmly by Candlelight writing gathering is on January 26 @ 8pm UK time and I’d love to meet you there.

The next writing workshop will be for the Imbolc season, gathering on February 5.

And a subscription taken out by January 7 is currently half price (£24 instead of the usual £48) — the last days of my midwinter to epiphany offering.