After a little hiatus (dare I say holiday?) I’m back. I’m currently working on two letters delving into material ecology as well as an excavation of the Persephone myth in popular culture.
But this week, we’re having a little catch up. I feel as though I’m emerging from something; a way of living and a field of experience that is shifting. While most of my writing here excavates my past; this, here, is a look at the immediacy of life and what comes next.
Last week, I travelled to Canada on my own. For a week.
I spent time in Vancouver visiting my older brother. I also delivered a workshop on creative placemaking in the beautiful Squamish Public Library. Nestled beneath a dominant granite-rock in the sea-to-sky area of British Columbia, this is more than just a library. Alongside and enthusiastic staff, library director Hilary Bloom has created an inclusive and open space embedded in the needs of her community. There are regular events, family spaces, IT lessons, meeting pods and drag storytime sessions.
Coming from the North East of Scotland, I feel a great sense of connection to the landscapes of British Columbia. My brother has lived there for most of my life, and I’m fortunate enough to have visited a number of times. Thanks to covid and the arrival of small children, I haven’t visited for seven years.
When thinking about the workshop and what threads of connection we might unravel thinking about space and place, I learned that there is a very plausible theory that posits that parts of Scotland were once connected to Canada and Greenland. The Great Flen Fault line contains a seam of rock that points toward such a connection, though I’m planning on asking
to explain this one to me. Looking at the mountains around Squamish, I can believe it. Although scaled up, there is something there that reminds me of home. Verdant temperate rainforests and jarring slides of rock layer into mountainous highways. And there’s rain. So much rain.It was an honour to deliver this workshop to a wonderful group of emotive, open and engaged writers. We talked about our sense of space and place and how we experience landscapes in fiction and poetry. This was my first time delivering this particular workshop outside of Scotland and I learned so much from that experience. Not just about landscapes, but about the way we engage with spaces we know and don’t know.
I was incredibly moved to be introduced after a land acknowledgment from the library director acknowledging the native Squamish people (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), whose land the library sits on. This act of recognition and acknowledgement was the thread that wove across our discussions, and I’ll be thinking on that for a long time.
Back in Vancouver, there was sun. The first proper sun I’ve felt all year; the kind that prickles the skin and makes you feel as though you’ve been underground over the winter. Regular readers will know I’m fascinated by the myths of emergence that shape our seasonal experiences. I spend my time among fictionalised underworlds, in the murky depths of grief and mulch and rot. My work centres on patterns of emergence and rebirth. I am focussed on the myth of Persephone and the seasonal cycles of death and rebirth that root our understanding of grief. I’m always quietly cynical of such stories, but I feel a greater empathy with them beginning to form.
But this trip gave me a sense of my own emergence in a way I truly hadn’t anticipated. I think I’ve been nervously hiding from some seismic shifts in the dynamic of my days.
Over the next couple of weeks, my daughter (and youngest, last child) is moving into the ‘big’ room at nursery and embarking on a forest school adventure alongside her brother. I’m working more. I’m writing more. They’re both away four days a week now. I hadn’t preempted how momentous a shift this really is in my life.
The very fact I could go on this trip and leave them with their ever-loving Daddy and various friends and family brought into focus a feeling of emergence within myself. I am emerging from the intensity of having two children 16 months apart over the course of the pandemic; a period of time that has been joyous, but has also been marked with anxiety and mental difficulty.
I had huge plans for this week in Canada. I was going to finish editing my manuscript. I was going to start the agent proposal. I was going to take hundreds of photos of the new, gritty East Vancouver neighbourhood my brother stays in. Below are two of the only (phone) photos I took. Of coffee. And a nice pen. And an unfinished manuscript. My camera stayed hidden its bag and I have no gritty photo essays.
What I do have is a sense of emergence. It’s a little disquieting and I’m not sure what to do with it yet. But it’s welcome all the same.
So, here’s to the sun. I’m not always so quick to appreciate it’s healing power, and I’m sorry for that, sun. That probably won’t entirely change. But I’ll give it this one.
Thank you x
Ps. We’ll be back in the Underworld next week. Don’t fret. And words are coming your way, soon,
— promise!
Beautiful work, little sister. Seven years is too long.
Oh this is beautiful beyond words actually. YESSSS for this emergence 🖤