I’m excited to share with you this essay by Kathryn Vercillo on a topic that is dear to my heart. It’s an excerpt from her new book, Creative Health Cartography Workbook (details at the end of the post).

Enjoy!

The Business Side of Creative Life Is a Creative Health Issue

Why financial and practical stress belongs in the creative health conversation, and what the Creative Health Cartography workbook says about it.

Creative culture maintains a weird, uncomfortable silence around money and business. We talk about inspiration, about craft, about community, about what the work means. And although sometimes we talk about money in abstract ways, for a lot of us, the concrete daily challenges of money as a creative go undiscussed.

The invoice that is overdue, the client who has gone quiet, the slow drift of a bank account in the wrong direction, the question of whether this is financially sustainable that arrives reliably at three in the morning: these topics are present in many creative people’s lives and largely absent from the public conversation about creative practice.

That silence carries a cost. The practical domain of creative life, the financial, administrative, and logistical reality of sustaining creative work in the material world, is deeply integrated with every other domain of creative health. Treating it as a separate concern, as the unseemly business side that exists apart from the “real” creative life, produces a systematic blind spot in how creative people understand their own situations.

How financial stress affects the whole system

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, in their research collected in the book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, documented something that has direct implications for creative health: that financial scarcity, the experience of genuinely having less than you need, produces measurable effects on cognitive capacity. The mental bandwidth devoted to managing scarcity, to the constant low-level calculations of what can be afforded and what must be deferred, reduces the cognitive resources available for everything else. Mullainathan and Shafir call this the bandwidth tax: a real and specific cognitive cost that persists as long as the scarcity persists.

For creative people, this means financial stress is physiological in its effects before it is even psychological. The narrowing of cognitive bandwidth under financial pressure affects the particular quality of attention and associative thinking that creative work requires. The practical domain’s difficulties migrate into the physical domain as cortisol and sleep disruption, into the psychological domain as anxiety and avoidance, into the material domain as difficulty accessing the quality of presence that making demands.

The creative person experiencing significant financial stress and simultaneously finding their creative work inaccessible may be encountering these effects as a single compound experience rather than understanding them as connected to each other through specific and traceable mechanisms. The connection is real. Naming it removes the self-blame from the equation. The creative difficulty is a predictable response to real conditions, which means addressing the conditions is more useful than adding the creative difficulty to the list of personal failures.

The specific shape of shame around money and creative work

The silence around money in creative culture is partly produced by shame, so it is worth examining that shame. There is a cultural story that serious artists have a particular relationship to material concerns, one characterized by transcendence or indifference, and that worrying about money signals a compromised commitment to the work. The figuring-out of the business side is framed as somehow antithetical to artistic integrity. It has many faces but one common one is the concept of “selling out.”

This story is neither historically accurate nor practically useful. Artists have always navigated the economic conditions of their practice, sometimes through patronage, sometimes through day jobs, sometimes through commercial work that subsidized the work they cared about most, sometimes through poverty that was romanticized in the telling and difficult in the living. The romantic myth of the artist above material concerns has served, and continues to serve, the interests of people who benefit from creative workers undervaluing their own labor.

Shame about the practical domain also tends to produce avoidance, which compounds the practical problems rather than addressing them. The financial situation that is unexamined generates more anxiety than the financial situation that is understood in its actual specifics, even when those specifics are difficult. Vague dread is harder to work with than concrete information.

What the practical domain exercises actually ask

The exercises in the practical domain of the Creative Health Cartography Workbook ask for direct attention to the financial and logistical reality of the creative life, without the usual layers of avoidance or minimization or catastrophizing that tend to accompany this territory.

They ask: what is the financial picture actually like right now, in its specifics? Where does avoidance live in the practical domain, and what is it protecting? How does the practical domain’s current state affect the other domains of creative health? What would it mean to understand these connections clearly rather than managing them around the edges?

These questions tend, hopefully, to produce useful visibility. The practical problems most disruptive to creative health are often the ones least clearly seen: ambient financial anxiety with no specific shape is harder to work with than a specific understanding of the actual numbers, the concrete gap between income and expenses, the real options for addressing it. Specificity reduces the dread that vagueness generates, and reduced dread tends to free cognitive bandwidth for everything else, including the work.

The visibility the workbook offers is the starting place. The specific circumstances, resources, and choices available to you are yours to navigate. What changes with visibility is the quality of navigation: responses based on clear understanding of actual conditions tend to be more effective than responses organized around avoidance and ambient fear.

You already have the answers within you. I hope the workbook helps you see them better. And I hope this essay starts opening a conversation around the honest, complex and nuanced relationship that creativity and finance are entangled in.

This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo as part of her Creative Health Cartography Workbook tour. Follow the full tour at createmefree.substack.com. Follow Kathryn’s writing and the new podcast at createmefree.substack.com. If you’re curious about your Creative Health archetype, take the free quiz here. And if you decide to purchase the workbook or Kathryn’s Creative Health Cartography services, use WorkbookTour20 for a 20% discount.

Share

Leave a comment

Just a short post today. I’ve decided to re-jig a post I wrote for my paid subscribers back in 2022. I think it’s worth revisiting. And, at the end, I have a special announcement.

A reflective prompt…

… inspired by the following quotation from Light the Dark: Writers on creativity, inspiration, and the artistic process (edited by Joe Fassler. New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

“It also describes what a monumental work of art does: takes the pieces of you, reassembles them, and hands them back to you in all the right order. Literature can also heal us relationally. If a relationship with a person, someone we know for just a short time, can forever alter our lives, then why not a book?” – Junot Diaz,

So, I want to ask you this: How are you all in pieces?

For example, I could describe myself as the following right now:

Bad temper + generosity of spirit + lethargy + fierce work ethic + wild imagination + intemperate gloom = me.

You are not constrained to describe yourself as a mathematical formula, of course. But what are the pieces of you, and how would you describe them or represent them?

And what, for you, puts those pieces back in order? And what was the last work of art that did so?

Let me know!

Leave a comment

Share

Announcement

This Sunday I will be publishing a guest post by Kathryn Vercillo. It’s an excerpt from her new book, The Creative Health Cartography Workbook.

This book is a self-guided framework for understanding how your health shapes your creative life. Built from twenty years of research and interviews with more than one hundred artists, writers, and makers, it works through six domains of creative practice with reflective exercises, composite real-world stories, and a six-archetype pattern system. It’s available as a PDF download and in print. And because, as a reader of this Substack, you are special you get to use the WorkbookTour20 code for a 20% discount.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy Kathryn’s essay!

The quotation above came from a YouTube clip featuring Dr Frank Yeomans, an American psychiatrist and psychotherapist who specialises in treating personality disorders. I enjoy how articulate and interesting a speaker he is and I’m particularly struck by his humane attitude towards his patients. They include those who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder - people most of us would find to be somewhat unlovely and perhaps even alarming. Dr Yeomans seems to be able to find compassion for them, however, speaking of their awful behaviours as stemming from psychic pain. But he also is able to speak to the dangers of disordered personalities at both an individual and societal level.

In one short clip he has this to say:

“I think the challenge we all face as therapists, as human beings on the planet, is to develop a narrative that gives us meaning without it being at the expense of others, and there are a lot of ways to do that. And I just find it frustrating that so many people fall into that simplistic … it’s almost like not making the effort to create your own narrative where you can feel good about yourself without somehow being negative about another. The easiest way to say ‘I’m good’ is to say somebody else is bad. That’s cheap, that’s not honest, and I just hope people can work on developing a satisfying self-narrative without damaging others. We all have to find a way to feel good about ourselves. It’s our responsibility to do that by creating a personal narrative. If we’re lazy we latch on to the narrative that somebody else offers us and we can be duped that way.”

Today I was listening (again) to this call to create a narrative that resists that lazy impulse to define ourselves through othering those who are different (surely a sort of psychological double negative) and instead build a personal narrative grounded in a loving sense of self. As I listened, Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese, came to mind.

This short poem is a favourite of mine; I go back to it again and again. I’m sure I’ve shared it here before so forgive me for the repetition. But I think that I thought of it because one way of reading it could be to consider how it touches on the necessity of building a psychologically and spiritually healthy narrative of the self.

Of resisting self-flagellation or martyrdom as a defining characteristic:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

Of embracing the need to

“let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.”

Of inviting the other to

“Tell me about despair, yours,”

And knowing that you can tell of your own despair in turn. That both the hearing and telling of despair have an equal place.

That “... the world offers itself to your imagination” and in your loneliness, you still have that imagination with which to build a self-narrative.

And, in considering nature, including the wild geese calling “harsh and exciting” as they fly in the “clean blue air”, you can see yourself in the context of the larger, wilder world, and as belonging within the family of things.

Yeomans says that “there are a lot of ways” to build or find your narrative. Oliver’s poem suggests that this is only limited by one’s imagination.

Where do you turn to find that narrative that speaks to your place in the world, in the family of things? What parts of the world offer themselves to your imagination? Are they the narrowing and embittering anger of populist politics or the murkier areas of social media? Or are they something that lifts you up into the clean blue air of your imagination?

Thanks for reading.

Share

Leave a comment

The Conversation recently published an article entitled Poetry for an anxious world: 5 experts share poems of grief, hope and restoration. Alongside the enjoyment of being introduced to new poems, I was jolted out of my doldrums by the resonance of some old favourites.

Interestingly, one of the aforementioned experts, Aiden Coleman, writes that

“Poems can be ‘amulets against the darkness’, as the poet Molly Peacock noted. It’s another good reason to commit them to memory.”

I actually wrote a creative prompt in the early days of this Substack inviting people to memorise poetry. This exercise was fresh in my mind at the time of writing as I had been reciting memorised poems to myself during the daily one-hour walk we were allowed during Melbourne’s lockdowns. Coleman refers to one of Gerard Manly Hopkins’ terrible sonnets - terrible because they depict the dark night of the soul. And John Kinsella, in his contribution to the article, nominates Manly Hopkins’ God’s Grandeur as one of his go-to poems.

“And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

This is actually one of the poems I silently recited to myself on my daily lockdown-walks beside Merri Creek. I have loved it for years. I was introduced to Manly Hopkins by my late mother who, when she was dying of cancer, asked me to read God’s Grandeur at her funeral.

Coleman nominates Wendell Berry’s lovely The Peace of Wild Things as his poem of choice.

“When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”

I also love, very much, Berry’s Rain Light:

“All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now

when you are alone you will be all right…”

Another poem I find to be restorative is David Whyte’s What to Remember when Waking:

“You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.”

Of course, to share my favourite poems with you meant that I searched for them on the internet, re-read them, and, for the hundredth time, had to stifle a sob as I sat writing this article in Melbourne City Library. I am in the Quiet Room, which asks people not to talk to each other or on their phone; I wonder what the policy is on people having a quiet cry as they read beloved poetry? I have left a long line of startled strangers in my wake due to the countless times I have been sitting on a tram or in a library or a reception room, silently reciting poems inside my head, and suddenly realising that tears are trickling down my face.

“A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world…” – Toni Morrison

Poetry - and any art form - are so important right now, putting into form our anxiety and dread when words fail us, slyly sliding in a little hope when we need it, and restoring us to ourselves. As Whyte put it:

“To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.”

What hidden gift do you carry? What calls to you inside the privacy of your own head when the outside world presses its anxiety upon you?

Share

Leave a comment

Today (15 April here in Melbourne) is World Art Day according to UNESCO. And I just found out that I missed out on World Poetry Day (21 March). So, to honour both days I have re-written an old piece that I published on a now dead blog years ago. It’s about a poem about an artist. I hope you like it.

“I have but one job:

to keep you looking, though I’ve snatched the breath

from your throat.”

These lines come from a wonderful poem by Danielle DeTiberus. The poem – The Artist Signs Her Masterpiece, Immodestly - comes from “a series of poems about the artist Artemisia Gentileschi’s work and life.” This particular poem was inspired by Gentileschi’s striking painting Judith Beheading Holofernes.

“Because I know what rough work it is to fight off

a man.”

The poem is as stunning and immediate as the painting itself. It references Gentileschi’s own history as a survivor of rape (and an ensuing court case) and reflects the mastery of her painting technique in the way she so vividly depicts a violent act. I particularly love the way DeTiberus works into this poem ideas about the role of the creator and their relationship to their work. It’s a neat thing for a poet imagining an artist thinking about her work to do.

“I have thought it all through, you see. The folds

of flesh gathered at each woman’s wrist, the shadows

on his left arm betraying the sword’s cold hilt.”

These lines, and others, in the poem show us how detailed and specific art making (in any discipline) must be. Many people assume art making to be done in a welter of disinhibition – the artist as anarchist chucking paint at a canvas or toking on a joint in front of a typewriter or throwing a tantrum during a rehearsal. To be sure, too much inhibition will kill the creative process, and playfulness and experimentation are important parts of arts practice. But alongside the moments of instinct and imagination, art making is about choice making. You have to think it all through. You have to get the details exactly right: choice of adverbs, shades of colour, angles of limbs, the inflection in your voice on a certain word at a certain beat. If you don’t make the right choices about bringing the right details to life, then your inspiration cannot be conveyed to your readers / viewers / audience.

“Some say they know her thoughts by the meat of her

brow. Let them think what they want.”

These lines are talking about viewers assuming they know what Gentileschi’s Judith is thinking. DeTiberus’ Gentileschi is unconcerned with this in this poem: “Let them think what they want. / I have but one job: to keep you looking…”

The truth of the matter is that you cannot ever control what an audience is going to think or how they will interpret your work. That is simply not within your power. DeTiberus’ Gentileschi is right: an artist has one job and that is to engage their audience. What the audience does with that engagement is up to them. And as a woman, the Gentileschi in this poem is assertive and businesslike in tone; she is not concerned with minding our sensibilities for us. The emotional labour she performs is as an artist portraying a scene, not as a woman pandering to others.

The closing lines are pure defiance:

“Ergo Artemitia. I made this—I.”

DeTiberus writes that in painting, Gentileschi, working in an era where female artists were less likely to be supported much less celebrated, and also working as the survivor of rape, “… reclaims her agency through making and naming. Ultimately, then, this poem is an ode to survivors and to Gentileschi’s exquisitely manicured middle finger to the idea that she could be erased or silenced.”

DeTiberus’ Gentileschi has done her one job: she made us look.

DeTiberus has done her one job: she made us think.

Share

Leave a comment

I’m slightly fixated on orangutans. I find them to be fascinating creatures.

I’ve always kind of liked them, but my gentle obsession with them kicked in at the beginning of 2024. At the time I was habitually lurking in my local library, taking advantage of the safe environment and free internet in order to hide from a bad situation at home while frantically trying to find a new place to live in addition to saving an ailing business. It was an awful time; I didn’t want to do anything except curl up in a ball. I would march myself into the library at opening time, sit myself at a desk until closing time, and bribe myself through the day with the promise of orangutans:

‘Spend the next hour chasing overdue payments and you can watch an orangutan video.’

‘Spend the next hour working on your marketing and you can watch an orangutan video.’

Orangutans are in danger of going extinct, just one of too many animals around the world. The idea that these delightful creatures might cease to exist - and due to human agency / delinquency - is horrifying. But alongside an interest in orangutans and concern for their plight, I think my earlier fascination with them also came down to my own sense of yearning for some kind person to come and rescue me, rehabilitate me, and release me back into a verdant and fruitful environment far away from pollution and poachers. In the end, I had to rescue myself, a horribly incremental and muddled process. But I still like to watch orangutans; I guess that my interest in them has outlived my own selfish concerns. I hope that this is a mark of some kind of recovery.

Did you know that Australia had its own ‘tiger’?

Well, the Tasmanian Tiger was not really like a tiger but more doglike and was also known by the alternative name Tasmanian Wolf. It got its tiger name because it was striped. It was also known as a Thylacine and, tragically, it is extinct.

There are some photographs and footage (which I find to be heartbreaking) of the last ever Tasmanian Tiger, called Benjamin, being held in a zoo.

A creative prompt for you.

Send a message back through time to Benjamin. Or perhaps some other extinct animal. What will you convey to this creature on behalf of us all?

I don’t mind admitting that I am finding this hard to do - words fail me. Apart from ‘sorry’.

(The excerpt about the Tasmanian Tiger above comes from this old post, which contains some other tiger-themed content.)

Share

Leave a comment

Not so long ago, I shared the above quote with a few friends via email, accompanied by an image of the painting Wedding Dance in the Open Air by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

It might seem at first that the two are not well suited, that the Beckett quote is too sober to be paired with the boisterous merrymaking in Bruegel’s depiction of a wedding celebration.

But, as much as that wedding dance looks like fun, it is also messy, like many of Bruegel’s crowd scenes. He was brilliant at depicting the mess of everyday ordinary human life and human nature.

When you look at his crowd scenes you can see people displaying various attitudes or behaviours: gossiping, bargaining, flirting, arguing, yelling at their kids. In his paintings people glare, listen, zone out, concentrate, or laugh. So I included Bruegel’s painting because of his adeptness in capturing the mess of the human condition.

We are surrounded by mess right now. Depending on how unlucky or dysfunctional you are, chaos might be present in your own daily life. And we are all being continuously pelted with images and stories in the news and on social media about war, climate change, and ugly politics.

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” - Beckett.

Beckett is, of course, right. Not just because art can palliate the effects of the mess, or even be used as a powerful tool to advocate for remedies, but because art is-making is so able to absorb and hold the mess - in all its ugliness and beauty and confusion - in a way that rational words and linear thinking cannot. Art - whatever the art form - stands ready to receive the unspoken, the ill-defined, the perplexing, or even the taboo.

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” – E. Hopper

As I watch the news and before I give into gloom and doom I want a reminder that not all mess is bad. Not all mess is frightening, stressful, or horrible. Sometimes the mess comes out of a rambunctious outbreak of joy. And chaos can seed possibilities.

And artists have to accommodate this too.

Just a Bruegel did. And his work is a reminder that through harsh winters, or plagues, or war, or just the sheer mean grind of peasant life, life does go on.

So what art do you go to when you have nowhere else to deposit certain thoughts or feelings? For me it is often the paintings of Bruegel, the poetry of Mary Oliver, the music of Bach, or the martial arts movies of Jet Li.

If you make art yourself, what do you make? My laptop is currently littered with half-written drafts that I cannot find a way to finish, but I do feel so much better for attempting to write them.

What do you do?

Leave a comment

Dear reader,

As some of you may know, I am a facilitator and I especially love to use creative prompts to generate meaningful conversation.

To celebrate the Year of the Horse I have designed a horse-themed creative prompt which you can access and use for yourself if you wish.

What kind of a year do you want? How do you want to feel during 2026? What do you want to experience during the following 12 months?

Recent times have been tough for some of us, fast-moving for others, and confounding for others still. Use my horse-themed creative prompt to carve out some time and space to envision the kind of year you want to experience.

• Hear,

• Orientate,

• Reflect,

• Sense-make, and

• Engage.

(See what I did there?)

How to access:

Simply click through to my shop at Ko-fi and download the short pdf document that will explain everything. You can either pay $0 and get it for free or, if you’re feeling generous, leave me a wee donation.

Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I am reminded of the sound of my father’s laughter because of a dream I had just a few nights ago. During that dream, Dad walked into a room and, apparently surprised to see me there, burst out into that signature laugh. He then walked over to where I was sitting, rested his head on my shoulder, and wept. This was not at all like him in real life; he was a sensitive man but belonged to the generation of men that bottled their feelings. My dream-self let him weep, gave his shoulder a pat, and dropped a kiss on the top of his head. In this dream it was not explained why dad needed to cry. Maybe it didn’t need explaining; although dad’s physical moment of death was quick and, the nurse who witnessed it assured me, without suffering, the final few months of dad’s life were marked by an awful family melodrama that was centred around his finances and saw my sister - who was dear to him, to all of us - estrange herself from us with a suddenness that felt brutal.

I have been house sitting lately, minding an elderly cat called Monique while her pet-mum is away on holiday. Today, coinciding with dad’s birthday, is the last day and I will be dedicating a large chunk of it to the tedious but necessary chores of packing and housework while the empty space left by a dead person’s birthday quietly lies behind all of this mundane activity. I am feeling that odd feeling - akin to but not quite irritation - that arises when I am in a physical in-between space - that slightly melancholic feeling of that last day of a stay away which is marked by the business of shutting that visit down. And, in encountering the first anniversary of dad’s birth after his death, I also encounter the liminality of grief.

He would have been 95 today. He died last November.

Previously dad’s birthday would have meant a trip to see him in his home town’s aged care facility where, thank God, he enjoyed living during the last few years of his life. It would have meant having a glass of wine with him and listening to the same stories he told about his life and which I heard during every monthly visit. These were repeated not because he was dotty - he was impressively sharp right up until his death - but because, in those last years, he was engaged in making sense of a harsh life.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. God knows, there was plenty of unhappiness within our family unit but one way in which we were surprisingly functional was in our attitude towards dying and death. Perhaps it was to distract ourselves from how weird or awful we were in other ways, but we always could cheerfully talk about our wishes when it came to the practicalities of dying - To resuscitate or not? To “turn off the beeping machine” or not? To donate organs or not? Accordingly, when it came to our parents entering into palliative care we knew their wishes.

We also talked about funerals, and dad had stated many times over the last decade of his life that he didn’t want one. He somehow distrusted them, suspicious of rituals that he found mawkish. His wish was for a private cremation - “just get rid of me” - and then to gather anyone who remembered him for a few farewell drinks down at the pub. Not exactly a wake, just raising a quiet convivial glass or three. This was just as well because by the time of his death his savings were gone, although I nearly killed myself trying to remedy this for him. We would not have been able to afford a funeral, and it was due to the generosity of dad’s niece and nephew that there were sandwiches and cake and a tab on the bar when a small group of us gathered to see him off at the small country town pub that dad had frequented in his youth.

It felt right for me to say a few words about dad, in a non-mawkish way without a hint of ritual. I showed the room a lovely photograph taken of him when he was young that showed a gentle, intelligent, sensitive man who was eager to be happy.

What I said about that eager lad was that:

He grew up to be a kind father and husband.

He had been a clever boy who had had to leave school at 14 but who then grew up to be a journalist, editor, and owner-operator of country town newspapers.

He had been a humble man who was absolutely sure and firm in his opinions and values, who was the still centre of every room he was in, no matter how much noise there was in that room.

He was a quiet person with an outrageous sense of humour. An amiable and friendly introvert. A man of modest tastes who loved good wine, food, words, and company.

I said that all of these things might seem to be contradictory but dad used his intelligence, his emotional intelligence, and his values to unite them in one purpose: He wanted us to be good to each other, to be kind, and to enjoy life. He didn’t always get his way in this but he showed me how important it was to try.

When I think of my dream-father weeping I’m glad I said those things. I remember dad constantly rehashing those anecdotes during my visits to the aged care home, and how I listened even though we both knew I’d heard them many times, because I could see that with each telling he was holding the story up to the light, turning it this way and that to see where it shone with meaning, and I respected how much he was trying to make sense of a life lived with an abusive father, a volatile wife, and, as the local newspaper editor, often on the receiving end of the nastier style of small town politics. In these retellings he was constantly trying to reconcile fairness - to himself and others - with love, and love with candid reality. Dad really did just want to live a quiet gentle life and somehow this elicited the brutality of too many of the people around him.

The young man in the photograph never had his eagerness for life repaid. And I couldn’t stem the financial damage done to him in the last year of his life. But he is beyond any need for protection now. But he is also beyond the potential for joy, even the small joys afforded to a little old man in a nursing home - a glass of wine, a visit from friends or family, memories of a walk by the river.

He is gone. In the empty space of his birthday I have my dream of him weeping and my memory of his laughter.

Dear reader,

Thank you for reading. I had planned to post something dedicated to the new lunar year of the horse but then I was inspired to write this on my dad’s birthday instead. The horse-themed post will come in a couple of days.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

(I nicked this lovely graphic from this article).

Dear reader,

Happy new lunar Year of the Fire Horse which, apparently, promises to be an exciting one. According to this article, the Year of the Fire Horse “… combines two extremely dynamic symbols in the calendar…”

Should be interesting.

To celebrate, I am sending you a little compilation of horse-themed poetry and art.

Enjoy!

“And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey—ten together—

Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,

Making no sound.”

This extract is from a beautiful poem by Ted Hughes called The Horses. I recommend that you read the rest.

“Asleep on horseback
dreams linger, distant moon,
smoke rises for tea.” - haiku by Basho.

“And one was there, a stripling on a small and weedy beast;
He was something like a racehorse undersized,
With a touch of Timor pony — three parts thoroughbred at least —
And such as are by mountain horsemen prized.
He was hard and tough and wiry — just the sort that won't say die —
There was courage in his quick impatient tread;
And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye,
And the proud and lofty carriage of his head.”

As an Aussie, when I think of horses then I think of AB Banjo Patterson’s iconic (for Australians) poem, The Man from Snowy River, which tells the story of heroic horsemanship. It’s a long poem (but a fun read) so read the rest here.

To finish, here is some art of a different kind. I love martial arts movies. As an ex-dancer and choreographer I love the virtuosic performances, the inventive choreography, and the audacious storytelling. Jackie Chan was born in the Year of the Horse, so here’s a short clip of him fighting with a horse shoe.

Thank you for reading.

I have made some more horse-themed content which I will be sharing with you over the next couple of days.

I wish you all the best for the following 12 months. I hope that you can harness the fiery energy of this forthcoming Year of the Horse and get it to work for you.

Share

Leave a comment

“Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” - Mark Carney

These words from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, spoken at the recent King Dick fest at Davos, seem destined to be some of the most quoted words from that event this year. I have even heard commentators say that this speech will be a “tipping point”. It’s an interesting speech, to be sure, during which Carney explores how a middle power like Canada (and, ahem, Australia) can adapt to the current turbulence seeded by Trump and his awful ilk.

(The section where Carney talks about the theme of rupture starts at 4:39.)

While the political boffins, international affairs experts, and media commentators hummed and haa-ed and harumphed over the ramifications of Carney’s speech, I took refuge in my own particular areas of expertise in the arts and humanities: I looked up the etymology of the word rupture:

“Late 14c., in medicine, ‘act of bursting or breaking,’ in reference to a vessel, etc. of the body, from Old French rupture and directly from Latin ruptura ‘the breaking (of a vein), fracture (of an arm or leg),’ from past-participle stem of rumpere “to break” (from PIE root *runp- “to break;” see corrupt (adj.)).” - from etymonline.com

“See corrupt”? (The bolding of the text above is my own emphasis.) Given that Carney’s speech - and his use of the word “rupture” - were in response to the actions of Trump, of course I looked up ‘corrupt’. I found that it entered into English in the 14th century, coming to us from a French word meaning pretty much what the word means today, which in turn came…

“... directly from Latin corruptus, past participle of corrumpere ‘to destroy; spoil,’ figuratively ‘corrupt, seduce, bribe.’” - etymonline.com

Remind you of anyone?

And, of course, the Latin word ‘corrumpere’ can be traced back to the same root word as ‘rupture’.

So, to be corrupt is to be a destroyer or a despoiler and to corrupt something is to break it down, fracture it, ruin it. Carney’s evocation of a rupturing of the world order has real poetic power when considering that he is speaking out against corrupt autocrats hell bent on wrecking the world order for their own gratification and empowerment.

And what about you? When you experience a world that confounds you, mystifies you, breaks and makes you with all of its heartbreak and beauty, what do you do? Do you project your inner spoilt toddler? Do you just shrug it off*? Or do you find some other response?

(Isn’t this picture of the infant giant Panatgruel great? I reserve the right to use it in another Substack).

What is the opposite of ‘spoil’ or ‘corrupt’? The Merriam-Webster entry on ‘spoil’ suggests words such as ‘glorify’, ‘dignify’, ‘cleanse’, ‘ennoble’, ‘elevate’, ‘uplift’, and ‘enshrine’ as its antonyms. Which of these verbs can you put into action in your life to counteract the awfulness, this rupture to which we’re all being subjected? Or maybe the rupture can be exploited for good, somehow?

It’s easy to look at an orange-faced malicious idiot swanking about on Airforce One and to feel helpless, but I am a big believer in the power of cumulative action. So let’s all get out there and glorify or dignify or [whatever] something. And let me know about it in the comments below.

Leave a comment

Share

*Surely I’ve shared this clip with you before. I love it so much. But when I was writing about someone shrugging above, I thought of this with its glorious writing and I feel that you should watch it if you haven’t already. The whole thing is great, but the bit I was just reminded of starts at 2:45.

Thank you for reading.

I’m reviewing the my Substack posts and thinking about what I’ll do with this Substack in the year ahead. Feel free to give me feedback or suggestions below. What do you want to see?

Leave a comment

And I will soon be unveiling my plans for paid posts for the coming year. However, if you want to support this Substack in the meantime, a tiny donation would be much appreciated.

On this last day of January, and a little over two weeks before the beginning of a new lunar year, I thought I would send out a post that ties in with this time of year.

Then I found a two-faced stone

On burial ground,

God-eyed, sex-mouthed, it’s brain

A watery wound.

In the wet gap of the year,

Daubed with fresh lake mud,

I faltered near his power —

January God.

- Seamus Heaney

In this post I have some creative prompts that are inspired by the etymology of ‘January.’

This first month of the year is named for the Roman god Janus / Ianus, recognisable for his two faces. These two faces enable the god to look forward and back; he is the god of time, duality, beginnings and endings, gates and doorways, transitions and passages.

So, I thought that today’s prompts could be centred on where we find ourselves at this time: right at the beginning of this new year, with the end of the old still only a few weeks in the past. We are living in uncertain times, perhaps even in a liminal space, still waiting to see what will emerge during the rest of 2026, while coming to terms with 2025. Looking forwards and backwards.

So, let’s respond to that as our theme. I’m offering two prompts for you to choose from:

Prompt no. 1: Write / draw / sing / dance for, to, or about Janus.

Supplicate him. Complain to him. Ask him for guidance; ask him for forbearance.

Cook him a meal. Light him some incense. Create a ritual.

Or just have a heart-to-heart with him in your head.

January Night Prayer by Ursula Le Guin.

(Of course, Janus is a god of summer down here in Australia).

Prompt no. 2

Perhaps you could respond creatively to the theme of doorways, gates, archways, or passages?

Design one of these. Describe one. Enact or mime passing through one. Find one to photograph or sketch. Make one out of pasta and marshmallows. Or just conjure one up in your imagination when you have a few quiet minutes to spare.

And consider:

• What do these imagined doorways shut out right now?

• What do they keep in?

• What entices you to walk through?

• And what might you fear or welcome on the other side? Or are you content with not knowing?

• And how do you go about opening or unlocking them? Will this be easy or hard?

What questions would you add?

Leave a comment

(The Door by Schjerfbeck, Helene - 1884 - Finnish National Gallery, Finland - CC0.

https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/2021012/app_si_A_IV_3680)

Thanks for reading!

This is actually a reworking of a post I wrote back at the beginning of 2022. I am currently reviewing my old posts with a view to refining what I am going to do with this Substack. I would love your feedback: What would you like to see more of in my posts? Creative prompts? Interesting etymologies / images / quotes? Or something else?

Leave a comment

Just a few days ago I read an article about some volunteer firefighters from a tiny rural village in my home state of Victoria here in Australia. The article detailed their ordeal of fighting recent bushfires; they narrowly escaped death due to their resourcefulness, witnessed the death of animals and birds in the burning bush surrounding them, and lost a home to the fires while trying to save other people’s properties.

“She was captain of her local brigade, in charge of protecting her community, but she had to make the call that her own house could not be saved.” - from As bushfires swept across Victoria, Terip Terip’s volunteer brigade fought to survive by Elise Kinsella, ABC News

This article was compelling but sobering to read. When I read how the brigade captain sacrificed the opportunity to try and save her own home in order to divert resources to homes that stood a better chance of surviving, tears came to my eyes. This was partly due to the cumulative effect of reading and hearing news coverage of these devastating fires. But I was also stirred to read of the narrow escape of these firefighters. And I was incredibly moved by their courage, their selflessness, and their determination to protect their community.

The horrible destruction of bushfires in recent years provides us with much to grieve: the death of people, human and non-human. The annihilation of beautiful bushland. The destruction of homes and businesses. The trauma of the survivors.

Australia has always been a bushfire prone country; some of our native plants have evolved so that they cannot reproduce without fire. But in recent years climate change has caused worse bushfires that burn longer, hotter, and more destructively. Climate change related grief is a growing phenomenon.

But, in this article, alongside the horror was also much to celebrate. The firefighters did escape death. And they, and many other volunteer firefighters across our state, exemplified the best of human nature: courage, selflessness, resourcefulness, and care for each other and their community.

Reading about the death and destruction was awful; reading about the heroism was wonderfully uplifting. After reading this article I realised that it showed an example of how some - not all but some - situations elicit grief alongside feelings of inspiration or uplift. Try to ignore your feelings about one, then you risk avoiding or distorting the other.

We live in a society that is squeamish about experiencing grief. Too many people see it as something to be overcome or tidied away as soon as possible and rush to shut down the space of grief as soon as it opens up. But they don’t understand that when you do that then you can also potentially lose a space of celebration, or discovery, or wonder. In some situations these things are interwoven into the experience of grief.

If the journalist who wrote this article had brushed over the destructiveness and danger of the fires, then the heroism of the firefighters would not be fully understood but instead sold short. And if the article had instead dwelt only on the destruction and not fully explored the selfless and resourceful acts of the firefighters, then that would have been unfair to both these heroes and the readers of the article. Necessary context for understanding and celebrating the heroic would have been lost if the depictions of loss had been underwritten; necessary context for understanding the depth and meaning of grief arising from this calamity needed the uplifting aspects of this story to stand in contrast to the horror.

To understand what was worth celebrating in this article meant that the reader had to understand what needed to be grieved. Grief can be painful, but it can also create space for the life affirming.

If we let it. Of course, the agency of the grief-stricken has to be respected in regards as to when and how they explore and express their experience of grief. I am still raw and smarting following some losses over the last two years, and still searching for the right way and place to start talking about it. But, as painful as my grief has been, its urgent and honest energies have also plugged me into what’s important for me and the way I want to live. Grief has been a complex space to inhabit, and the complexity of this space - and its capacity to hold both devastation and inspiration - is what has saved me.

If we don’t allow the possibility of this complex space to exist, if we try to weed out the complex relationship between grieving loss and affirming life, then we lose the opportunity to fully experience both of these things.

Thank you for reading.

I am very compelled by the subject of grief and intend to write more about it. But is this Substack the right home for these reflections? Or would you like to see different content? I am currently reviewing the direction of this Substack and want to hear from you: What do you want? What draws you to this Substack?

Leave a comment

Simply sharing this just because I find it to be so inspirational:

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” ― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Feel free to share whatever has been inspiring or comforting you in the comments.

Leave a comment

Image: The World’s Fair VI - Fireworks, Felix Vallotton, 1901

I hope that this ‘Happy’ New Year of 2026 is treating you well so far.

Here in Melbourne we have just passed the third Friday in January; the second Friday is known (apparently) as Quitter’s Day, whereby the majority of us give up on our New Year’s Resolutions.

Interestingly, the etymological ancestor of the word ‘resolution’ meant to reduce or break things down into a simpler form. It was by the 15th century that it came to mean a pledge to do something. Perhaps reducing aspirations into the distilled and simpler form of a resolution is a way of breaking down a gnarly life-goal into an achievable undertaking, and it is this that led to the shift in meaning and usage in the word ‘resolution’?

I don’t make resolutions any more. For myself, I have found my life to be too peripatetic to support the making and keeping of year-long promises. Typically, events overtake me and I have to focus on coping; carefully crafted promises-to-self and their regimens are soon forgotten.

I hope you are having a happy new year but wouldn’t be surprised to find that you are not, or, if you are, that your happiness is tempered with anxiety or frustration as Donald Trump or climate change or [insert villain / phenomenon of choice] has its wicked way with the world.

The adjective ‘happy’ comes from the noun ‘hap’, which means chance, fate, or luck. And I guess that the bizarre state of the world right now - the daily cavalcade of dire headlines we see in the news - might make many of us feel as if we are creatures of fate. Wherever you are and whatever you’re dealing with, I hope you’re at least coping.

Now for a creative prompt:

I chose this prompt because I was musing on how we have just all been through the festive season, and how some of us may still be on holidays and some just beginning their new work year. Some of us will be at play and some of us will be wishing we were.

And the notion of play also often links to ideas of childhood and happiness – perhaps conjuring up notions of innocence or perhaps of disinhibition. Either way, a time of less complexity, nervousness, or pressure than many of us are experiencing right now.

So today I thought it would be interesting to ask you to respond to this quotation:

“It's never too late to have a happy childhood.” Tom Robbins

You can think / imagine / write / paint / perform / design whatever you like, but here are some optional questions to get you going:

• What feelings, memories, or thoughts do these words elicit for you? Happy or unhappy (we all had different childhood experiences)?

• Do you agree with Robbins?

• Describe a happy childhood from a kid’s perspective.

• If you are reclaiming your right to have a happy childhood, describe it from your adult perspective.

• If you could do anything - anything at all - what would you want to play with today?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading.

I am in the process of reviewing my Substack posts and trying to formulate a direction for this Substack overall. This post was inspired by a creative prompt I shared with paid subscribers back in 2022, shortly after the birth of this Substack in late 2021.

Since then I have shared reflective prompts, personal musings, favourite quotations and poetry, etymological tidbits, and more creative prompts, always featuring images from my beloved trove of Public Domain pictures.

Please feel free to share with me what you want to see more of in this Substack so that I get some idea as to how to create, curate, and tailor content that really connects with you readers. Because that connection has meant so much to me over the last few difficult years.

What do you want?

Leave a comment

Thank you so much for being a paid subscriber. Your financial support has been vitally important over the last year. But just as important is the sense of endorsement that comes from anyone who is willing to actually pay money for what I do.

I am trying to find a clear direction for this Substack.

I have had a lot of fun writing and curating c…

Read more

What do the words ‘grammar’ and ‘glamour’ have to do with each other and why did their etymologies make me think of a statue of a Greek enchantress? For ‘grammar’ and ‘glamour’ are etymologically intertwined, and once had meanings that may surprise you.

Let’s start with ‘grammar’, a word with which most of us associate stodgy and dry rules pertaining to language. Actually, this was a meaning attached to it when it arrived in English in the 14th century. However, it had links to an Old French word meaning learning in general, including in subjects such as the occult and astrology:

“... late 14c., “Latin grammar, rules of Latin,” from Old French gramaire “grammar; learning,” especially Latin and philology, also “(magic) incantation, spells, mumbo-jumbo” (12c., Modern French grammaire)...” - etymonline.com

During the renaissance, alchemy, astrology, and the practice of magic were seen as respectable fields of knowledge. The etymonline.com website notes that ‘grammar’ could mean:

“... ‘learning in general, knowledge peculiar to the learned classes’, which included astrology and magic; hence the secondary meaning of “occult knowledge” (late 15c. in English), which evolved in Scottish into glamour”

(Notable figures in the history of science such as Tycho Brahe, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton all included the serious study of alchemy in their portfolios of expertise; Johannes Kepler was a skilled astrologer as well as astronomer).

Tacked on to the end of the sentence above is that word ‘glamour’ which originally meant ‘enchantment’ or ‘charm’. Over time the meaning of this word shifted into something meaning alluring, and we still call attractive people charming or enchanting even today - they cast a spell over us.

It’s not surprising, then, that when reading about the etymology of the word ‘glamour’ and thinking of enchanting enchantresses that I was reminded of the statue Circe by Bertram Mackennal, displayed in the National Gallery of Victoria.

While acknowledging the skill of the sculptor, I thought this statue was hilarious the first time I saw it twenty-something years ago. The NGV website notes that

“This life-size femme fatale was Mackennal’s largest work to date, and was clearly meant to make a daring proclamation.”

I still agree with my younger self that this ‘proclamation’ was a reflection on the confused feelings Bertram felt in his undies while he constructed this erotically powerful figure - was he terrified or titillated by the idea of a powerful nude working her glamour?

The sweaty palms and fevered imaginings of Victorian-era blokes aside, Circe is a beautifully rendered sculpture, detailed with precision. And it is perhaps this precision that reminded me of this:

“You have precision. Precision is not prissy, precision is the foundation of passion. Passion without precision: Chaos.” - One of the Devil’s lines from The Witches of Eastwick, screenplay by Michael Cristofer, based on the novel by John Updike.

As I wrestle with my own purple prose, replete with bad grammar and punctuation, I often think of that sentence from The Witches of Eastwick. If I want to convey something passionate, or inspiring, or enchanting, or charming, then I need to pay attention to the precision with which I use my words. And, for me, this means fixing up my own damned grammar. Because the devil - and the magic - is in the detail.

Thank you for reading.

Share

Leave a comment

Dear reader,

Recently I was searching on the internet for interesting Christmas-themed images to share. As always, I was looking through historical material in the public domain because

• I love it, and

• I don’t have to worry about breaching anyone’s copyright.

I was looking for vintage Australian Christmas card illustrations when I came across two in the State Library of South Australia’s collections featuring Forget-Me-Nots*. The poignant name of this lovely flower jolted me back to the theme that has been dominating my own ‘festive’ season this year, which is reflecting on the empty space left by people who have died or become estranged from us, or even the space left by lost jobs, businesses, or homes.

“Middle English foryeten, from Old English forgietan ‘lose the power of recalling to the mind; fail to remember; neglect inadvertently,’ from for-, used here probably with privative force, ‘away, amiss, opposite’ + gietan ‘to grasp’ (see get (v.)). To ‘un-get,’ hence ‘to lose’ from the mind.” - etymology of ‘forget’ from the wonderful etymonline.com.

The act of remembering is central to grieving. None of us want to be forgotten when we die, to be - to borrow words from the quotation above - inadvertently neglected and lost from mind. Nor do we always want to forget that or those which have been important to us somehow. There’s an old cliche that the dead live on in our memories, but as I have grown older and started to notch up a few deaths I have found that this is true for me. Often inside the privacy of my head I speak to the people I love who have left me; I feel close to them. I want them to know that they haven’t been lost or erased. That they mattered.

But mattered how? And why? The act of remembering is not as straightforward as it first seems. Just what, exactly, do you remember? I love remembering the good things about the ones I have lost and the fun or meaningful times we had together - this makes it simple to carry the dead in my memory with love, gratitude, or tenderness.

But how candidly do you remember the bad times or the personal faults? Do you owe it to the dead to gloss over these? Or do you owe it to yourself to remember them as vividly as the more palatable memories?

I choose to remember both the good and the bad. I want to remember my dead as three-dimensional, complex humans who had to turn up (to borrow words from Gerard Manly Hopkins) as “their sweating selves”. I want to honour the way they slogged through life and I want to honour the emotional blood sweat and tears that our relationship was based on, as well as the easy times and lovable qualities. If after all of the rows, or silences, or misunderstandings, or disappointments, or bad parenting that went on we still love each other in the afterlife of one of us, then that really means something.

The empty space stands ready to receive. At Christmas and New Year, that empty space can stand out in stark contrast to the jolliness and indulgent excesses of everything else going on. When I come to remember my dead, what will I put into that empty space? My mother’s riotous laughter or her childlike joy at getting her Christmas presents? Or her tantrums when she didn’t get what she wanted? My dad sitting with a paper hat sliding down his forehead and resting on his ears? Or the way he laughed at the dog going after the neighbourhood Santa while he distributed lollies to the kids; laughed so hard that tears ran down his face? Unbelievably, while he was recently dying, he still managed a single exhausted guffaw when I reminded him of it.

I want to remember all of it, vividly and honestly. The empty space elicits, demands, invites, or challenges these memories. That empty space could be an abyss I let my dead disappear into if I choose to forget, or a repository in which I can cradle whatever I have left of the people and events that made me.

*Forget-me-Nots are not native to Australia, but white Victorian and Edwardian era Aussies culturally cleaved close and hard to Mother Britain.

Thank you for reading.

Share

Leave a comment

It’s just ticked past midnight here in Melbourne, so I want to wish you all a happy, safe, healthy, fun, inspiring, and rewarding 2026.

Dear reader,

It is now Boxing Day here in Australia. Boxing Day was apparently originally a day when you boxed up some spare treats or gifts and passed them onto the deserving. So, I’m passing on a few little random things that I have laying around my laptop and that I want to share.

That Phenakistoscope above is one. It dates from 1833; I found it on this webpage on the Public Domain Review where there’s a whole bunch of them. I think they’re wonderful but staring at a whole page of them for too long could be seizure-inducing so you have been warned.

The next thing I want to share keeps with the Christmas vibe; it’s a short animation made by Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python fame) in 1968 called The Christmas Card. It’s fun. I came across it on this webpage on the Open Culture website.

The third thing I want to share is what is called The Proust Questionnaire; you might have seen it before. It was a popular Victorian parlour game that is still used today as an interview tool. Maybe you can use it if the conversation with extended family that you only see at Christmas runs dry. I have adapted the questions somewhat from those listed on Wikipedia. Perhaps, after you have inflicted it upon your relatives, you can use it as a creative prompt: Imagine the answers as provided by a character in the novel you’re writing, or your ideal lover, or perfect boss.

The Proust Questionnaire

• The principal aspect of my personality. Or my favourite aspect.

• Your favourite qualities in another person.

• What you appreciate most in your friends.

• Your main fault.

• Favourite way to pass your time.

• Your idea of happiness.

• Your idea of misery.

• If not yourself, who would you be?

• Where would you like to live?

• Your favourite colour.

• Your favourite flower.

• Your favourite bird or animal.

• Your favourite writers, artists, or creators.

• Your favourite fictional heroes.

• Your favourite real life heroes.

Thank you for reading.

I hope that Yuletide is treating you kindly. Stay sane, safe, well, and happy.

Leave a comment