This week I want to share some observations, from my desk to yours, on the creative process. As some of you may already know, alongside my work itself I keep an ongoing, multi-year, journal of what it’s like to try and make things, what gets in the way, what works and doesn’t work, and how I feel about it all.

Largely, I write it for myself because getting the process down into words is itself clarifying and generative. I also have some diffuse and unspecified sense that it might come in useful someday professionally speaking. I also find it a useful reference for mentees, or on workshops, when I want to remember how it is for me, if asked. Mostly though, I keep it because I’m not sure I’ve ever learnt as much from delivering a finished product as I have from the undertaking. I create far more than I deliver - and in a way I keep notes because I want to understand why this is, recognising that creating has never been about product for me, but about some essential human response to the world.

Anyway. Here are a few things I have noted this week, thoughts I’m having, a couple of things I’m up to:

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COMING UP THIS MONTH: HEAVY BODY GONG

For anyone local-ish to Derbyshire, I am doing an in-person creative movement-sound session on Saturday 13th June 6.30-8pm at Florence Nightingale Memorial Hall nr Matlock, where we will be exploring our ‘heavy bodies’ (gravity and bones and all that good stuff!) before letting them get super heavy against the ground as you’re carried off to the heavy sound of the gong! A sound immersion with a gravitational twist and pull. Think geological sound with a bit of deep time embodiment. Booking now.

This weekend just gone, I attended a movement intensive with Linda Hartley exploring EarthBody Dreaming; a process through which we can come to embody more deeply our relationship to the Earth, and to explore what is needed for the healing and restoration of both our own body and that of our home planet. The workshop was in her small garden studio, and I stayed nearby on a tiny patch of family land along a quiet stretch of the north Norfolk coast. This allowed me to extend the embodied research we were doing in the daytime as an intimate group of 5, into a series of early morning and late evening ‘solitudes’ that gave me space to integrate what I was learning. Every day I woke for sunrise, had a swim, and then spent the first few hours of the day in quietness before the workshop began. Every evening I returned to swim again as the moon got fuller and the tide higher before sleeping with the van windows and side door open so that I could feel the breeze and hear the sea. I call it swimming, but it was dancing. Fluid body meeting fluid body.

I had a revelatory time on the workshop. While the type of work we did intensively from 10 till 6 every day was very familiar to me, this time and with this group I was able to slip into a deeper and more trusting presence with the others, that I would ordinarily find quite hard. This time I yielded to the process and let my vulnerabilities be felt. Indeed, as we named the personal bodily symptoms we wanted to research over the weekend, as well as those planetary issues pressing on us, I found myself crying easily with others, ‘strangers’, for the first time in a very long while. No coincidence perhaps that the 20 year anniversary of Dad’s sudden death and the workshop were in the same week. My much younger self was present all weekend.

If the easy presence and vulnerability I shared with others in the small group was itself somewhat revelatory, then so too was the pace and nature of the whole weekend which from beginning to end, unrolled in such an attentive and intentional way that as soon as I got home I felt its invigorating power manifest in all of my one-to-one work this week, helping me listen better, attune better, and reconnect with my embodied capacity for the deep relational work. There was no ‘new’ magic to any of the weekend of course – mainly it was a lot of moving into different systems of the body, Authentic Movement (AM), witnessing and reflective dialogue in pairs and as a group – and yet put together in such a peaceful and respectful way, combined with my daily sea dances and meditation and lengthy lunch breaks listening to the garden bees and birds, all of it was magic. It was a necessary answer too, to one of the questions I took into the weekend: what has happened to sacredness in the world?

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This is quite a long read split into two parts. Pre-amble and then 15 bullet points. You can read one without the other.

Despite my interest in rock, I don’t live in the stone age. Which is to say I’m not against AI, as a blanket statement. How can you be against something so nebulous and ubiquitous, something so resisting of set definition and purpose? I’m sure that in some way I don’t understand it has already helped me today without my noticing its presence, or will do tonight while I sleep. Or next week, or next year in some tangible or intangible way. It’s just that I am for humans. I am for living, breathing beings of all species first, before ‘intelligences’ built off the backs of them. That’s my preface.

I’m pretty convinced from what I have seen and heard so far, that in the right places, AI is going to do amazing, helpful, hitherto unimaginable things, and is already doing so – it’s going to help make lives safer and healthier, it will help in conservation efforts, food security and hopefully climate work and so forth. It will help see things (patterns, anomalies, causes for concern) over scales that we can’t dream of, in timeframes we can’t comprehend as possible. AI is complex, we know it to be energy and water demanding, it is hungry, and like any ‘hyper-object’ that we live with, it is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It’s what we do with it. And in that regard, I have concerns. These are primarily around planetary impacts, the already foreseen ethical problems, the unintended negative consequences I worry no one is scouting for, a lack of robust ethical guidance in its development, and its invisibility where we might need it and want it to be more visible in order to make collective choices. It’s frightening how it is slipping into everything unseen through existing infrastructure. We’ve not seen many technologies like this before. And that’s all to say nothing of how it makes us solipsistic with its answers trained to please us with its growing knowledge of what we already like, and who we are. The implications of this.

But what is specifically on my mind at the moment, is that I’m just not fundamentally convinced of the merits of any technology that pushes the human out of the work that has always been remarkable precisely because it is human.

I think something important is lost when you erode human creativity through the backdoor and hope no one notices. This is what AI-made creative work is doing when it is not being labelled as such, when creatives are using it and not declaring it, when the industry is choosing that over human-made work, when due diligence is not being done to prevent degradation of human creativity, talent and opportunity. Again, the implications of this.

This is far from only being about beauty, but it is also about beauty. I am philosophically opposed to the idea that generative AI can make any human creative work more beautiful. When my writing hero Olga Tocarczuk said this month that she uses AI to see if she can make her work ‘more beautiful’, I was aghast. How can a homogenising system, built on flattening out natural diversity and nuance, built on other people’s uncredited intellectual property, built on unchecked, problematic and biased data sets, make the work of such a great mind more beautiful? What does she mean by beautiful? What do any of us mean now? I felt she was doing herself a gross miss-service, and by extension all of us. What is the long term psychological blow to our species when belief in what we can do and offer is sailed down the river so readily?

What I am interested in is the ways that we are – yet again – outsourcing what makes us human, as well as our readiness to do so, primed in a human culture that is at root, both troublingly self-absorbed and deeply ashamed of itself. Is that at least one of the possible dynamics at work in the human psyche today?

What I’m saying, in my own haphazard and imperfect way is that preserving what is interesting and curious and idiosyncratic about humans feels important in the bigger picture. I’m aware of the seed of doubt that is within me even as I write this, as I try and articulate my thoughts: why bother anymore? Why not just ask AI why AI is dangerous - it will flow better. But the point isn’t to tell you something perfectly, it is to make a connection with you on the themes. If we stop doing that, if we let AI mediate everything unchecked, if we sail our humanness down the river so readily, then what? ‘Progress’ (whatever that is) does not feel like it will ever be found in reducing what makes us human, and beauty will not be found in flattening the specificity and uniqueness of human creativity (there is a link here between AI and the endless culture of tweakments and injectibles and looksmaxxing that are making everyone look the same). What is our obsession with optimisation and perfection? Again, I suspect, our collective shame.

We know what we have done to our home planet, and what we are doing, we feel powerless to do much about it, we are under extreme pressure to do better with dwindling resources (material and emotional), we don’t have leaders who are providing moral and ethical direction. We have, I think, given up on ourselves while being unable to fully opt out. Our self-annihilating, self-denying behaviours suggest so. But all of the evidence I have ever seen points to the fact that when people hold tight to their intrinsic human potential to be additive, useful, part of the recovery operation, they are kinder to themselves and kinder to the planet and its many diverse citizens. They often do less, but with more focus, generosity and commitment over time. They are not endlessly optimising themselves, they are getting on with living an outward looking life. I admire these people.

Most discussions around AI centre the technology at hand. The potential of AI. We are constantly being sold on its merits and kept busy and distracted with the art of the good prompt. But are we talking enough about who is being erased? And are we taking steps to keep what it means to be human and creative in the discussion? I keep coming back to my own life, my own practice, and what I am committing to in practice when I talk about placing the human back into the heart of these discussions about AI? What am I doing about it?

My sense is that we are scared to recentre human value in these discussions because centring the human has brought us here, and aren’t we supposed to be decentring ourselves? We’re overwhelmed, confused, unsure of where we should be. We don’t know how to stay inside a problem without being the sole beneficiaries of its outcomes. For example, can we be at the centre of AI or climate discussions, but not just for us? Can we be at the centre of action even though we act for others? We don’t really know how to be at the centre with other life, and not always above it, domineering it, erasing it. We don’t yet know how to truly draw alongside, but still put ourselves forward as willing to take some proper guardianship. We’re still learning. Maybe we are also in our infancy. But, if we can only see humans as irredeemable – while we carry this wound in our psyche and seek to push ourselves out of the picture by denying our responsibilities and trying to smooth out our flaws without any meaningful integration - then it stands to reason that we will rush AI into even our most intimate emotional terrains and sites of work without so much as a backwards glance. Come and take us, we seem to be saying, we are lost anyway.

So, this is how I’m dealing with it, I guess. I’m imperfectly thinking about how to keep the human in and not only talk about how to keep AI out. In and out of what? Creativity, yes. But I suppose also just life.

I recognise that we are all being forced AI all the time now – it’s hard to do any sort of web search without being given the AI answer, and so where are the lines and boundaries? If we can’t work out where creativity is becoming too artificial (is it in the research phase or the final product?) can we at least start to reframe the conversation so that we take power from the machine and give it back to responsible adults who not only speak for themselves? Can we take on that role, talk to each other about how to do it, and not ask AI for the answers?

Here are some (non AI generated) ideas for how we could keep humans in the AI-conversation, and keep what is most human in our creative work:

1. Re-engage with what is beautiful and hopeful about being a human; the potential and capacity we have for goodness beyond ourselves. Can we avoid getting caught in so much despair that it leaves the door open for self-erasure and species denial? If we cannot tolerate ourselves, face ourselves first, how can we do this difficult work? In practice, this looks like spending time with other people in their kind and flawed, embodied messiness. How are they doing their best? How do they inspire you? What have we done well? What can still be saved?

2. Commit to keep putting your mind to work. In a world now where you don’t need to learn for yourself or engage in the process of learning or assimilating information, keep setting your brain these tasks even when it’s easier not to. Do the thinking for yourself. Sure, the internet is great for facts, but don’t outsource every question, task or errant thought for the computer to resolve. Be critical of what you read and from where. Weigh things up. Keep some things for human chat. The arrival of convenient appliances was wonderful for people on many levels, but convenience was not the panacea for a fulfilling life as it turns out. We need to be wise what we usher in to replace functions that we were born to use. Some shortcuts will be wildly convenient, some will de-skill us and deepen our existential crisis about what it means to be human. But I’m convinced that thinking may yet prove to be part of our redemptive story.

3. Resist the idea that you and your work are objects to be optimised. Dare to believe that you and your work is not better for the aggregated ‘perfection’ offered by AI. Personally, I don’t want to sound perfectly formed and generic, just as I don’t want to look it. I am a faulty, fleshy human carrying more weight than my doctor might prefer, and who makes more grammatical errors than my editor might wish – but oh well! Not a part of my self-worth is based on standardised perfection. We do not expect this or ask it of other living beings, so why ask ourselves? How does holding this perspective continue to separate us from the natural world we long for deeper communion with? Allow yourself to be the human animal, not the machine. Your living, breathing, dying embodiment distinguishes you and makes everything more beautiful in ways that ‘optimisation’ can’t touch. You can’t out-optimise impermanence so don’t waste time rejecting yourself.

4. Remember your innate adaptability and resourcefulness. It is easy to become a victim of AI fear, instead of trusting that what makes you human is also, somewhat, within your control. The online world will always amplify these fears because it is the home of AI (there are agendas at play), but there are many spaces in the real and material world that your humanness is required and necessary; where it is demonstrably useful, and where being human still matters. Spend time in those places and notice how resilient and resourceful humans can be. Who gains when you become a passive victim?

5. Keep trusting yourself, stay close to your intuition. Pay attention to the world, to your experience and honour its cultivation. AI diminishes trust in self, eroding it one prompt after another. So, work on your self-trust. This includes trusting yourself to make decisions or to work out what you need– do you have to ask the internet everything? Is it becoming habitual when you could really ask yourself? (see also wearable technologies). What does this do to trust in self over time? The skilfulness of knowing one’s own mind and body? There are so many reasons why we might lose trust in ourselves, AI is pushing on an open door, and will exploit our already-waning emotional and embodied intelligence. But we have got by a lot longer without AI, than with it.

6. Don’t let AI erode trust in other humans. It is easy to be convinced that the answers for your life - what you should do, how you should do it etc. - are found in an aggregated regurgitation from a machine that only simulates the impression of knowing you. This averaging feels like it ought to make more sense and be more reliable than one’s own intuition, or the advice and guidance coming from the ‘single failure point’ of mere individuals. I don’t buy this. Relationships are hard and messy and prone to misunderstandings, but they are protective against all sorts of ills. Just one person who listens to you and tries their best for you, and holds this intention is more important as the glue in our sense of belonging, than ‘perfect and right all the time’. You can be this to others, too. Step away from AI and back into the mess of each other. This is where we really find ourselves and what we want to do/make/write etc.

7. Orient to human-made creative work, invest in it. A bit like ensuring ethical food provenance, and reducing food miles and so forth, this will take time and a commitment to high production values and transparency. It will be necessary to look closely and not take things at face value, and it will all get more sophisticated. It will be hard to tell what’s what and catch it all, and it will mean some things get through the net. But isn’t human work worth it? Isn’t yours worth it? I want to spend my money on people and their work who are trying to keep showing their human side more so in the face of these new simulations! Who are finding interesting ways and means to do that! Investing time and energy in supporting human-made will be the next home-made or hand-made, we can vote with our attention and ask for transparency.

8. As individual producers, assume a high standard for yourself. As a producer I want to commit to the human work – to doing the work only I can do with my mind and body through labour-intensive means as necessary, using tools and methods that elevate the human mark, not render them redundant. This doesn’t mean not using new technology, but it does mean being very clear in how it is used. There are many tools that help humans express their humanness more clearly and that still preserve the trace and mark of human effort (cameras, brushes, materials and so forth). Not all tools seek to homogenise and make invisible the human as AI does (generative for who?). I suspect that for the foreseeable, we will all have to make our own decisions about when human made is becoming a little too artificial for our own tastes and philosophy. What is the appreciable difference between a machine sewing a garment, and a machine making an artistic decision? How much AI can be tolerated in a piece of work? Does this change depending on who’s doing it, and how? Are any of us entirely removed if we are using the internet? All I know is that recently, when I was struggling with my book project someone well-meaning said to me “Why don’t you just ask AI to do it based on all of your notes and research?” The answer was a very definite No and will remain a resounding No. If I can’t do it myself, then it will not be done. I commit to this.

9. Culturally and practically come to terms with the fact that smart work made my humans will now always be slower than AI. And this has beauty and value. It is not a source of shame. ‘Slow life’ has had its first wave, and now we’re in the second. There is some work that will benefit from being sped up by AI, and some that will remain brilliant for being crafted over time, honouring attention to detail, developing a richness for the waiting. What is better for being slower and fettled over by humans? What is lost when humans have no reason to do that anymore? Don’t you think it’s wonderful when you read about a human in flow, being in ‘their process’? Isn’t it more interesting than ‘Chat told me in 0.75 seconds’. Great things take time. I still think this is true. Geology knows it, I know it. I am so very tired of being constantly told implicitly to speed up. I want to make work worth waiting for, and not panicking over how long its taking me compared to how fast AI can write 10,000 words.

10. Let’s hold the work that we can do with real people in higher esteem than ever before. Never have I felt so sure of the importance of relational work, deep listening and so forth. Of bodies being with bodies. I want to be where my slow, relational work has value, and this will mean divesting effort from some places. It is disheartening to watch the creative industries struggle with this, but in the meantime where else can we put our efforts and stay resolutely human in what we are doing and offering? As being human is devalued incrementally, can we resist by becoming more human? More embodied together?

11. Practically speaking, scrolling all of the latest news from the most dangerous people on Earth will not reassure you of anything about the potential of good people. But you will start to judge everyone else by their actions. Our brains do this – they panic, look for patterns, try and root out the unsafe objects. Sadly, when we can’t get rid of the right people, we blame the wrong people as the next best option that will (temporarily) stabilise our fears. It’s always worth putting down your phone where the AI is, and the misinformation etc. I went back on social media recently, saw a whole bunch of AI slop and resolved to get back out quick. My time is precious, your time is precious. See point 9.

12. Use AI mindfully and respectfully. It is unlikely many of us will be able to rule it out altogether. It is here, like covid. But if we use it can we say so? Can we model honesty? Can we dip in to it as a tool, but not as a replacement for putting our minds to work? Can we brave enough to take a stand where necessary and divest where usage is not respectful? Can we stay in a conversation about it and hold the tension of wanting it and not wanting it?

13. Get out in the world, touch real things. Talk to the plants and the animals and the rocks. Ask questions and listen for replies. This is still the world at its best and way more ‘generative’ than talking into a synthetic simulacra of a relationship. I have written two books about having a relationship with nature, so I won’t labour this point but there really is nothing like nestling alongside your wild kin to know with whom you belong.

14. Work on our collective shame. What is yours to carry, what isn’t? What can be laid down? What will you be freed to see and imagine that is additive to planet earth if you are not paying penance for being a human forever? I once did a dance workshop with Helen Poyner who in her own indomitable way said we just need to get over ourselves and stop self-flagellating. Those might not have been the exact words, but it’s what I heard and it rung true. When we are so consumed by guilt we are not doing anything else. Worse, we are letting stuff happen to us that we might regret. Open your eyes, walk normally (again, Helen Poyner).

15. Rejoice in what makes you weirdly human. Become even more human than you already are. Really go to town with the weird stuff, and the stuff that only you could care about so much. This is where humans excel and will always have the upper hand. Throw ideas together, make a mess, try out ideas, write incoherent poems. Elevate an ethic of being human and let this be the transmission. We can be better. Last week, I shared a picture of the gongs in my teahouse. The caption read ‘I’ll just be here making geological sound if you need me’. And then someone replied saying ‘Geological sound makes AI look so flimsy!’ and I loved that. I think humans being their depthful, weird and contradictory selves will always make AI look flimsy. I want to be getting down to that work. I want us all to have confidence to do that.

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This is a test shot I made last weekend for a project I’ll be working on over the summer. I’ll tell you more about that another day. But it encapsulates something that I love about making human work - the physicality of bringing ideas to life. I love crawling, grumbling, sweating it out over an idea. I love materials. I love making things in place. I love not knowing whether something will work, but trying anyway. I don’t plan to do less of this, but more.

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COMING UP SUMMER 2026

ARVON Short Course/Residential - Lumb Bank, Yorkshire, 17-20th August

In August, my friend and fellow rock botherer Alyson Hallett and I will be running a 4-day residential on writing rocks - prose and poetry - for the inimitable writing centre, Arvon at Lumb Bank. Last time I heard over half of the places were sold and there were perhaps 5 places remaining. If you would be interested in joining us for a writing intensive then please do look at the info on the link and book a place. I would love to meet you there and write together.

Writers who write about nature, often and inevitably write about the seasons and cycles of life, observing them as they change, even as those changes are out of kilter in a climate changing world. They write about species, charismatic and overlooked. And so, it occurred to me recently, what do people who write about rocks, write about? Afterall, the changes that a rock undertakes are not as noticeable against human time frames, and there is no particular seasonality to a rock. It doesn’t come into leaf (though I suppose moss on a rock may thicken) or hibernate or go into spate. Strange too, to wonder about rock writers as if they are a group I know nothing about, as if I wasn’t one of them.

What do I write about then when I write about rocks? The answer is a paradox: I both do, and I don’t. I am in some ways writing about rocks all the time, and also never writing about rocks. Not that many of my Substack posts are about rocks, and I’ve never written an ode to a rock (have I?). But I have definitely written one book about rock. Another with rocks in mind (and on the back cover!). Most recently, my zine/chapbook Conduit and my first zine, Great Geological Controversies were about rocks. I have also written a couple of articles about the benefits of knowing a bit of geology while out walking. But my editorial portfolio is mostly not about rocks, directly. I create workshops and fieldtrips that centre rocks. I help other academics and artists think about their own work with rocks. Recently, I helped musician Laura Misch work on her latest album, Lithic – mainly in the thinking that went into it, but also some of the lyrics. There are probably more things that I have missed off the list. But am I a writer that writes about rocks? I would still perhaps err on the side of I’m not sure. What I am sure about is that I write about relationships, I write about what I hear, I write about states of being.

I like to work within a healthy dose of mystery, but I also like to know what’s what. Perhaps you do too? I like to have a regular check in with myself about what my work is about, which is essentially asking what am I doing here?* Sure, it helps make writing a bio easier, but it’s more than that. It’s about making sure I am not running on with an exhausted idea that I’ve lost the plot with, or that what I’m doing still matches what I want to be doing, or that the trifling idea I am labouring over might have some bigger, broader, point that I can identify as potentially useful, or better still, connective.

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This is the first trip to northern Scotland, that I haven’t thought of moving here. The first time I haven’t fretted over whether it will be the Cairngorms or Ullapool. The first time in 15 years that I haven’t been scouring Rightmove every evening. And yet, it’s been just as wonderful a trip as any; just as compelling, just as tempting in light and sound, just as peaceful. If anything, I feel more rooted here now than ever. My work in this part of the country is developing, I know more people here than I ever have done previously, and time is making my connection to the Highlands more stable. I feel like I know several areas like the back of my hand (such a curious phrase) and better than my actual home grounds in Derbyshire.

This time though, I did something different:

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As I’m about to head off on my Scottish Geotour/fieldtrip this week to do a spot of rock-bathing and deep process work with a lovely new group, I thought it would be fun to show you an update on the Japanese-inspired tea house I mentioned a couple of posts ago. I suppose you could call this my first teahouse meditation.

We built the ‘summerhouse’ from a pretty standard and affordable kit seven years ago (and had electricity wired into it about 5…), which was no mean feat as we live and garden on a hillside, but despite the effort we made the glorified shed never reached its potential, and over time it became a regular shed full of gardening equipment, stacks of dirty old pots, overwintering garden furniture and so forth. Among its woes of neglect we had not sealed it properly when we built it, planning to let it settle for a season or two, and then forgetting to do this essential job for all of the subsequent years. This meant that the shed was a great sanctuary for any and all insects, but would not be an appealing option for anyone to sit in, aside from the most ardent of invertebrate enthusiasts. All in all, it was a flop in terms of its intended purpose.

For the last few years I’ve walked past it everyday and either wondered why am I not doing anything about this? Or looked away, unwilling to face the small collapsed dream that it represented. While it looked ok from the outside, I could ignore it. Hello, metaphor. Then recently, I sat through the final weekend of my sound practitioner training frustrated about the space I didn’t have to practice, resentful about what others seem to have ‘effortless access to’, which tracked all the way back to my great disappointment at how hard it is to find good outdoor therapeutic space in the absence of owning acres of private land. Ultimately, I found myself asking again: why am I not doing anything about this, really?

This is the honest answer:

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It feels strange coming to the page to write to you this week, as if I have had a long absence and need to tell you all about it. But in fact, this is not the case. I have not been gone very far in any literal sense, just remote from the online space. I deleted the social media apps (Instagram and Substack Notes) from my phone about a month ago now, and that always opens a broader sense of remove, doesn’t it? Sharing online collapses the distance between yourself and the viewing world, in perception at least. When I am on social media I feel the presence of everyone, very closely (even if that’s not the case) and the opposite is also true; when I go, I feel that same world on my phone drift from me. I don’t know what people are up to. I don’t know who is talking about what. I am not being told ten thousand times a day what to think, read, buy. Things get quieter in my mind, and then the quiet begets quiet, until I arrive into a sort of inner silence when I feel quite remote, even from myself. When I become just an ear turned to the world.

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Some ‘experimental writing’-adjacent news this week from me:

Chapbook # 3 Conduit Into Geological Intimacy is now available in digital format!

I am absolutely delighted that my latest chapbook of experimental writing is gradually making it’s way all around the world as we speak (if you have ordered it, it should be arriving this week in the UK notwithstanding easter postage delays) but I am not delighted by the cost of sending it outside of the UK. At 40-pages long this chapbook has tipped the scales relative to the last two, and it is now just shy of the same amount to post it abroad as the chapbook itself. With this in mind, and now that half of the limited edition hard copies have already flown, I am also offering the chapbook as a PDF download which you can view instantly on any device. Nothing beats the real thing of course, but it’s crazy money to send to the US especially right now - more than I even realised with the change in weight, so I hope this is an affordable way of accessing it for anyone interested and who missed out before I closed for international orders! My second chapbook is also available digitally.

Regolith Lab Online & Self-Paced is coming very soon!

Over the winter of 2024, I ran the first iteration of Regolith Lab online, which was live over a month, and designed as an intensive creative workshop oriented around play, exploration of our own creative materials and preoccupations/themes etc, and developing a sustainable creative writing practice. It was inspired by ‘regolith’ or the layer of broken-up, rocky and fragmented material that blankets the earth of which soil is the uppermost layer. In our lab we gathered together all of our creative fragments and ideas, so that we could use them as the basis of our own ongoing growthful substrate. We also had a book club, and weekly co-writing sessions alongside the main teaching workshops. I really loved this group! For reasons of timing and logistics it has become difficult to find a time to run the group live again, so I decided it would be great to turn it into a self-paced online course which I am hoping will be ready next month! Creating workshops is something I absolutely love to do, and echoes back to my time in higher education where I developed all sorts of online learning materials when they were just starting to become popular! This version of Regolith Lab is designed to take 4-8 weeks, but can be explored at any pace. It also has a Book-Club-for-One adapted from the original, and is packed full of resources and ideas for working with your own fragments perhaps as the basis for longer work, or perhaps as experimental short forms in themselves! You can register your interest now to hear when it’s live, by filling in the quick form on my website (where the workshop will be hosted!) - I can’t wait to share my love of the fragmentary with you at your own pace…

OK, onwards with more on today’s theme of experimental writing…

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MOST RECENT POST: Lessons and Takeaways 2 years on from publishing Weathering - 11 insights you might find useful for your creative practice!

Well, as it happens you didn’t email me with many questions for this week’s part 2 on writing and publishing. I received just two! Perhaps in an age of AI we don’t feel the need to ask one human our questions anymore because we have a more powerful synthesizer of a multitude of answers at our fingertips, and perhaps information is now so ubiquitous that we can get it when we want it, rather than contriving a question at a particular moment? The times they are a changin’ friends.

In any case then, I will answer the two questions that I did get by email in plenty of detail and then next week I will return with some thoughts on ‘experimental writing’ for my paid subscribers (or maybe something else will capture my attention more and I will write about that instead…let’s see!)

1. My question is what advice you’d have on approaching agents/publishers with a book proposal. What was your experience like for Weathering?

I have two lines of thought in response to this question. One is around the logistics/pragmatics of writing proposals. The other is around strength of an idea going into the proposal itself.

Let’s start with logistics and nuts and bolts etc…

I have had a few different experiences. For Grounded, I was approached to write a book by a small publisher, and at the same time a few other larger publishers were asking me if I had thought of writing a book. This is likely because I was sharing a lot about nature connection on social media at the time and was carving an authority for myself with my work. I had no idea what to do, and panicked. Once I had calmed down, I found an agent who looked like a good fit, and emailed them with my situation. This meant that I went to my now agent armed with publisher interest already and they helped me navigate that process and make a few choices. This was all quite easy and exciting. I got lucky!

After Grounded, I wrote a proposal for Weathering with the help of my agent in the conventional way, and this was sold to my current publisher Ebury/PRH who pre-empted it quite quickly. This was also a lovely process and I got on so well with my new editor that it felt like a great and easy fit. My third book was then sold to the same publisher off a third proposal.

So, three different experiences. But for all of them my agent was crucial because she knows the market, she has the contacts, and it’s simply ‘how it’s done’ in most cases. They do all of the work submitting your idea to editors, and fielding the responses. Some smaller publishers may invite direct proposal submissions, but on the whole it makes total sense to have an agent to navigate all this for you and to be your ally in the process. My experience of all of this has been pretty good and not too stressful, though always anxiety inducing. After all, however you go about finding a home for your work there are long waits, rejections and things that don’t quite go to plan. A lot of the time those in the industry assume a lot of knowledge, but I knew nothing, so it was a steep learning curve to understand what’s what.

Because of how my experience unfolded I can’t speak first hand to what it’s like getting your agent in the first place via lots of cold enquiries and a pre-book proposal for them to get them interested in representing you, before you rework it with them for sending to publishers. But my best advice is to think about the book you want to write (maybe a specific comparable title) and then do some sleuthing to see which agents typically represent those books. It’s not usually very hard to find out which agents represent which authors and so forth. You can then narrow down your search and check their websites to see if they are open for submissions. Most will say if they are or they are not.

In terms of writing a proposal, this is a dissatisfying answer, but I think whether it’s a good or an arduous and lengthy experience for people varies really widely, depending on a number of factors, including their writing experience, how coherent their idea already is, and how well they are tuned into the commercial realities of traditional publishing etc. If, for example, you have a keen sense of what your book is about in a few hundred words, why you are the one to write it, how it situates itself culturally, how it will be structured, where your book idea would fit in the existing market, what it is comparable to (this is important – too unique brings its own problems), your plans for supporting promo and so forth – then the proposal writing process is likely to be quicker and less onerous, than if you are starting with just the book’s plot.

What I will say, is that writing a proposal is not only essential for non-fiction ( you will need a proposal and sample chapters, compared to fiction which is typically bought on the strength of a completed manuscript), but it is also a useful and clarifying exercise because it brings your idea out of the realm of fantasy and helps you to shift gear into what it takes to make it a reality. A proposal helps you nail the point of your book in a precise way, why it’s different, and forces you to think about the general flow and breakdown of the book, as well as who the intended audience is and so forth. Put simply, it is the first dollop of reality after the great idea takes root.

All told, my advice would be as soon as you think you have your idea, you have started writing a sample, and you want to find a publisher then start looking at what goes into a proposal and begin thinking in that direction sooner rather than later. But don’t be scared of it. It’s a clarifying and enlivening process and it will hone your ideas.

Which brings me to the strength of the idea going into the proposal…

I suppose what’s ultimately really important is how great your idea is in relation to the market. An idea can be personally stimulating and fascinating, or even important for a great many, and still for some reason not get much traction on the market owing to the trends I mentioned in last week’s Substack. I had the idea for Weathering a while before it ever got to the selling stage, but there was a sense that it wasn’t the right time. Hard to believe, I know, but folk weren’t that interested in rocks a few years ago! But a moment arose and it became possible. Weathering isn’t really like much else on the market, so it was a gamble and not easy to categorise – not solely nature writing or in the nature writing tradition, and not self-help either – but a bit of lots of things. You can see this reflected in the two very different covers we went with.

Ultimately, to get a book to market you have to work quite hard to make your idea unique and gap-filling, but not so unique that a market needs to be created for it. Publishers need to know where it will go on a bookseller’s table, or what cultural moment it will slide into. Or you will need to have such a compelling voice or established public persona that you will make your own market! For this reason, the proposal is important but the first step is establishing what is special about your idea and why you are the one to deliver it.

An agent might help you with this bit of course, but they are busy people too, so it is primarily your job to establish within yourself why your book idea matters and how it fits and why you, and take this belief (and bullet point list) with you to agents.

I hope this helps!

2. This is not specifically about book writing, but you seem to write a lot with here too. Do you ever get writers block? If so, how do you deal with it? I spend a lot of time dreaming of the end result, but staring at a blank page…

I would say that I have never had major writers block. But I have a sense it is related to chronic fear and/or persistent misalignment (going against oneself), and so I try and avoid both of these things. For example, if you are so scared of the path ahead that you are paralysed and can’t move forward with the writing, and your nervous system is spun out and draws a blank etc. then you won’t write. This taps into so-called imposter syndrome. Or if what you are trying to write is not really right for you and so you just keep sitting down and nothing happens. This creates a stagnant nothingness on the page.

Because I suspect block is related to fear and misalignment then I always try and make sure that writing is a joy for me. I try to ensure I only do work I want to do. I don’t let my whole world ride on what writing I do or don’t do. This is all a fine balancing act and not watertight as an approach, but generally I know what sort of writing to avoid, and I know how to stay calm and grounded (as it happens!) under pressure. Which isn’t to say there isn’t pain and disappointment (I know that too) in the writing process, just that you have to try and release the tension and the grasping, and let go of some control.

The real world implication of this is that: I don’t accept writing pitches that I don’t think I will love. In fact, I never pitch for anything anymore - I just make for myself to my own brief. My focus is art and expression, rather than being a commissioned writer so working under my own steam has to be my focus. But if work comes to me that feels good then I do it and I am glad for it, and if I get a tell-tale lurch in my stomach then I steer clear. This is the slower way to build your portfolio, but it does mean I don’t make too many missteps and give myself writers block. I have turned down some great jobs in the past with orgs or brands that many folk would love, but I knew that for some specific and idiosyncratic reasons I wouldn’t enjoy the job and would spend a lot of time fretting and staring at the page. I’ve never regretted these choices, even when I am a little rueful about how specific my needs are. But, alas, we are who we are!

What else might be happening?

Well, I try not to take writing (– or indeed anything!) too seriously in the bigger picture.While I am a pretty serious person to meet, caring about serious things seriously, I also have a sort of ‘ambient Buddhist’ take on things where I try and cultivate non-attachment to outcomes. I value play even if I am quite serious…I guess I take play seriously? I try and remember none of it matters as much as who we are at core. This inherent playful and vaguely fatalistic outlook has always served me quite well. Do or don’t do, just get on with it, show up, do your best. If its not working after a reasonable amount of time trying then allow yourself to grieve and be angry and sad but try not to let it ruin you.

I would say that with writing you have to be in love with the process of writing itself - you have to want to write and not just want what’s on the otherwise of writing such as publication. This lightens the route to the dream, and is also means you are always taking something from showing up to the page. You are as invested in what it brings you in the present, as what it might bring you in the future. Maybe blockage can be related to not really knowing how to get from a to b - and for that I recommend, building a writing practice, listening to writers talk about writing, studying how your favourite authors do what they do. All of these things can bring the dream forward and remove the blockage of ‘not knowing’.

Lastly, preciousness and pressure can create writers block. Not everything you write has to be a masterpiece. Most of it won’t be. But does it communicate and connect and tell the truth? No one piece of work can say everything or be everything. It’s dangerous to freight our writing with that. I have seen it in writing workshops that a person will have a major blockage because everything is riding on one project, and perhaps they don’t even write the rest of the time. Perhaps they have suddenly decided they have a dream, but haven’t taken any of the first steps towards it such as building a regular writing practice over time. No wonder then, that the words won’t come on demand for the big project. Instead, start small. Build the writing practice. Break the big dream into small dreams and steps. Lay the foundations and enjoy it!

All of this said I have been tired and fed up, temporarily out of ideas, or unable to articulate my ideas so that I sit and stare and do nothing and make no progress. I have waited months and months trying to get things to work and they don’t. I have gone down dead-ends, and discovered dead-ends where I thought there was safe passage. These are all common experiences and part of the writing package, I think. At the moment, I am very stuck with a few things. I am not going back or forward and it feels rubbish and humbling and frightening, but it’s still not a blockage - I write every day, I pick up something new, I keep journalling, fettling, reading…trusting that if I keep moving towards what is most true for me then it will be OK in the end…

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order my new chapbook

To mark the occasion, I thought I would share some lessons and takeaways two years on from publication in today’s post, as well as invite any questions you might have about the book, about writing as a vocation/profession/part of your work and/or about publishing itself, which I will answer as a Q&A post next week. So please do, drop me any questions you might have about writing life, any advice you might want a bit of, and so forth. You can put them in the comments, or you can reply to the email and I will share my answers in a post next week!

Before that though a catch up….

Slow Read Weathering

I want to remind anyone who might be new to my second book, that on Substack there is a free 9-week slow read that you can access to guide you through it. This published weekly last year when the paperback came out, and it’s hosted here. You can open it, and print it if you like for easier use away from the screen. It’s designed to give you an enriched experience of reading Weathering including journaling prompts to use yourself for personal exploration.

Links to previous writing insight

Here are some links to previous posts where I have written about the book writing process. I mentor writers and offer writing workshops, so I like to talk about writing!

1. 2 book babies, 9 creative lessons (this was written on publication)

2. the lost epigraphs (chapter heading quotes that didn’t make it into the book)

3. An interview with myself (!) about writing a book (to answer questions people were unlikely to ask me)

4. 10 books by women about rocks (new books have been published since I wrote this, but it will be a start)

OK, so here are some lessons/insights that come to mind for me two years after initial publication of Weathering. Two years isn’t long, and that’s a take-home in itself, many books go on to have a longer life than we might imagine. But in two years a lot can change too, as our writing interests are likely being put elsewhere:

1. A book is a portal, its highest value is off the page – if there is one thing I have discovered about writing a book and publishing with one of the Big 5, is that it’s value extends far beyond the book itself, especially if you are not a full-time author. It is often said that a book is like a shop window, and while I don’t quite like that analogy – it’s a bit mercenary – the essence of it is true. When people read my non-fiction books, they get a fairly true sense of who I am, my sensibility, my outlook, my philosophical leanings and so forth. Yes, it’s not a complete picture, but even in its partial gaze, it is true. This is exposing at first, but afterwards it becomes a useful short-hand for readers/groups/organisations who decide they want to work with me, or come to a workshop, or collaborate, or have mentoring and so forth. In my experience, it makes it a little easier and faster to establish if we will be a good fit. Weathering has brought so many interesting people and their projects in my direction – connections that feel really valuable to me and I almost certainly wouldn’t have made without the book. All told, a book is a portal and this is really what it’s about for me right now. It’s been the absolute best thing! A book isn’t the only thing to do this though, so it might be helpful to think about what else can create this sort of channel if not a book.

2. Clambering into your niche is really good – it can feel scary to write into a niche because you will probably need to forego blockbuster success (see later points) but confidently stepping into your niche, will also bring the right people towards you, faster. It will also, crucially, help you feel more you in the bigger picture of your work and your life. Grounded was a very general book about nature connection, and it was a great way in for me, but it’s been Weathering than emboldened me to say hey, I am interested in how we as humans relate to the geological world and to see what happens from there. I still feel at the beginning of this journey. Being bold in your niche will expose your inherent weirdness, but it will also bring other weird folk closer, and this is the opposite of isolating.

3. Books can be a valuable part of your ecology of work without them being your only work – Two years down the line, I have realised I cannot and may never be a full time author/writer, even though it’s so important to me to write. I thought I might want this (sometimes I still fantasise about it, just like I dream of the wilderness cabin), but I don’t think it’s the path for me. Or at least not for now. The reasons for this are multiple. Mostly though, I love the variety of work I do, and don’t want to forgo that to write full time yet. Likewise, I like to start new things and finish them on a regular basis and a book project for me is just too long to be emotionally and creatively sustained by. It’s great to have a book on the go – to make that slow, thoughtful, creative work - but it’s also great to see work come into fruition, sooner. I have often envied writers who just write and do not offer anything writing-adjacent like workshops or teaching or mentoring, let alone other unrelated work. But in reality, I derive a lot of pleasure and purpose from finding ways to encourage other creative folk, and I am driven mad by my own interior gaze if left alone too long with myself! Long and short, fast and slow. It’s the geological way. I couldn’t do without the prospect of writing a book, but I also couldn’t do without the moments that last no more than an hour or so. This feels healthy and sustainable to me at the moment. It’s good to know what sort of person you are and how books fit into the whole, without being all of it. Because books are hungry and they would happily take all of it. There’s no moral virtue in books being your only thing, no shame in being a mixed bag sort of a person.

4. Commit to the long view – one of the biggest rides post publication is the one your ego takes you on as it acclimates to the attention a new and popular book brings. Once you have got over the anxiety of it, having a book in the world is a wonderful feeling, but when things quieten down, it’s hard to know whether to get straight back on the book-writing wagon or whether to take your time. Afterall, will I be forgotten? Will my ideas become irrelevant? I have a lot of books I want to write, but I also want to take my time to do the right work. The thoughtful work. What I consider my best work. When I wrote Weathering I thought it took me about 2 years, but in fact it took me all the years of my adult life including two careers. It was a culmination of sorts – which I didn’t understand then – and so afterwards when I expected to plough on with the next, I was surprised to find that my thinking wasn’t entirely there yet. Sure, I wanted to make hay while the sun was shining on Weathering, but given that nothing I write is to a genre formula then each requires a lot of thinking and percolating. Lately, I have come to terms with my need for a slower pace (this is physical not just psychological) and it feels better than the anguish of production to order. I tell myself now that I have time to get it right. I am trying not to be suckered into arbitrary timeframes. I want to love the process of writing and making my thoughts clear, not just the outcome.

5. This thing about becoming irrelevant is a red-herring – because let’s face it, you already are. Ouch. But also, can you breathe in the relief of that? Outside of your nearest and dearest, most people are anonymous to everyone else. Statistically speaking. Sure, a few people get big and famous through all sorts of means and they are known by millions but most of us will only truly matter deeply in the long term to our friends and family, our animal companions, and our local communities. Perhaps also to an audience, for a little while, in a fleeting sort of way. I am largely an irrelevance to the world and that’s OK, but what I do have is a nice sized readership (thanks to you all, and those who buy my books) that I can nurture, even if my mattering to them (you!) is brief. I’m not going to be forgotten by the imagined masses, because I never featured anyway. And for those I am speaking to through my work and my writing, I will not be forgotten because we are in a dialogue. If in the end, I am forgotten and become irrelevant then it was meant to be: I am still loved somewhere. In the final analysis, this is something to heal through therapy and good relationships, not through writing a book or any other form of production. There are plenty of reasons to write a book, but to feel like a somebody should probably not be one of them.

6. Get offline more – this may just be declining oestrogen, but two years ago I was so anxious about what people would think of me when Weathering was published. Would I be cancelled? Trolled? Would I be accused of not being fully rounded in my thinking? Now, I have become much less afraid of what people think. I am online less than I was, which has unskewed things, and I have tried to relocate the nexus of my life and validation away from the online sphere and anxiety machine of social media. I spent too much of the last 10 years there. If I am anxious, I go back to the mountains or the woods and remember this is where my heart is known and understood. Or I immerse myself in my other, non-writing, work. Online life has the power to make you feel paranoid and frightened, and sadly this is where a lot of writers end up - online and fretting! We think we have to be there constantly keeping an eye on what our work is doing, or what ‘the competition is doing’ and so forth. But it’s good to stay in the real world as an author for all sorts of reasons. This is a constant practice of return, but worthwhile.

7. Your work is probably not going to be bigger than the system – everyone has high hopes for a book. You do, your agent does, your publisher does. But save for a few breakthrough books and authors, the vast majority will not win prizes or become best sellers or have fifty co-editions. This is probability statistics, but there is politics at work too, money as well probably, and trends etc. The publishing industry is quite conservative because it needs to make money, and so though some things will meet the zeitgeist of the moment, in exactly the right moment, and go big as a result, lots of other books will not. But, they will still be successful, and they will still find a good, loving, loyal audience that grows with time. Weathering is this sort of book. A lot of books are this. Time and again, I have heard that it’s difficult to define in terms of genre. It’s not pop science or pop psychology. It’s not self-help exactly. It’s quite poetic. It’s reflective rather than instructional. It’s universal in theme, but set in one place. This has undoubtedly been its success and its challenge. All to say, there are many reasons why a book will go places, or not, and this is not just a reflection of writing quality. The same is true for any creative work. It might be that you are blazing a trail in a genre or outside of it, or that there is stiff competition in an aspect of your genre, or that other books got more promo budget. You have to learn not to be disheartened, but to keep making the work you want to make, while understanding you are not bigger than the system. You might even choose to be glad because being outside the system is quite an interesting place to be. Trust in the smaller ways that a piece of work can do its work.

8. Reading your own work as time passes is uncanny but not cringe – it’s really tempting not to look back at your work at all. Or to look upon it with disdain when you do. But in my experience, reading your own work post publication doesn’t have to be cringe (like reading a diary!) it can just feel uncanny, like seeing yourself in a photo from the past. When I have had cause to re-read parts of Weathering two years on, I feel a lot of generosity to myself. All of it still reads true, even if just two years later I feel a little older and different. Imagine what 10 or 20 years will be like. But this is a reminder, that a book (any piece of long work) can only ever be a snapshot of ourselves and our thoughts in time. A book stays static, but the author changes. This process is inevitable and quite lovely, and we should probably all be generous with ourselves and our work as we age around it. It is a gift to leave a written trail, along which we might find ourselves in all our different stages.

9. Let your book have a life of its own – immediately after publication your book, if it’s doing pretty well as mine has done has a certain sort of known trajectory: you launch it, do speaking gigs, festivals and so forth and your book is read, people ask questions, and you hear the same thing over and again for a while. Then things go quieter. But after that something really interesting happens – your book makes a more winding way into the world even as you get on with other things, and after a lag time of sorts, you start to notice it’s opening different, unexpected doors. Suddenly, it’s on the other side of the world and a small group with a niche interest is working with it as part of their weekly gathering, or it brings an offer of work that you wouldn’t have thought of, or it make a connection with someone who you go on to collaborate with on a project you’ve never heard of, or it simply, beautifully, makes you a new friend. Slowly but surely, your book creeps into the cracks of places and gets found in ways much more curious and surprising than at first. And it is as if you have had nothing to do with it. This is reassuring and a lot of fun. You don’t always have to be doing promo. Let it go off and live, mature in the world and people’s minds. None of us can know or predict how long a book will live for. Be grateful for the postcards it writes back to you.

10. Hearing from readers never gets old – let’s make no bones, the world is full of books. More and more books are being published every year, the churn is fast and real, and most publishers move on from your book pretty quickly to new offerings in their pipeline. So, it is a surprise when readers are still finding you, and even more so when they email you to tell you they are on their second or third read, or that perhaps they didn’t start it for a while, but have now. You realise your book has become to someone else, like certain books are to you – put aside for the right time, or read and then re-found. It is always, always a pleasure to hear from readers especially as a mid-lister like myself. While mega best-selling authors probably don’t have time to read everything they receive, many mid-listers will, and will be grateful for the time you have taken. If you want to tell an author you loved their work, then don’t hold back. It’s hard to write a book and encouraging feedback is always a treat.

11. Let everything your book brings your way be a source of surprise and wonder - it might bring more things than you can manage or it might bring just a few choice morsels. Either way, if you can view all of it as an unexpected gift then each little thing will feel like magic. You got lucky. There are a few things that I do now that are in large part due to Weathering and the confidence it gave me just to be (and say) who I am. Many things just come and go, but a few I savour. They are enough. I try to remember that we live in a contingent universe, and that none of us are owed anything or are more or less deserving. Every thing it brings is a tiny miracle in a noisy world.

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Why do anything at all?

This is the sort of question my husband holds as his trump card for when I’m in a self-defeating spiral about the value of my work. An abbreviated version of this conversation goes something like this:

Me: why am I even doing this? *waving hands around at everything – clutter in my office, piles of books and so forth*

Him: Well, why do any of us do anything? Why do anything at all?

Me: Ok, I get it, we’re monkeys in jumpers. I know, I know. All pursuits are inherently pointless, which means they can all be equally meaningful. *head in my hands*

Him: *has already backed out of my office quietly*

I have no real comeback because he has a good point. Though I do sometimes resent his reductionism, I also value how straight-down-the-line he is. Undiscriminating in matters of what matters. We’re all just goofing around, trying to figure life out. He is also, I should say, the biggest cheerleader of my work whether it’s the easier-to-see-the-value stuff, or the more esoteric wanderings. After all, he drove all the way to Sicily with me last year because I had a series of ‘questions I wanted to live in’ (laughing at myself) for a month, and a volcanic project I wanted to explore. I felt drawn to go, but couldn’t give a business plan for why we should invest the time, money, energy. Still, at no point did he ask why are we doing this? Instead, he just seemed to trust. Not only my judgement I suppose, but also that whatever comes from an intuition like that is likely to deliver something interesting for everyone involved. He trusts me, he trusts Italy. That was enough. Is enough.

I have learnt a lot from this attitude over the years. It, he, has softened the edges of my self-doubt. I wasn’t exactly sure why we needed to go all the way down to Etna either, or to bundle us all onto a bouncy hydrofoil – Juno included – to spend time on Stromboli, but then why do we always have to have such a plan for our lives and our creative work? While some things benefit from a strategy, creativity thrives on potential and possibility.

About the project

My intuition for the project was equal parts ‘thinking with’ the volcanoes as we moved through the various magmatic provinces of western Italy – Tuscan, Roman, Neapolitan – and ‘material’. The thinking would be for my next book - this was a field trip, fieldwork. But I also wanted to create something tangible. To make an ephemeral, sited, something in a place that is meaningful to me (well, us both: my husband did his PhD on Mt Etna, I went there after my dad died suddenly in Italy. We have entangled links). I travelled with some bits and pieces, like a painter might take paper and paint, but I didn’t have more of an idea than that.

Instead, I gave myself constraints. I was under the spell of red last year. I wanted to approach the place slowly, as a sort of supplication. I knew that I wanted a time boundary around the project (equivalent to the therapeutic hour). That was all. I had to trust that the rest would emerge in the moment, with the conditions we had, in the weather the volcano offered us. And with covid as it turns out. I was quite ill by the time we got there, the addition of altitude creating unbearable pressure in my head with all the congestion. It wasn’t pretty, not the ideal scenario I might have wanted, but this is how it is in the field. You get what you get. It’s a huge part of the fun.

Eventually, Etna had a sizeable eruption in the middle of the night while we waited for the weather and my head to clear, and it felt like permission. The next day I got to spend my time on the old lava flows, tinkering with ideas, living in my question with Etna, as she rumbled loudly over me. Later, we took the boat to to Stomboli and I remade my installation there too. It was surreal, magnificent. The whole experience a lesson that far surpassed anything I might think or make. I was just there. Listening. Trusting. It was already worth it.

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When we came home after that month, I made a few notes and I put the project away. I focused mainly on the book thinking. And so, it has taken me a year, almost to the day, to understand what I was making on the volcano last spring, why I was making it, and what I would do in light of it. Even now it is only a first pass of understanding.

The project is called CONDUIT: Into Geological Intimacy, but I am also calling it an ongoing thought-action or a collage-essay of images and text, because like most enquiries, it’s not finished. And like most of my work is resists category. But it is sufficiently something that I wanted to pull it into a chapbook zine format to share with anyone interested in this project, or more likely this way of intuitive working with ‘emergent process’. Perhaps you will also find something in the questions that arose from the project. It is a distinctly midlife project, concerned with the second half of life, with the choices we make and how we make them. Nevertheless, its meanings are also meant to unfold in the longer term, I think. It’s an internal as much as external work-in-progress in that way. Because aren’t we all?

I like the idea that the process of making should speak to the process of living in some way. More and more, I become aware that my work in the time ahead is going to be slower made. Not so long ago I had ambition for lots of work. Now, I have ambition for thoughtful work. Time-full work. Work that pulls between the two great temporalities of my life - the long geologic, the short therapeutic. In this AI age, I want to make work that is human-slow and materially human. That requires human effort and quirk, roughness and incompletion. Imperfection. I am not a photographer, and took no special equipment. I like to move lightly without being encumbered by paraphernalia. Am I even an artist? I don’t know, but I am a writer. I know that writing rarely starts with what is written.

Ephemeral work interests me a lot – stuff that is here and gone, like we are in the blink of a geologic eye, or even a meaningful therapeutic encounter. Dance, brief encounters, performance and installation. Work where ‘leaving a trace’ is ambivalent – we don’t want to, we want to. We want to matter but not matter in a materially polluting way.

To return to the original provocation why do anything at all? I suspect the answer is simply because creativity matters for its own sake. It is an organizing principle of life – everything is creatively unfolding and evolving. The volcano, the atmosphere, the human. It’s freeing and enlivening to share odd work with odd kin, work that is still growing and maturing, and to do so without fear. We could do with trusting ourselves and each other more – and in the conduit that exists between us, in the pursuit of meaning, in its transmission.

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Conduit: Into Geological Intimacy is a 40-page full colour chapbook printed in limited edition and is a collage-essay made of image and text, exploring an intuition, a hyper-short term installation, and the process of meaning-making.

It is printed in the UK on recycled paper stock, and will be sent out in the last week of March/first week of April. Ordering now constitutes a really helpful pre-order of sorts, while I wait for the final batch to come back from the printer.

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A final note: I had been calling all of these short works zines but given the length of time it took me to put this together, and its longer length (40 pages instead of 28 as per the previous two) I decided to call them chapbooks instead, which feels more fitting. A zine is often spontaneous and quick to produce - this was not that! It made sense to rename all of them on my website to avoid confusion. There are still a few copies of my second chapbook an innate waveform available in the shop, and they make a nice set.

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For my birthday mum gave me a book about death. This is very us, I think and then tell her so. Somehow she knows my soul the best, which is not surprising but still surprises me. We don’t live in each other’s pockets, I generally forget to call for weeks on end, I’m far from the best child. But still she knows me, pre-empts my restless mind, manages to know before I do that I’m in need of medicine. She knows when something within me is reorienting and needs scaffolding. A book is a proxy. She’s my mum, but she was a nurse her whole life. She knows how to put a glass of water at the bedside.

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I study the questions the book prompts. I rarely do this. But when asked what are you pushing away? What nightmare are you trying to avoid? I feel, with some irony, compelled towards making my answer, my submission. I sit down to journal and emerge 5000 words later.

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In discussions around collapse there is talk about knowing where you have come from. Which is to say that the collapse of everything we thought we knew about how life would go, is profoundly disorientating. Keeping a sense of your head, your origins, is a way of staying steadfast and sane in the confusion. I realise I have lost sight of my beginnings. They have faded, or gone into the mist. What are my origin stories? How could they function in working out what kind of being I choose to be as our structures fail?

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Ritual is a powerful container for chaotic times. My advice: make your rituals, keep your head. Especially when it would be better for the powerful and political if you lose it.

This is a rune stone reading for the coming spring.

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I am thirteen and I am standing in Room 44 of the National Gallery, London. It is full to heaving, and I am sweating in my culottes and crop top. The many hundreds of people throbbing around the second floor rooms have brought summer inside, and the wooden floors seem to shine with the holiday heat. Maybe my eyes are blurring with the sting of loosened suntan lotion, but even the paint seems to be running off the large canvases that surround me, shimmering as they are in tantalising glimpses between the ever shifting mass of human bodies. I am lost in a heavenly, exotic trance. I’ve never been anywhere like this before. Not the building, nor the city. London has, until now, had no place in my small life in rural South Gloucestershire, but I’ve already decided I’m going to do Art GCSE, and so Mum and I have come on the train as a treat. We will visit some galleries, presumably do some other fancy stuff like go to a restaurant or a café, maybe visit the big branch of Tammy Girl, but already I have forgotten everything else and will never again remember anything of this trip but this moment.

Across the room, a space finally clears as the crowd is pulled back like a curtain, and on the wall from a distance, I see for the first time The Boulevard Montmartre at Night by Camille Pissarro – a night time scene of the wet streets of Paris, electric lights glowing, lit carriages lining the streets, black daubs of people shuffling past gold fluorescing shop windows. Everything is dripping orange and purple (my two favourite colours!) and I am mesmerised by this rainy window into another far-off city that drips with art and posh buildings. Drawing into the gap, I move closer to the painting, and as I do it blurs to nothing more than marks on the canvas. Up close I can see brushstrokes and dabs running from top to bottom and side to side, I can see dots of yellow and scrapes of teal. It is nothing remarkable up close. How can this be? Mystified, I step back from the painting and walk slowly backwards to the middle of the room. There it is again! Paris at night, in the rain! I cast around for Mum. She has to see this. Eventually I find her looking at Lake Keitele by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (one of the two postcards we will later buy in the gift shop and I still have today in a box of treasures) and centre her in front of my painting. Isn’t it amazing, I say. It’s nothing up close, but then you step back and it all makes sense. That’s ‘Impressionism’ she says, unsurprised but enthusiastic with me. Come and see this one, she insists, dragging me away bewildered towards the lake painting, the lasting impression of glittering streets and a bruised Parisian sky, imprinted onto the blank canvas of my newly-minted teenage mind.

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When times are hard (externally/internally - it doesn’t matter, they are the same) two things in my life become more difficult: writing and therapy. Which is an inherently stressful personal economy to be labouring under, because the times we live in are perpetually hard it seems, and I am a writer and therapist every day. Every day then, I am confronted with a question that I must answer, or at least, must ask: what is the most honest way to be today that honours both the complexity and horror of the world, and the possibility and potential in the human animal?

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I’m in Finland this week so I thought I would share a ‘writing craft’ post on how to maintain creative flow while you’re away. While some people will holiday as a break from work, writing is a way of life for me as well as part of my work, and so documenting my travel is both a huge pleasure, and important way of building an archive on which I can draw over time. While Weathering was a very place-based book written in (and with) my local area, my current and third book project draws on experiences and encounters from across Europe spanning the years from 2022 onwards. Having a system is essential.

Even when I don’t know how I will work with the material I have documented, I trust that at some point I will want to, so I have a process that means I capture everything I can in the moment as a supplement to memory, which brings its own prismatic view of things over time. I rarely make use of anything I have recorded from trips for at least a year – this just seems to be the lag or percolation time that works best for me – and so a combination of memory and notes taken at the time, works best.

I have been documenting my travel in Finland for seven years now, and just recently started working with some of it on a project that will run slowly into the more distant future. This week i’m topping up that archive of observation and experience.

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I don’t live a normal life. Structurally, speaking. It feels normal to me of course, and it looks pretty regular (I don’t live in a commune, in a van or off grid, for example – just a normal house), but by several other measures it’s a little different. The obvious differentiator, is that I have chosen not to have children. By the end of their ‘reproductive life’ around 18% of women will not have children, however this includes unvoluntary and voluntary figures and so we can assume that those choosing not to have children is a small minority. I am in a minority, though it doesn’t always feel like it because several of my closest friends don’t have children either (we tend to find each other) and we don’t spend any time whatsoever talking about not having children. Mostly, we talk about the rest of everything. We talk about other cares, other loves, other encounters and experiences. We don’t make apologies, or prepare our explanations, as if we need to justify the choice for the sake of the environment, for example. Just as people having kids are never asked to account for why. It is enough that it wasn’t for us for a whole raft of reasons.

In the place of children, I nurture a multi-species family, or perhaps it is better to say, community. My dog is not a surrogate child, she is a companion. She is resolutely dog, she is not dressed in a bonnet, and our relationship is one of equal dependency. She needs me, I need her. Outside, our garden is an extension of our family – nurturing it, and the wild-kin within it, is a huge priority for us. Just today we have been planting bare root shrubs like Juneberry and Common Buckthorn in a bid to encourage and shelter particular species that we would like to draw to our wildlife-oriented garden. It is a long-term commitment and project. The buckthorn is in anticipation of brimstone butterflies. The Juneberry will increase the density of cover around our bird feeders, and give food. The Redwings we had in our garden this winter have now stripped the holly entirely, and left. We’re going to need more provision.

I am in a hetero relationship, but I experience high levels of parity in work, caring and domestic labour. This is different. I have made it this way without guilt. I don’t very often cook, suffer whining about it, or applaud it. I do my share of chores and expect the same without fanfare because anything else suggests there is some divine order that we eschewed. There isn’t, it’s all constructed and I remind my husband of this regularly. I am glad that he understands feminism, and is willing to learn when I bring to his attention the ways that women are still expected to be grateful for equality as if it’s a gift not a right. He is remarkable, not for any of this, but for his general personhood. We like each other. Even that these days, feels rare.

I have largely opted out of productivity capitalism and did so in my 30s - as a political choice not because of private or accrued wealth or health. I just wanted a different life and choosing not to have children lowered the stakes for creating and maintaining that life. I live in a rural area in a house that is enough to manage and maintain but not large and replete with stuff, which means I can minimise what I don’t want to do, and maximise thinking, reading, being outside, nurturing life beyond the domestic. I prioritise a life of the mind and body, over childrearing and endless chores, determined to take advantage of this privilege of choice that many women still can’t make.

I choose not to squander this opportunity, but neither do I feel beholden to extraordinary achievement. Which is just as well. I am a decidedly average person, living an average life, facing average losses and average gains. The choice I made was for the agency to strive or not. I sit somewhere in the middle: I enjoy making the effort and work to such an end because I believe that pleasurable work is good for the soul and good for community and good for the earth, but I don’t imagine it will amount to either brilliance or nothing. I have been cultivating this attitude for years now through self employment and lately, my husband has also chosen to go self-employed. Finding mutual freedom, matters.

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COMING UP:

This coming weekend I will be giving a book took about Weathering, and interviewing Professor David Farrier about his new book Nature’s Genius at the Wild Writers Festival 2026 in Peebles, Scotland. It’s pay what you decide. Why not stop by and say Hi. I’ll be around the festival all weekend with Juno!

Earth Mind Geotour 2026

This May I will be returning to the NW Highlands UNESCO Geopark with my co-facilitator John, to deliver our Geotour in a new 3-day version. We have an exciting visit lined up to a particular little island that’s hard to get regular access to, so if this peaks your interest then why not check out the workshop and grab a place. Last year we had participants from all over the world! There are now 5 places remaining. I am delighted to be an official ambassador of the geopark now too so expect me to go on and on about this forever ;)

When I was little I used to put my Christmas presents in a neat pile and look at them together. Just as I loved the individual items, I also loved the sum of their parts. Christmas dinner was nothing more than an interference on my gazing longingly on the pile (even as the pile got smaller as I got bigger). As I got older I declared proudly that my biggest aspiration in life was to live in a bedsit, and when asked why I explained it was because everything was in one place where I could see it. The bedroom, the kitchen, the sofa, the belongings – all of it held in one gaze. This, for me, was an exemplary way to live.

As I got older, my desire for a bedsit waned but my love for backpacking, camping and long distance hikes grew. I loved the mountains and the landscapes I walked through of course, but by equal measure I loved travelling with my whole world on my back. I loved – and still love - knowing that everything I need to survive and thrive is within arm’s reach. In my camper too, is a little cupboard designated just for my stuff so that wherever I go, there are the bits I need to feel safe and happy. Not all of these things are useful in any conventional sense, but like a child’s blanky their comforting presence makes adventure possible.

For a brief time, I was an accidental landlady and hated it. I don’t like distributed assets. I like my stuff around me. Perhaps it is compensation for the many people who are not, in a literal sense, around me. Maybe it is also some physical counter-weighting against the abstract nature of life and death, and the many intangible things that occupy the life of the mind. It may also be that I have developmental challenges around Object Permanence, or a memory that requires an object to land on. I don’t know. What I do know is that while I don’t love clutter and waste, I am not a minimalist. I enjoy being surrounded by my toys and my books like Sarah in the Labyrinth. I see myself as a considered collector.

Hold that thought.

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JANUARY EVENT - Wild Writers Festival 2026, Peebles, Scotland 29th Jan - 1st Feb 2026

At the end of this month, I will be doing a book event for Weathering (30/01) in the Scottish borders, in discussion with author Kerri Andrews who you may know from her books Way Makers, Wanderers and her work on the writing of Nan Shepherd. I am honoured that she will be asking me questions, and that we’ll be doing lots of talking about walking, I should imagine! And then the evening after I will be switching seats and interviewing David Farrier on his new, Wainwright shortlisted, book Nature’s Genius. I’ve not interviewed anyone about their own book before, so this is a first for me (I’m excited and nervous!) but I have been on the receiving end lots of times now, so I am hoping to take some of that experience into speaking to David about the genius adaptability of nature. If you’re local to the Peebles/Borders area why not come along to one or other?

As I mentioned last week, today I’m sharing a flash fiction from my prose sketchbook. It’s working title is Persuasion and it’s 600 words. I don’t know how many of you read short fiction, or have any interest in reading work in drafting, but I think it’s nice to share more than just essay, opinion and cultural commentary.

I like to write very short (flash) fiction when I want to keep writing, but need a break from the Big Project. Or when I want to just loosen myself creatively. Or as a way of exploring an image, that has stayed with me. Perhaps I have seen something while out and about and it’s left a mark that simply journaling doesn’t get to the heart of. Flash fiction is a way of developing a moment (albeit with tight constraints) in the same way that poetry does. Or perhaps it’s just a way of bringing attention to an intensity of some sort: a feeling, or dynamic. I feel like I spend a lot of my life moving towards intensity in others and myself - I can’t imagine there being another way - and short forms of writing, seem to offer a great container for the potency of life.

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At the start of another year, I’ve been thinking about (creative) solitude. How important it is, and how much is ‘acceptable’ to take and cultivate?

Returning home after new year in the Cairngorms, I took the first week of January to write. I blocked out my calendar, set my out of office, and spent most of the days writing with my phone downstairs banished between the hours of 8 and 4. My best schedule is to start early, write till lunch time, go for a run/vigorous walk, and then write again in the afternoon. Generally, I write the more substantive creative stuff in the morning, saving afternoons for note-making, plans or research. This all flows more or less seamlessly if I work without interruption. To be creative, and to find a sense of flow I need a good holding structure, as contradictory as that may sound. I pride myself on my discipline, recognising it as a sort of payment for the ideas given to me. I like to keep regular hours.

This system is convenient for me, but less convenient for others. It is no doubt a pain when I can’t easily be contacted, when I don’t reply to emails immediately, and when people want my help or attention with something ‘time limited’. Mostly, everyone who matters is accommodating of my schedule, but I’m not unaware that it would be easier if I was more present, more available.

And yet, I’m of a generation where I remember work without a mobile phone and email. I remember doing shifts where I couldn’t be contacted. I remember the impenetrability of not just the workplace, but of my free time. How I used to go off on a Saturday with just 10 pence in my pocket in case I needed to use a phone box to call home. How I went off and travelled the length of South America with no contact save for a weekly call home to my poor, worrying mother. I remember a whole life that wasn’t gazed upon by others, and I still pine for it. It is unthinkable to me adults today, allow themselves to be surveilled (and watch their kids as intensely as they do) with apps that track their every move. What does this do to the roaming human psyche that longs to find itself in the world? How does this de-skill each of us in the art of solitude and privacy, and their benefits? What does this sort of technically-enabled monitoring mean for embodied liberty? These are all asides, but linked through the quiet dwelling place and practice of solitude, creative or otherwise.

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1. The first sounds of 2026

On New Year’s day, I woke in the dark to the soft thud of snow on the van roof, and a tawny owl calling from the trees. Once it was light I went to the loch and listened to the clink and chime of surface ice breaking into shards and moving as one raft in the wind. For a short while, I heard with absolute clarity the life I should be living. I don’t really know what this means, I only know that it’s true.

2. First read of 2026

While it was still dark on new year’s morning, I lay in bed and devoured The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, a dystopian novel set in 60s alpine Austria featuring a sparse cast of one woman, a dog, a cow and the eponymous wall, which appears overnight and cuts the protagonist and her animal companions off from everyone in the outside world beyond the valley. The book had been sat on my kindle for half a year, but the strange micro-season of the Betwixt felt just the right time to get into it. The Wall is utterly engrossing for a story where so much of what happens is repetitious. It is disquieting, ominous but also thoroughly pastoral. Is it sci-fi, is it allegorical, is the wall literal or metaphorical? None of it really matters. Neither does the wholly unresolved end. I love how this little book provoked a wide-open ponderance in me that spilled like milk into my 2026. Am I hoping for a wall? Do I live with a wall that only I can see? Do we all have a different sort of wall?

3. My first animal guide/s for 2026

It’s all about birds for me this January. On the eve of new year, we spotted a snow bunting hopping between the ice-rimed granite boulders on the summit of Cairngorm. I hadn’t seen one for a few years so he was a treat to behold. Then when we got home our holly tree which has been having a mast year of berries was (and still is) full of redwings who are stripping it bare from top to bottom. There’s something wildly satisfying about being a steward of a small garden that gives such good provision for our wild kin in winter. Soon the birds will fly on. Perhaps we will see them again next year, but likely not. They are not loyal.

Then yesterday I picked up a book in Oxfam titled The Psychology of Birds. It was the book’s striking cover illustration of two back-to-back woodpeckers that caught my eye. That’s very different I kept saying to myself. Very compelling. But it wasn’t until this morning that I realised why it had such a curious resonance. The woodpeckers, I realised, reflected a sort of Janus character. A Janus woodpecker! The god of two faces, the god of January. One face looking back, the other looking forward.

4. What I’m resisting

Like many people I’m sure, I am not ready to leap into a fully planned and pre-empted 2026. I am still very much at the threshold looking both ways. Down from the mountain and the frozen lochs, January already feels like a torrent. So much is already happening, so much striving is being reported on, so much tragedy too. So much is being burned down, and so much being built. So many new offerings, notices, persuasions. I’m standing on the banks perplexed and overwhelmed. Shouldn’t it still be a little quieter than this? Shouldn’t we be allowed our torpor for a while longer yet? It feels impossible to know how to be in these early rushing waters. Do I have anything to shout about? I go to step into the water, but pull back. I don’t know how to get in. And if I do, I don’t know how to stay there and navigate the rapids. Come to think about it, I don’t want to be in the rapids at all. I have nothing to shout about, I am just here watching the birds, looking back and forth at what is flying by and through. And so I don’t get in, and won’t. I want to sit on the edge for a bit, you know?

5. What I’m looking forward to over the rest of winter

Next month, I’ll be 44 and we’ll be back in Finland exploring a new area on skis for the 7^th year (I can hardly believe this) and I’m already getting excited about who we might see out on the fells. I knew the first time we went that I would one day write about this part of the world at some length, and I keep faithful notes and a diary in anticipation. But this is the first year I have felt something stir. Is something becoming ready? At my desk now then, I am reading and writing about birds of the boreal forest – including the great grey owl, whooper swan, and (my favourite) the Siberian jay. Research is my favourite stage of writing. Winter is not the easiest season, but as a writer I look forward to it. When the days start lengthening, it will be harder to sit indoors and play with words, so I am making the most of these quiet days in the slow season while I can.

6. One creative wish for the year

A couple of years ago my commitment was to nurture more art in my life. That felt right. It gave me a way to prioritise my decisions, even if the outcome was more about an internal shift and way of approaching my work, than output. Now my wish is that I can be brave in following the right direction. At the end of last year I asked for an extension on my book deadline. Things weren’t going quite right, it wasn’t taking the form I wanted it to, it wasn’t coming to life. All of this despite 10 months of effort and travel. Now I have to work out where to take it that feels like true north again. And how to balance such a hungry, all-consuming project with other ideas I want to develop. Living creatively isn’t easy – in fact, it’s full of turmoil – but this year more than ever I feel absolutely committed to my writing despite the set-backs. From the cutting room floor of 2025, I have learnt not to be scared of letting things go. You never know what might be waiting in the wings, readying itself for a chance to live.

7. My best advice for the time being

Taken from The Psychology of Birds (1967) by Harold Burtt on the interpretation of bird behaviour, an erasure poem titled ‘Social Behaviour’:

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