Welcome to our collaboration feature here at Wild Quiet Folk!

Substack is an endless source of inspiration, a cacophony of unique voices that can lead a reader through the weird, wonderful and wild.

Here, I have collaborated with other creatives to bring you their meditations on place, story and wilderness - the heart of Wild Quiet Folk. This series is in an interview format, but offering creative prompts rather than questions - the freedom is with the contributor, to respond in whichever way they see fit, be that words, photos, drawings, anything that enlarges rather than restricts.

Our contributor this month is Janelle Hardacre, who writes beautifully about nature and learning to live a life that’s right for you.

Thank you for being here, and I very much hope you enjoy the below:

The last walk you went on

I’ll admit that my love and I can be fair weather walkers. But I encouraged us to don the right clothing and head to our nearest country park. A wonderful woodland fell that can be seen from miles around.

As soon as we stepped into the treescape, we had no regrets. We breathed in lungfuls of lush, earthy air as our boots sunk into the soft humus.

We slowed, like rain drops catching on bark.

We gave ourselves permission to meander with no purpose. Stories and memories made themselves known.

Mid-spring, everything around us was coming to life.

A celebration of season

Folks open up their gardens saying “welcome, welcome.” So, we can revel in the joyful blooms they have tended to.

The things in your pockets

I have been wanting to make a zine for ages and finally, thanks to Bonnie’s invitations, I have! Hopefully the first of many. Big thanks to @Zabby Allen https://substack.com/@naturenoticeboard for her tutorial

A place that feels wild to you

I so love to feel my boots clomping along this lane. With every step up the hill, more terrain and vast sky come into view. The panorama is too big to take in all at once. Fears and challenges shrink.

I am awed like a child when I notice something I haven’t before. New pine branches. They are so lush and bright! Each tree is adorned with a vivid green layer of new. I can’t help but reach out to gently touch and they are soft like baby’s skin.

Through the gate now and into the woods, my feet make satisfying sounds on crunching gravel and snapping twigs.

I am thrilled for a magic moment by a flash and a flutter of blood orange plumage in the bush ahead. A bullfinch. Before I have a chance to study him, he flaps away. On tiptoes I wait in case he returns. Not today.

Everywhere I look evokes the word NEW. This place is bursting with life and buds and every shade of green. Yolk-orange Iceland poppies bloom next to the footpath and thistles are on the very cusp of flowering.

I am thrilled to hear the most iconic bird-call of them all.

Cuckoo…cuckoo

Not near enough to catch sight of, but a joy to hear all the same.

Before I walk back the way I came, to the world of pings and screens, I head into the trees. I duck under branches and watch my footing around the piles of pinecones. I am compelled to stop. To look up. This new perspective gives me pause. Wow. The canopy, so high above, envelops me. I see the miracles of magnitude and of the trees knowing not to invade each other’s space.

A few more breaths. And then it’s time.

A moment of care

(An off the cuff acrostic poem from my journal)

Care for the self is not selfish

Allow your own cup to be refilled, by even a few drops

Role model the compassionate world you wish to live in

Embrace yourself, release that grip, wilt. And that moment of care will ripple outwards to those around you

A place that holds history, yours or others

The other day, my Mum handed me a photo of a treasured place I travel to regularly in my mind, but will never physically visit again. My Grandad’s garden at number. 13.

I can’t think of a time spent in this place when I wasn’t content, light on my feet and aware that I was somewhere special. A place imbued with my Grandad’s love, tenderness and sense of fun.

A garden of ‘secret’ pathways, colours, hiding places and space to stretch and sprint until I’d run out of breath.

There is another family there now. And I hope the stories they are making there are just as joyful as ours. It is special to think that some of my Grandad’s handiwork is still in the earth.

Share

A story you found in the land

When I’m walking, I hear whispers of my own story. I am not being ‘productive’, to achieve or to fix myself.

These walks are tender and meandering. I have glimpses of being truly present. I forget time because I’m in it instead of missing it rush by, out of my control.

I shed things as I go. Old skin and old stories that I no longer need to carry around.

Sometimes I imagine little Janelle is walking with me, just to my left.

If I listen closely, my steps on the Earth make music. The wind through the leaves sounds like an applause.

My walks aren’t blissful. But they often contain glimmers and moments of bliss.

And it’s amazing how those can see me through and charge me up. Despite how fleeting they can be.

The last thing(s) you read and loved

No apologies that I’ve made this plural. I can’t pick just one!)

Reads I’ve loved/ am loving recently…

- For words that speak to my soul and illuminate my own wisdom. The How by Yrsa Daley-Ward

⁂ the utter

Honest writing and talks about attention, the body, what we repeat and why, and the great work of meeting yourself. I’ve lived a lot of life — some hard, some strange, all mine. I write about what that does to us.

By Yrsa Daley-Ward

- For invitations into magic and everyday wonder – Hermit Season, Poems and Visions by Alix Klingenberg

Earth and Verse

Get out of your head and onto the page! Writing circles and creative prompts for poets, artists, and writers who are ready to take their practice to the next level.

By Alix Klingenberg

- For enthralling and highly original fiction – Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

With Love, Grief and Fury

My new personal Substack - sharing poetry and memoir, notes and news, my latest books, my work in progress, and the 4am Writing Club

By Salena Godden

- For creative permission slips and validation – Divergent Creatives by Allegra Chapmanhttps://substack.com/@allegrachapman

- For stunning and heartbreaking memoir writing exploring baby-loss, grief and nature – Underwing by Jennifer Lane

The Green Witch

Witchcraft, healing plants, seasonal living and working with the cycles of nature 🌿

By Jennifer Lane

- For finding wildness in the city – The New Eden by JC Niala

JC Niala

Ways of Noticing is a space for slow attention—across fields, footpaths, museums, and rehearsal rooms. I write about nature an culture through the lens of observation, curiosity, and care.

A small thing you learnt recently

A wild sound now missing from my local area in rural Lancashire is the croak of the corn crake. At one point this would have been prolific, part of the soundscape of the land.

Janelle Hardacre is a sensitive, creative soul who lives in rural Lancashire, having moved there from Manchester in 2022. The move from city to countryside had a profound impact on her, particularly in igniting her curiosity and passion for noticing nature. Janelle is leaning into the era of having many strings to her bow. Embracing creativity, practising joy, curiosity and play.

She is a writer, workshop guide, singer, seeker, patron and cheerleader of your creativity and much more besides. You can read her personal essays at

because she has to

Hello. Janelle here. I write because I have to (hence the title) usually about creative blocks, writing, self-doubt, seeking beauty and joy. I'm still not ready but doing it anyway. I've miraculously managed to write here consistently since April 2023

By Janelle Hardacre

and she also runs Nature Writing Club on Substack

Nature Writing Club 🌿

A community for people who are called to write and deepen their nature connection. A new inspirational nature prompt pack every fortnight.

By Janelle Hardacre

If you can support this work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Or, if you liked this, why not sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi? It’s hard to earn a creative living and every little helps!

It is the light that holds me, still on the raised path in the woods. Beside me, a long ditch, once a boundary marker between counties, now a leaf filled, half forgotten dip beneath the trees. Overhead, the wind rustles the leaves, sways the branches. Every leaf dances. And the light - the light itself is changing. As the clouds scud by it falls dull, then the cotton wool thins and it is bright again, dazzling. The light moves and the branches move and the leaves along the branches move, and down here, at the foot of these tall old trees, at the top of the ditch, I stand and watch as light plays out over the twisted roots sticking up through the hard-baked earth.

The past few weeks have been sun and rain, cloud and drizzle, impossible heat and torrential downpours. Everything, all at once. Everything, all the time. It confuses us, this changeability, but isn’t this just the natural order of things? Why are we, as humans, so set on something being just as it is, fixable, predictable, certain? The only thing we can rely on is change.

I keep walking through the woods. I can hear only forest sounds - the wind as a great tree-top rush, the crackling of dried leaves, the sound of my footsteps on the dried out mud. I meet the occasional dog and walker. I find the ribs and spine of a fox, tail still attached and firey. I stand, transfixed for a time, by the knobbles of spine, by the push pull of disgust and delight, fear and fascination. This is a dead thing, but it also a thing that once lived. Look, how perfectly the bones fit together. Look, that delicate curve that once caged a beating heart. Look, still, the glow of that fur, discarded, left behind. Where is the line between beauty and nastiness? Death is all around us, and all of us are dying, yet we do not like to look at it. Too confronting.

Share

Further on, another fox. Alive. Alive this time, running across my path, under the fence at the back of someone’s garden, across the path and into the undergrowth. One quick glance thrown my way - the white puff of fur on its chest, the nose tilted for scent, the bright eyes, the red fire. Always the red fire. One of you, I think after it has gone, one of you back there is ended. And here you are, squeezing through the smallest spaces, bristling with life.

Traditionally the fox has been thought of as the trickster. Cunning, clever. Wily. Hard to pin down, impossible to trust. Always shifty, always shifting. There is something of the otherworld about this one, a knowing. The dark glint of a briefly glimpsed eye. If I were to turn back, to look for the bones that tell, not only of death but of life lived, would those bones still be there? Not in a story, they would not. In a story I would return, retrace my footsteps, needing something from the bones. Looking for something, for some answer or reward, and the bones - they would be gone. Carried away? Or come back to life? Perhaps come back as the fox I just saw, curious, tricksy, so alive. The light would be shifting, those dancing leaves, those dancing trees, that dancing breeze, would play shadow and light over the bare earth where the bones once lay.

So I won’t go back, won’t look for the answers. It is better to keep the belief, sometimes, in the shape of stories. Instead, I will turn for home, thinking about light and about stories, and I will hope that, even while death is no ending, somehow those bones are gone. Somehow those bones got up on their own and wandered off to a find a whole new kind of life.

If you can support my work with a subscription, paid or not, it would mean the world. Or, if you liked this, why not sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi? It’s hard to earn a creative living and every little helps! And in other news, see below for a video of the magical shifting light below the trees…

Every time I go to the cinema, I am shocked. The film ends and then, right at the start of the credits, the lights come on and SO many people get up! It doesn’t matter what the film is, it doesn’t matter what’s just happened. So many people are up, on their feet, that’s that then, onto the next. Don’t you need a moment to digest? I want to shout. Don’t you want even a second to process this piece of art, the characters, the way their story ended, to think about where their lives go now, to think about the slice of life we just witnessed and why it was that slice served to us and what that slice was saying? When did we stop appreciating the pause?

Share

I listen to a lot of audio books when I’m driving. Same thing, the audiobook ends, instantly they are thanking you for listening, reading credits - fine, I understand this. I’d rather be left to let the last line echo, but I can appreciate a credit sequence, can feel grateful for the work of all those acknowledged. But then - then another random audio book, unselected by me, starts playing a sample. STOP! I am still in the thrall of the world I just left! I am digesting the last line. I am, after the journey this writer had taken me on, letting it all sink in, feeling the shape of the story, considering how satisfied I am with the ending. Sometimes I may be crying. I am not in a place for a brand new beginning, one I haven’t chosen or asked for and know nothing about. If I don’t stop it, it will play sample after sample, beginning after beginning. All I want is peace.

I am in a pause place myself, creatively. It’s the opposite of instinctual, but I’m beginning to see it’s not only okay, it’s necessary. I have just sent a long worked on novel out into the void that is agent submissions. I sat down, after sending, to look at the short story collection I’m working on with Catherine Lovett. I read everything and decided I’m a terrible writer and should never write again and realised I need it - the pause.

We think if we’re not creating as creatives then we are wasting our time. But maybe we just need the pause? I think of the bit in Kiki’s Delivery Service where she loses the ability to fly. She goes to the woods with the artist, who says sometimes she can’t draw, so she doesn’t, she does other things and it all comes back.

So. I bake. I pick cherries from the tree in the garden and soak them to remove the worms. I work through my pile of alterations, I package up paintings, I read, I go for walks. On one of my walks, I see a badger. 5.30 in the evening, fully light, a badger. A BADGER. Unconcerned by my presence, he snuffles through the leaves mere metres from the path. The path not far from the dual carriageway, not far from the suburban streets. I could so easily have missed him, if I had left five minutes later, if I had gone for a longer walk, if I had driven to the sea. As it is, I stand, mouth open, silent, as he nudges through the leaves. His fur almost bristly at the edges. His loping, happy seeming gait. His focus on the floor, the leaves nosed aside. His stark black and white striped face, glinting eyes. He is beautiful. One of the best things I’ve ever seen.

Without the pause, I could have missed him. Perhaps the pause is itself the reward for hard work, for engagement and focus, for falling into a story. It is only in the stepping back that we see the value.

So I end the week, not with an agent, not with a publishing deal. Not with a new novel begun or a short story polished or a pile of new paintings, but with something else equally valuable: a badger, white striped head lifted for a moment from the leaves, staring right at me, almost unseeing, grey backed, thick furred - right there, in front of me, the unbelievable.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Or, if you enjoyed this piece, how about sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi? Also, there’s a video of the badger disappearing through the trees below…

I have spent too long indoors, curled over a laptop. When working for yourself, in your own creative business of making art and sharing it with the world, when you are trying to make this a viable life and you are not getting paid for it, not enough, not yet, how do you drag yourself away?

I meant to read my own post, on what I need within a day, to build my days intentionally from these blocks that are the cornerstones of what makes me happy. And yet.

I have an attic full of paintings. I decided, this year, not to hold back any more. I was invited to write an article for someone else, and I decided this was a good time to put the work out there. I thought the hard part would be the decision. I thought the hard bit was feeling wobbly while I sorted through blue pigmented paper, coming up with names, photographing them and arguing with the light, wobbling on the top step of the stairs, which seemed to be the only place the light stayed consistent from moment to moment. But I was wrong. The hard bit was putting them online. I am not a web designer. I have no desire to be a web designer. A couple of days into the process, I looked up what a web designer would cost. And to refer back to the not getting paid part, I realised that was not an option for me. And so I spent the best part of a week struggling to build an online shop in Wordpress) which is not designed for online shops…)

But what I realised was how easily I was consumed by it. I missed every opportunity to swim that week. I was late for family gatherings. I didn’t get outside enough. My back hurt from curling forward over the laptop, and I was so frustrated it’s a miracle I didn’t throw the laptop through the window. But I did it. And then, I knew, I needed to get away.

Share

It is all too easy to let that work - not the creative, fun part, but the bits around, the admin and the tech and the dull dull dull bits - take over your time. I needed not to be by a screen. And so I went with my partner when he went away for work. I drove, out of Manchester, into the hills. I walked round a reservoir, where I had no phone signal. I followed the well-made path up, beside a falling stream, gushing over rocks, until the path was no longer well-made and I was clambering over boulders. I went up the ‘path’ at the side of a waterfall. The sun disappeared. I almost turned back when I wasn’t sure I could cross the downward flowing water. I stopped, to rest and decide, and I spotted another route. I made it across, and just a few boulders up, I came across the most perfect pool.

White water crashed down at the back of it. At the front, a ledge of rock held it safe, black water contained. There was a small grassy changing ledge. I got into my costume and slipped into the black.

It was clear, the water, not black after all. I could see my toes when I floated my legs in front of me. It was the colour of Guiness, my skin tinted brown. The rocks towered over me. The water crashed down. My hands tingled, my breath stuttered, and I dipped my face, too, to let the cold claim all of me.

I was not, in this moment, creating anything. I was not furthering my own creative ‘business’. I was not making or doing. But those moments are as necessary as any of the rest of it. Without those moments, I do not want the rest of it.

I changed and walked back, fast, shivering, happy. The next day I went to three different art galleries and a free jazz festival - again, not creating, but feeding myself nonetheless.

It is all too easy to be consumed by what we have done in a day. I am wondering if, instead, we need to shift that to ask; how did the day make us feel?

Make all my painful work worthwhile and buy a painting? Or go enjoy a browse of lots of lovely blue things.

OR, you can support my work with a subscription or a small tip on Ko-Fi, it would mean the world.

Welcome to our collaboration feature here at Wild Quiet Folk!

Substack is an endless source of inspiration, a cacophony of unique voices that can lead a reader through the weird, wonderful and wild.

Here, I have collaborated with other creatives to bring you their meditations on place, story and wilderness - the heart of Wild Quiet Folk. This series is in an interview format, but offering creative prompts rather than questions - the freedom is with the contributor, to respond in whichever way they see fit, be that words, photos, drawings, anything that enlarges rather than restricts.

Our contributor this month is Clare Mulvany, who writes the enchanting Substack The Wild Edge.

Thank you for being here, and I very much hope you enjoy the below:

The last walk you went on

I’m just in the door. April in West Cork has been a hatch of hail and sunburst. Rainbows or mist straddle the divides. The path from my home took the Sunday morning route, through the village to the local farmers market where neighbours share tales of winter, the long stretch; how fortunate we are to be here, with the saunas, the sea and so much sky, irrespective of the weather. It is one of the things I appreciate about the people here, the collective sense of gratitude to place.

I followed the path along the shore, a daily dog walking route. Milly, my dog, ran ahead, and today as the light re-emerged after days of storm, I was noticing how much further the buds have pushed, and how insistent the blossom is on becoming bloom. There is an ample of wild garlic this year, reaching out of cracks and boulders; a fringe of white, then topped with an abundance of bright yellow gorse bloom, lifting the air with a waft of coconut scent; an exotic twist to the winding path. Later I am led three steps over a low wall, across a stream, plump with storm and mountain, then falling into the thrumming beat of the Atlantic, the soundtrack of my days.

We have a special word in the Irish language for the way light shimmers on the sea, with a tint of magic: Loinnir. Today it was celebratory. After the winter we had here, every glint is an applause. We made it through, as seasons do. As I turn, I glance back over my shoulder. It is as if the sea is winking back.

A celebration of season

The season is rhythm and ritual. I align myself to the Celtic ones, which come from an ancient calendar where cyclical wisdom centres the spin. Right now we are mid-way through the arc from Spring Equinox to Bealtaine (at the beginning of May,) a time of emergence from the underworld of winter, through bud to blossoming.

While we have the physical shifts in the land, each season offers its attendant invitations, working on us in a metaphoric and mythic way. I am interested in the language and symbolism the season gifts, and honouring each transition through. The Celtic Calendar is marked by eight such transitions, beginning in the darkness of Samhain, which takes us through the cycle of the dark to light, and then the return. To celebrate each marker, I take time to pause, reflect, write and set intention for the next phase. I also host special seasonal salons with poetry and pause as their beat. In a world of such flux and rapid change, the rhythm of the Celtic seasons feels almost incantatory, a steadying force of praise.

The things in your pockets

Stones as trinkets. Seeds. Poo bags for the dog. A pen. Keys. My phone. Bits of shells. Feathers. Acorns. Sand. Twig. Other random bits twine. Clearly tidying is not a priority!

A place that feels wild to you

Originally from Dublin, I moved to the West Coast of Ireland because the wild in me needed to find the wild outside of me. Here, with the continent of Europe pressing its edge on one side and the vast expanse of the Atlantic the other, I’ve found a ferocious ridge of encounter, the inner and the outer in a conversation with the edge, always changing, evolving, churning, settling, becoming. This has been the greatest teacher a heart could hope for. The longer I am here, ten years now, I find the chasm in my heart to hold all the beauty of this world, with its pain and grief, just keeps opening. What’s left is space for the ultimate bind between- that of love. The West has become a love story for me, of land, language, place, life and wild longing. I am eternally grateful.

A moment of care

The tiny things can shift an hour, a day. I swam in the sea earlier, a tending act of care to my bones, but it was a particularly cold day. So I sit now with a hot water bottle, and some tea, savouring the contrast from cold to warm, and how the body can find a home in both.

Share

A story you found in the land

I think of the land as a storied place. The hills which overlook the village in which I live are thick with myth and lore; tales of forsaken lovers falling to the sea, of a bottomless lake, of stones which are portal to other worlds. And beyond, tales of a Goddess wave, Clionadh’s Wave, which can entice men to their death. Every rock, every path, every tree, every creature is alive in the shape of story. I think part of my job as a writer is to learn how to listen.

The last thing you read and loved

For Christmas, I bought several copies of Robert Macfarlane and Luke Adam Hawker’s ‘Firefly’ and gifted it to friends. The illustrations are extraordinary, and Robert Macfarlane’s text is luminous, as ever. The last two lines have become somewhat of a mantra for me, and I picked the book up again last night as a reminder: Merge light within, and light without. Become vast, radiant, incandescent.

A small thing you learnt recently

I learned that the Irish word for Willow Warbler is Ceolaire sailí . I heard a warbler just the other day, and am trying to learn the Irish words for the creatures around me. It’s added another dimension to the story.

Clare Mulvany is a writer, educator and facilitator living in West Cork, Ireland. She runs ‘The Wild Edge’, on Substack, where she shares weekly audio essays, hosts regular poetry salons and writing sanctuaries, alongside sharing seasonal resources. Alongside this, she is a freelance lecturer in University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin in creative practice, and is a creative mentor to writers and creative business.

Instagram/ @onewildlife

Website: claremulvany.ie and thriveschool.ie

A reminder that Wild Lines writing group with me and will be on this Saturday, 23 May, not on the second Saturday of the month as usual. We will meet by the Nelson Mandela statue outside the Southbank centre just before 10, for two hours of writing in community. Join us - we’d love to have you!

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.

This week I want to write about something a little different - not a wild walk, but a city one. Not big bare skies and birds and waves, but murals and carvings, churches and markets, and a gallery filled with ideas and courage.

I walked through borough market, looking at all the expensive brownies and giant cookies, photographing sourdough for flavour inspirations for my own, still early, learning journey. I stopped by the garden in the ruins of the old town hall, admired the spiral staircase that winds down to the greenery, the work to bring a patch of green, a patch of wilderness, to these city streets. Passing through an underpass where I have walked many times, I noticed carved panels all along the wall, telling of the huge frost fairs that used to happen in london when the Thames froze.

There were carved images of people skating, setting up stalls, dancing. There were verses carved in undulating lines, a reminder that what was once water would be water again. I had never noticed these panels before, but they felt, this time, like the start of a story - a sparking in my brain that tells me I am beginning to find inspiration around me again. I have been buried in edits of one story for so long that all else has been shut off, but now my senses are beginning to turn outwards again.

I passed, too, a narrow White House by the river, that stands beside the narrowest street in London. This house was where Catherine of Aragon first came ashore and spent the night before hoping Henry VIII. It was also, according to the plaque, where Christopher Wren lived while he oversaw the building of St Paul’s Cathedral. But then u find another sign, that describes the plaque as fake, as telling the ‘myth’ that Wren lived here, in order to save the house from demolition. What is the truth? There is so much history around us, so much that goes unlabelled, that we walk past, forgetting all who have walked before because, simply, it is too much for us to truly comprehend. Who lived here before us? And before them, and them, and them? What echoes do our streets, our homes, hold? I have been writing about old houses and the pasts that haunt them, and even now, as I look up from my absorption, the truth of those layered pasts nudges me, forward into new ideas.

I continued on to the Tate Modern, where I caught one of the last days of ‘Nigerian Modernism.’ What struck me was the room dedicated to the work of Ben Ogunwu. Sculptures, traditional and modern. Busts of heads from ebony, statues, posed portraits, street scenes filled with movement, careful considered colours, layered so the brush work is invisible, beside wild free motion and exuberant mark making. So much variety from just one artist. So much work from just one artist.

Why do we think we need to decide, to pick only one thing and stick to it? Why do we think that because we write, that must be all we give ourselves too? Why can’t we all paint and tell stories, sew and make pots, garden and create murals and arrange fliers and bake fancy cakes? We do not have to be only one thing? We do not have to be good at all the things, but we should not wait until we ARE good to begin. Let’s follow the joy of making things, of noticing the stories around us and responding to them in any medium, making work not only to be good - because of course, to perfect a craft is it’s own wonderful reward - but to revel in the joy of simply making.

Share

I have been making art work for many years, work that I dismiss because it’s not a literal representation of the world, that I dismiss as too simple, too unskilled. But I am starting to share that abstract work. It is concerned with the ocean, with movement and layering, with the impressions something as powerful yet transient as water leaves after it has gone. That work will soon be up, on my website, available for purchase. I wanted to have it done for this post, but it has been a beast to wrestle with and I’m not there yet - but I will persist! Because I don’t want to only do one thing. And, mostly, I don’t want to say I never tried.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

On the way back from the mechanic, I found an empty stretch of heathland only five minutes from home. It was early still and the birds were singing loud and the sun was already promising to be hot. I followed the shingle path, away from the road where commuters whizzed by, out into the close cropped green. Immediately, beneath the boughs of a bent black tree: bluebells. Bluebells striped with the light falling in shafts from above. Glowing, there in the semi dark.

Further on, a land of gorse, yellow buds breaking out, path winding narrow between, like the walks I have done time and again in the New Forest, flat land stretching for miles, and always those spike surrounded flowers, the smell of sweet coconut. Like, too, the walks I have done in Cornwall, where the gorse clings beside the cliffs, yellow petals bright against the blue of stretching sea.

I am reminded that, however new, no walk is exactly fresh to me. Each walk is layered with every walk that has come before, with all the other times we’ve seen that plant, smelt that smell, felt the pumping of blood, the beating in our chest that tells of an uphill climb. So, too, of all the people who have walked with us before. My mum, back when she could walk, my Dad and sister, following the path to the lighthouse, my partner, climbing cliffs and following tide lines and watching birds flutter up from the fields, my friends, attention drawn by the same wild beauty, on the way to swims in the sea, in rivers, in waterfalls. Every outdoor adventure, however small, carries within it the trace of those who have gone before.

The same, too, with faces. I have just been on an amazing adventure in Japan, and I was struck, there, with the way we all take selfies now. Multiple selfies, changing our faces, our smiles, tipping our heads, removing sunglasses and putting them back, as if this face, this one we choose from dozens, this one we vet for attractiveness, suitability, is really us. Imagine, back before we did this. Before we were so aware of our own expressions. Before we vetted ourselves like this, chose which us was acceptable. Imagine back, way back, far before phone screens, before digital cameras, before mirrors were everywhere. What would it be to live without knowing what we looked like?

Share

Our faces today store all the faces of yesterday. Marks and lines and memories of all the things we’ve felt, the shapes we’ve been, the years, yes, but also all the people we’ve been. Nothing is only one thing, static. All of it is layers.

This is how I write. I lay down the first layer, a blurry, messy, chaos. The outline, maybe, the atmosphere. The first layer is so far from how it will be when finished. And then the next layer, shaping, taking away, fine tuning. On and on, layer after layer, details growing clearer, dark places becoming thick and velvety, light striking through with the clarity of relief. This is how I write - endless drafts until the final, multi layered thing is revealed. I did not realise this was what I was doing until I did a charcoal course with incredible artist Kate Boucher. This layered approach, adding, shading, erasing, is how she creates her moving, atmospheric art works. Whenever I see shadows of light filtered through trees, tunnels of branches, marram grass and clouds on wide open beaches, I think of Kate.

But now, I walk through the heath, turning off the main path to follow the clutches of bluebells, drinking in the dark green light of the wood. I squeeze between the spikes of gorse, as I have done so many times, with all my past me’s with me, and I add another layer to the strata that makes up each moment.

Subscribe

I have been away from here for a while and it is hard to know what to say, how to start again. I have been travelling, in Japan, chasing cherry blossom, marvelling at confetti lined riverbanks, outdoor markets, parks full of people out, simply, to enjoy spring as it drifts white and pink around them on the breeze. I thought that when I returned, the blossom here would be done. While getting ready to go, I thought, Oh no - I will miss the blossoming of our own cherry tree in the back corner of our garden, even though I knew that I couldn’t simultaneously visit another continent for its flaring spring and witness my own at the same time.

But the cherry blossom is still there, just a little. The leaves are pushing it aside, reminding me of this, one of my favourite poems, by Ada Limon. That first flush of spring has gone - but the bluebells, oh, the bluebells are everywhere. I go to the woods and meet a black cat on the winding path through banks of blue, their flowers still thin, not quite fully fleshed yet. I find striped ones in a flower bed outside my family home. And when I go to the lido, the scent of lilacs is enough to stop me still, to make me turn and breathe in in in, never wanting to let go of the smell. There are still tulips in the supermarkets, though daffodils have gone. The sky is changing colour. And all around, there is green.

This is the time when newness offers a shot of hope. When the light and the warm makes everything feel a little more possible. But it is the edge that is so delicious, the teetering on the cliff, looking down at a long lazy free fall into summer - but not being there, not yet. There is still so much year ahead of us.

Share

I sit in the garden to write, then have to have a warm shower to push the chill from my edges. I wear thin summer dresses and chunky cashmere socks. I open the blinds and see all the dirt on the windows, choose not to clean but to read instead.

My garden, my cherry tree, turned green without me. Our neighbours asked us, the other day, to trim it back, to pull the ivy from the roof of their shed, the wall of which marks one boundary of our garden. The roof of the shed cannot take the weight (sorry!) of the fat green branches, the ivy vines surging out. It is a wilderness out there and it makes me feel so tiny, so inconsequential in the face of it, of all that raging life. I am just one tiny human.

It is spring, hurtling into summer. When I left my pottery class last week, it was dark, but the sky was a deep blue, not all-engulfing black. I have nearly finished the redraft of my novel. My good friend Catherine Lovett and I are contacting printers about a project that’s been a long time coming. And I am making blue pots, always blue because I can’t not, and I sold my first painting, and I can’t stop reading, and when my car is fixed I will go to the sea and the water will be waiting, but for now it is enough to hold all these things close to me - the deep breath scent of the lilacs, the sticky new leaves, the painting winging its way to a new home, the words almost finalised on a page. It is enough to hold them close and feel, in the air, the fresh bright turn of possibility.

Welcome to our collaboration feature here at Wild Quiet Folk!

Substack is an endless source of inspiration, a cacophony of unique voices that can lead a reader through the weird, wonderful and wild.

Here, I have collaborated with other creatives to bring you their meditations on place, story and wilderness - the heart of Wild Quiet Folk. This series is in an interview format, but offering creative prompts rather than questions - the freedom is with the contributor, to respond in whichever way they see fit, be that words, photos, drawings, anything that enlarges rather than restricts.

It has been a while since I shared a guest post here - and this week’s is one worth waiting for. Our contributor is Sarah L Kent, whose thoughtful reflections on her off-grid life are an inspiration here on Substack.

Thank you for being here, and I very much hope you enjoy the below:

The last walk you went on

I’ve always been a morning person. For me it’s the best time of day, and at this time of year, all of the bird world seems to celebrate the lengthening days.

My narrowboat home is moored in a remote spot, sheltered by a thicket of blackthorn which is trying to impersonate a civilised hedge, and gloriously failing. It is covered in blossom, and my heart skips a little as I see a few rare honeybees amongst the drifts of flowers.

There are no footpaths nearby, other than the towpath. I have a simple choice – left or right? My feet always lead me away from civilisation and they choose left, heading away from the nearby farm buildings.

After a couple of miles, the canal opens into a wide expanse of open water surrounded by reed beds. A handful of Canada geese raft on the water sixty feet away. Closer to me, a white-beaked Coot makes metallic chinking calls as it retreats into the reeds.

There are few wild places in this part of Cheshire, but here at least I can only see water, reeds, and hedge-bound fields. I wait, hoping no other walkers come my way. I am listening for something very specific. Most days, I am unlucky. But today, just as I was about to turn to head back to the warmth of my boat, there it was.

A curlew calling. My world narrows until I can hear nothing else. Its liquid song threads into the wind, threading through me, calling to something half forgotten deep inside. It must have been flying low and fast, for despite searching the horizon, I could not see its distinctive silhouette.

Curlew dwell in the upland moors and bogs in the summer in the UK. I first encountered them years ago when I first hiked the 268 mile length of the Pennine Way. In the winter months the curlew come down to estuaries and rough farmland. I know as daylight hours lengthen and the weather turns warmer, they won’t be my neighbours for much longer.

The curlew calls again, haunting and melancholy, calling to the wild which still lives in me. My heart wants to fly with it, to follow it to wild spaces where no human has trod. But it is gone. I wait some more minutes, but only the geese offer company. Blackbirds and robins sing from the hedgerows. The voice of the wild curlew is silent.

I’ve been searching for something all my life. I’m not sure what it is, yet sometimes I think I’ve found it – when I am alone and quiet in the wilderness.

I walk back along the muddy towpath, listening, seeing how far I can hear, and listening for the deeper silence which underlies it all.

A celebration of season

Spring! Heralded by the drifts of blackthorn blossom alongside the canal.

The things in your pockets

I am an opportunist, and this means I delight in foraging. Now that spring is here, I am always ready to pick a few wild herbs, whether nettle leaves to make tea, or wild garlic leaves and flowers to add to omelettes.

Today in my coat pocket there is a small pocket knife, and a cotton bag (folded small) which I use to carry any foraged leaves. I am prone to hay fever, so I always carry a large gentleman’s handkerchief. Today it’s a red tartan one. I usually carry my phone too, although it’s pretty much always switched to silent. My boat keys are in my trouser pocket.

A place that feels wild to you

In my career as a meteorologist I always sought work in remote locations, and I was lucky enough to spend seven years living in the Falkland Islands. The land there is bleak and uncompromising; grassy moorland scoured by strong winds throughout the year. There are few people away from the capital of Stanley, and the wildlife has not learned to fear humans - or perhaps forgotten to fear us now that whaling and sealing are illegal.

The Falklands are home to the Black-browed Albatross. Whenever I could get time off work, I would travel to West Point Island - one of the small, outlying islands so I could visit its albatross colony. There were 1,000 foot high cliffs on the westernmost side of the island, and I would sit in the tussock grass which verged the cliffs, watching the albatross soar effortlessly above the ocean swell.

Once, when I had turned away from the ocean to watch nearby albatross chicks in their nests, an adult albatross landed on me. The first thing I knew about it was a heavy weight in my lap and slender wings knocking my arms and shoulders. I guess my green jacket had made me look like a bigger clump of tussock grass, and the bird was no doubt as surprised as I was.

Albatross are not small birds; think goose-sized but with an 8-foot wingspan. Despite the calamity of landing on a human, the bird managed to fold its wings and walk off my lap with a modicum of dignity, heading off into the colony to find its nest.

This for me was the wild at its best; simply getting on with life, unperturbed by a human’s presence. It’s a place I would go back to in a heartbeat.

A moment of care

I live alone on my narrowboat, with just my cat for company. He's never been a lap cat, but every morning, wherever I am on the boat, he comes and asks for snuggles. It's such a simple thing, having the companionship of another creature, and it gives me hope that we as humans won't forget our connection to the natural world.

A place that holds history, yours or others

My brother lives in the USA, and whenever I visit him we travel to the most remote and rugged desert canyons in southwest Utah. These places appeal to us because they are truly wild. You need to be well prepared, to know where you can find water, and ready to carry all the supplies you’ll need. During the course of a multi-day hike, you may not see another human – in fact that is usually our hope.

There is something unique hidden within these canyons; incredible ruins a thousand or more years old, and panels of rock art which are older still. Once, people lived here, part of a wider civilisation with trade routes reaching down to Mexico. We know that they left the canyons sometime between 1270 and 1400 AD, but somehow they are still present.

When I walk through a deep, twisting canyon, there is a sense that just around the next curve I may come across these ancient people - tending to their crops, or collecting water from a spring. It is as though the echoes of their voices and children’s laughter have only just faded into silence.

I walk lightly and with respect through the dusty sand of the canyon’s floor. The wind erases my footsteps. I am the ghost here.

Share

The last thing you read and loved

I always have three or four books on the go. Usually something nerdy based around psychology or somatics to inform my coaching work, a book or two of poetry to dip into, and then a piece of fiction, either sci-fi or fantasy.

I confess to having just re-read The Lord of the Rings – for the umpteenth time. I first picked it up when I was nine years old and I’ve never fallen out of love with the craft that Tolkien poured into the book, combined with its enduring story of friendship, grief, and the power of hope.

A small thing you learnt recently

I'm currently learning watercolour painting. It's reminding me of how much creativity nourishes me, and more specifically how to release expectations whilst still hoping for the best. Watching the paint and water interact in magical ways on paper helps me to trust the flow of life, and to allow myself to flow with it.

Sarah is a former astrophysicist, meteorologist, and winning ultra-runner, who now lives, works, and writes from a beautiful off-grid narrowboat based on the inland waterways of England and Wales. She’s a coach to women leaders and founders, helping them to think beyond their leadership roles and deeper into legacy – so they can create the life and legacies they deeply long for.In her spare time she curates the Dreamworks Project, which is devoted to inspiring and affirming the dreams and and aspirations of women around the world.

A Field of Dreams

🌸 A living archive of the stories of the dreams and aspirations of women from all over the world 🌸 A place to come for inspiration, reflection, and to reconnect with your own dreams 🌸

By Sarah L Kent

You’ll find stories from the Dreamworks Project on Substack. You can learn about her coaching and connect with her through her website or via LinkedIn

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

This week the question spinning in my brain is how we, as artists, writers, creatives, build our days. What are the things that come together to make a fulfilling creative life? I asked this question on notes recently and someone replied with something along the lines of ‘If all I had to do was write, I would fill my days with dreams and magic.’ And I recognise that, that idealisation of empty time, of creative work, I do, but really - what does that mean? You wake up and then you…. What?

A creative life, and the work that fills it, takes place outside the structures of 9-5 ‘normal’ jobs. Many of us have these ‘normal’ jobs to allow us to create, to take the pressure off the paying of bills. But if we had a whole day just for our own work, what would that look like? What are the things, outside of external success and accolades, publishing contracts, sales figures, that make the life we’ve chosen fulfilling? How do we make it feel real?

Share

Cat, my artist friend, tries to start with an adventure. She goes out, to the sea or the cliffs, the woods or the fields. She lives in Cornwall and the prints she makes begin life as sketches, drawn outside, from life. These adventures are part of her work.

I need this inspiration too, but I don’t see it the same way. It feels like skiving off sometimes, even though it makes me better at writing, happier in living. Then she is home for lunch, and she works in the afternoon. She has sketchbooks full of lists of things to do, and work surrounding her on the walls. She does markets and is a member of Cornwall makers and an artists collective with a shop she works in two days a month. I wonder, what is the equivalent of this for writers? Where can we be, together, working and sharing that work?

I asked the same question to the wonderful and you can see her response here.

I think this is what we need more, to drill down into the small details, the actual nitty gritty of how we fill our days. Boiling the kettle and looking out the window, going for a walk, doing the admin, calling a friend. These things are a part of it too!

I spoke about it with yesterday, who plans out their time into slots, for the creative work and the exercise, the day job, the time working on other creative projects, the admin and cleaning - all of the things that build a life, scheduled. Scheduled is the word that scares me. I don’t want the creative part of my life to feel restrictive or pressurised - but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s the opposite. If planning these things actually takes the pressure off. If rather than scheduling, I need to think of it as planning - and making - space.

Jess also showed me this, above, from Ursula Le Guin. This is what I mean, what I’m looking for. The honest truth of what we fill our days with, and how we let that fulfill us.

So I come back to what I know and what I need. I know I need the outside. I need walks and swims and sky. I need the sea, I need the woods. I need friends who get it, other writers and artists, who are as engaged in the questing struggle as I am. I need good green tea and a lid to keep it warm when I forget it, I need a tankard of water. I need chocolate as a reward, as a bribery. I need to get out of the house and write in a cafe sometimes. I need to stop writing all together and go on adventures sometimes. I need to be alone to focus and I need to be around people to fill me up. I need to see my family, visit my mum. I need my space to not be utter chaos. I need good books and bad books and easy books. I need films and art galleries and stories, however they come. I need the things that make me pause, make me say ‘oh’ and see the world a little differently. I need other creative projects away from writing, I need colour and paint and pencils and knitting needles and sewing things. I need a notebook and a pen and my laptop, I need to sit in the garden when I can. I need, sometimes, to sit on the sofa, to make it feel comfortable and less like work.

I do have a room of my own for writing. I need to clear this of junk, to tidy away the mound of papers, the work equipment shoved in one corner, the bag of alterations I never get to, the books piled up beside the bookshelves, waiting for me to build more shelves. I need to clean the blue stained trestle table where I play with watercolours.

I need, once again, to make this space somewhere I want to be. In the last few years I have worked on some writing projects I’m very proud of, but I’ve also had knock back after knock back, and I’ve needed the softness of the sofa. But I miss this, my space of my own, my place dedicated to creation. The stairs to my attic are painted orange. On the wall, I am collecting artwork, as much as possible by people I know. It has been a long project;framed and I framed work has covered the attic floor for months. But I am getting there, getting ready to walk up my orange stairs past beautiful art that means something, that shows me creation is possible, is worth it. Matters.

I am about to go away for a few weeks. I will not be writing on here in this time. I thought about pre-writing and scheduling all my pieces, but I’ve decided, instead, to take the pressure off. I’m going to go adventuring and stop thinking and when I come back I’m going to open my paper diary and try planning my time. I’m going to collate the things I want to fill my days with. I’m going to walk up my orange stairs, smiling at all the art, and begin.

Tell me, in the comments, how you build your own creative days?

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

The water is cold and the water is grey and the water is a thing we’re so unsure of, doubting, questioning, and yet the water is where we are going.

On a small beach with an empty pub we run into shallow grey water, biting like ice, count our breaths, inch ourselves under. There are gulls overhead and the harbour wall is close, the water low. There are gulls overhead. The buoys that would be on the horizon at high tide are floating beside us as we stand, water at our waists, looking out. Behind us, on the beach, a wood fired sauna, the smell of smoke, a window looking out on the water, where we will sit and warm and talk, about big skies and making things, about money and creativity and how to resolve this endless tussle.

On the Cape, we look out at the hunch of land where we spent two happy weeks two years ago as artists in residence at Brison’s Veor, at the hump of The Brison’s rocks off shore, which were the inspiration for one of our stories. We follow the path we walked from our past front door, down into the valley, up to the ruins, along to the mines, then back to the village and the cafe. Then back, back to the cape. Down to the cove, to the tide pool where we swam almost every day during that long past time, gathering stories, holding close the pictures we found in the land. We talk of booklets of stories, of printers, of pushing forward our long standing project to publish our collection of illustrated short stories. Of all the next steps, of the challenge of fitting it in around all our other creative - and non creative - work.

We sit and look at a view that means a lot, that has, in a way, been immortalised. My friend, artist Catherine Lovett, drew it, carved it, printed it. I bought a print, hung it at the bottom of the stairs to my writing room; a reminder of place, of hope, of ambition. Of a reaching for a creative life.

In a Cornish village we follow the cobbled path through the crammed together cottages, around the harbour. I see a woman in wafers scraping the bottom of a boat, a thing my character, a female fisherman, does in my story and photograph her, a piece of the imaginary become real, become imaginary.

We go up, over the rocky peak of the cliff and down, to the tide pool where the sky has fallen and the water reflects jagged peaks of cliff. We slip in, over frills of reddened weed, gasping at the cold, the way it swallows us, the way it spikes in our joints, ankles, the knobble at the back of our necks. We talk of sharing work, of how to build fulfilling days, of age and health and what matters.

Share

There are many conundrums to a creative life. I long, as I walk by houses with picture windows and big sky views, to live beside the sea. I long to fill my days with salt and swims and moving muscles, expanding thoughts, flickers of possibility. I catch myself - this is what this is. I already have it. Maybe not always, maybe not forever. Maybe there are still more early starts and dentist appointments and errands than an idealised life envisions. But this - in the fields, on the cliff, in the water with a friend who is also concerned with making - this is it, too.

It is International Women’s Day today. I didn’t know that until I read other people’s work about it here, on Substack, where everyone is concerned with creating. But what I want to celebrate on this day is the seemingly small, often overlooked magic of friends who get it. Who stand in the sea beside you, who celebrate a drawing you did with double ended crayons taken from a children’s pack at Wagamama’s, who encourage your sparks of ideas, who cheer you on, who call on a long drive, who go with you to pottery classes, who leave rambling voice notes, who start groups with you, who feedback on your work, who cover clothes with hundreds of tiny stitches, who read your words, who create art for your walls and words for your soul, who pose, themselves, the question you yourself are so concerned with; how does this creative path come to life? How do we blow the spark into a flame?

I trawl back, through my camera roll, deleting. There is so much I want to hold on to. I have so many photos that my storage can no longer hold them all, and I do not want to pay a ridiculous amount each month to store them in a cloud I never wanted to sign up for, but which filled, automatically, with everything I have ever saved, snapped, written, looked at. I am deleting the excess, setting myself free.

Share

There is a theme to my photos. The water. The sky. The green of the woods or of flowers through pavement cracks or the first buds of spring. Shadows on white walls, light through leaves. The sea, the white lace of breaking waves, the floor. So many photos of the floor, of cracks and shells and pebbles and interestingly coloured lichens. There are photos of my mum. There are photos of paintings I see in galleries and want to capture, there are photos of my friends’ art, there are photos of my own pen portraits and my play with colour and shape and water, water, water. There are few photos of writing. It is such a big part of my life and I am a visual person, but this one thing is almost hidden. There are a few photos of my laptop, open in a beautiful place. Of a notebook, open on a picnic bench, on my lap, on a table in a cafe. There are a few photos of books I’ve read and loved, often taken with the intention of posting and sharing them, often without ever getting round to sharing them. How strange it is, this paradox, that the thing that means so much is almost invisible.

I struggle with this, sometimes - if a visual artist has been working all day they can show you what they have been doing. If a painter wants to share their work, their peers can glance at it for thirty seconds and have seen it - maybe not deeply, maybe not properly, but can at least bear witness to the creation of a thing that did not exist before. It is not like this for writing. I can work all day and even though I know I got 2000 new words or cut 2000 words, or moved the middle to the start, or made a character more complex, you’ll have to take my word for it. Similarly, I can’t ask what you think of this messy thing in progress until I have wrestled it into shape myself. Even then, I am not asking thirty seconds of you - I am asking for hours. It takes hours to read a novel. It takes longer to offer considered feedback.

I realise, as I scroll, that I take almost every photo twice. In case the first one didn’t come out quite right? Yes, that, but also because to take a photo is to capture something. When the world is so beautiful, when the image of it fills me with awe, I want to hold on to it. I want to keep it close. Once is not enough - it could never be enough. And this - this - is the same with writing. We write to capture. To carry forward, to hold to the light. Unlike with photos, the capturing continues. While walking, reading, photographing shadows, I will think of adjustments, I will feel the thing I want to capture shift, just slightly, into something different, deeper, more nuanced.

I am trying to take less photos. Not to cull my interest, but to take, just once, the photo of that patch of ground, that cloud burst, that ripple. If not once, then to look back, at the end of the day, and delete what I do not need to carry forward. It is a falsehood, in any case. The photo is different to the thing itself - the thing is gone and I cannot capture it after all, not really. Yet even as I write this piece I am entranced by the multiples - by displaying them next to each other, as I have here, the way they show a slow progression of light, show the journey of my attention, show the things that I am drawn to and how my mind travels between them. I look at them and feel the way my eye roams.

What I can do is take the feeling, the experience of being alive, and put it into words, gift my experience to people who exist only because I created them, and set them down for someone - someone with hours to offer me, someone willing to get lost in my words - to read, to immerse themselves in, to feel, for a moment, hopefully, just a fraction of the wonder. To read and to recognise something that will change, just slightly, the way they see the world. To read something they needed to hear.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

Always, I am preoccupied with story. What do we need to tell? How do we build the layers and nuance that makes a fiction we’ve plucked from the air, from lived experience, from the spark of a place or a person or a little known fact, become a living breathing thing? How do we cut away the waffle to show the bones beneath?

Last week I went to the beach in the snow. I drive down u familiar country lanes with white whirling towards me like torn up feathers. The land in that part of the country is flat, and the fields were striped, the lines of planted crops emphasises by the gently settling snow. Forests were all twisted limbs, black and slick, iced with white where they turned skywards. I drove, slow, to the shore.

There I went down to the base of the cliffs. They were striped, terracotta and white, and as I followed along at their feet they grew taller, taller, taller still until I was tiny and they were the whole horizon, the whole pale sky. Still the snow fell, flurrying into my face, my cheeks red and wet with the bite of it. Nose cold.

Share

I saw something down towards the sea and made my way over the rocks. It was a wreck - the hull of a boat, a long one, metal studs in rusted panels, spokes no longer connected, struts like ribs rising from the sand. I know nothing about boats. I cannot tell you what type of boat it was, I cannot tell you how many crewed it or how old it was or what it carried. I can tell you it reminded me of a metal whale. I can tell you there was a square compartment, walls still holding, that was now its own tiny pool, not a rock pool but a boat pool, a lido for the fish. I can tell you the browns of the rust were many, varied, swirling; like an abstract painting that tells you something you can’t articulate.

I can tell you I found the empty green shells of sea urchins in the pools on the sand around it. I can tell you I climbed up and walked along the central spine of it, where others had walked and worked so long ago with lives and skills I know nothing of. A dog walker on the beach looked over at me, confused, and I felt chastised fur my childlike wonder, but I stayed there, in the iron rim of this sunken thing.

I am editing a novel at the moment. I write in layers, one upon the other, until I build up not just the story but the atmosphere, the feeling of the piece. But I have done all the adding and layering. Now I need to strip away. I need to hold the thread of the story and follow it to its heart. I need to show the bones.

This is hard. There is so much I want to see and there is so much I want to celebrate in my stories - about people and survival and care and creation and wonder. So much I want to cram in, every time.

I did not tell you everything about my shipwreck. I did not tell you that I wore my yellow wellies on the beach. I did not tell you that I found a dead fish, pale, ghostlike, half gone, in a puddle. I did not tell you how low the tide was, merely a memory on the horizon. I did not tell you of the woman I met who pressed a whelk shell into my hands, telling me she’d found two, whole, and they were rare. I did not tell you I then found many more complete whelks, striped just like the cliffs. I did not tell you the snow stopped and the rain came and my hands were fisted in my pockets against the cold, and the sea urchin shells smelt of rotten fish and the cafe was closed and I met two dogs and I went right down, to the memory of the tide, and walked along its edge, straddling the shifting line that dissolved, again and again, beneath my feet.

I told you the bones. The details are where the beauty, the nuance, the character lies. I don’t know if this is what readers want. My former forays into publishing have shown me that what the machine wants is the sellable idea - is clarity. I believe there is a line, that we can expose the heart of the story and still keep the details that bring it to life. That this is, for me, part of what makes writing worthwhile. But we do not need all details. We cannot let the thing our story is trying to say be drowned in detail. The detail needs to serve the story, to help us feel the characters, to help us experience the place. But we cannot put everything in just because we love it. I could write descriptions of water and walks, hills, mountains and the sea forever and I would not get bored. But the beauty is as much in leaving out, in choosing what to abandon, as it is in what we leave in.

So, I go back, I dig in, I clarify. I find the thread and follow it to the heart. I keep my story focused. And I dare to show the bones.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.

The sky is grey. Heavy and full, it presses down, a lid with no sense of ending, no sense of all the blue sky that must be up there, somewhere, if you go high enough. This week it has rained, and I have been indoors too much, working in a studio on an industrial estate where the air smelt of biscuits from a factory and everything was concrete, and yet as I walked from the station to the big grey shed where I spent my days, I listed things - wild things, weird things, dismissed things.

One single brown leaf left on otherwise bare branches. The day getting light, slow, impossible to pinpoint, one moment blue, they grey, then day. The treacle-thick leaf mulch in the gutter, already halfway to gone, no longer made of many separate things, close to becoming one. Tarmac cracking around the roots of trees it cannot help to contain, the great swell of the ground. The round balls of seed pods, strung like baubles overhead. The red of leaves of a hedge pressing through the blue bars of the fence. Heather in planters outside the factory. My breath in a plume in front of me.

Again and again I confront this writing life and how to make it feel right, feel full, feel mine. So much of it is, for me, this noticing of small wildnesses, of the overlooked, of a kind of dark beauty, and sharing these things, making them matter by pointing them out. Last week’s post was concerned with being ‘good’ at something. This week I am focused on the bigger picture - the things that make all the striving beautiful, that bring inspiration and solace and light. I am convinced so much of this lies in creative community - others to work alongside, who are consumed by the same thoughts, who are striving on as we are, devoting ourselves to people who live on a page. We need to find the others.

In aid of this, and I have begun the writing group we have always wanted. An in person writing group for writers of the weird, the wild, the dark and the dismissed. With a focus on Feminist and Queer stories, and a commitment to the chaos and joy of the writing life, we invite you to join us to work on your own projects.

We will meet for two hours, on the second Saturday morning of each month - that’s next Saturday the 14th for our next one! - by the entrance nearest the Nelson Mandela statue at the Southbank centre London. We will begin with a 15 minute catch up, followed by 45 minutes quiet writing, then a 15 minute break/chat, followed by a final 45 minutes of feedback on each other’s work if wanted, or further writing.

Writing is its own peculiar madness, and only other writers understand. There are many set backs, doubts, and challenges, but still we persevere. The way to stay sane is to find the others - a community of support, respect, and understanding for why you are devoting yourself to people who live on a page. Together, we can hold the madness at bay. Come and join us. We’d love to have you.

Share

I went for a walk to the sea and the tide was on its way out. When I started the water was close and blue and rippling and I resisted trekking over shifting shingle to the edge, to take a photo that adequately expressed the shapes of the waves, the way the sky was held there, broken into a thousand undulating pieces. I resisted because I felt, for some reason, that I had to walk first, that I would come back later.

As I walked, the water slid away. I squelched through the nature reserve on the headland, heard starlings singing desperately in the bushes, wondered if, later, they would put on a swooping, diving display.

I walked back and the water was thin, pulled back like the top layer of fish skin, leaving behind a choking expanse of muddy sand, shallow rock pools, seaweed and moss. I walked to the edge, then. The sea was long gone. The sand shone with the memory of it, and I sat on the shore, opposite a row of buoys now languishing on the sand, and I felt the weight of the sky above, the big-ness of it, the all-encompassing yawn of it. In the distance, the shingle spit stretched far out to sea and the walkers at the end of it seem to be striding through water.

I thought about what it means to be good at something. To be good at your job, to be good at writing, at painting, at drawing or pottery, at lifting people around you, at life. I want so very badly to be good. I draw because I am not good at it, because it doesn’t matter if I am good at it, because it is not the creative outlet I have chosen to define me - and yet still, I want my drawings, with little practice, to be good. I want to be good without trying. And when I try, as I do with writing, I want so much more desperately to be good. Yet what does that mean? Who decides on good? The subscribers, the agents, the publishers, the buyer for Waterstones, the reviewers, the readers, the friends and family, that one person who read your lines and felt, for a moment, like an artist again? And if you’re not good, if the whole pursuit of good is a lie, what does it matter? If the thing you love exists, if it makes you live, if you love it, does it matter, if you are good? And yet how impossible not to want it anyway.

Share

Beyond that, is what we are really striving to be good at simply life? A sense of purpose, of joy, of expression and colour and creativity and friends who get it and evenings when you smile so much you are drunk with it, and of good green tea in your favourite mug, and clean sheets, and noticing the moon and walking, as I do, as I am, by the sea on your own on a grey day, and feeling grateful for all of it anyway?

I got up from my spot on the edge of the shingle. I passed a woman huddled at the edge with a long lens camera and I talked to her about the birds, and she told me gulls are always good, there are always a lot of them, they are good for practicing photographing flight. Perhaps she was striving to be good at photography, but also, that she was happy crouched there on the edge, waiting for something more exciting than a gull, but happy, anyway, with those white wings spreadeagled against a darkening sky. I felt lighter for talking to her. Despite the mess of the world, the absolute terror of it, there is so much good, deep down good, crinkle your edges good. I walked towards a shingle bank. I went over the sand, where the water had left wave impressions on the sand, and my boots were wet in minutes. For days they would be stained with salt, crusted with mud, and my Dad would tell me to polish them, and I would think to myself that I should really dig out that old tin and cloth, but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t until the next time I came to the sea and soaked my boots and once again thought, I really should take better care. I walked over the sand and my socks got wet and my feet slipped and then I was on the shingle street.

I walked out, finding a whale shaped flint, throwing pebbles into clear shallow water, stroking a small dog, smiling at strangers, my feet wet, my skin tight with cold and I thought again that maybe good doesn’t matter the way we think it does, or not in the way we often mean. I followed the spit to the very end. Past the end, to where really it was water, however low, and I perched on two stones slightly above the water line. My boots were already wet after all. I watched the two overlapping tides, the waters from either side, their waves meeting, breaking, crossing and then dissolving into each other. I stood and watched and behind me, others crunched up, turned and walked away, but I stayed, standing in between, the moon showing in the dusky sky above me, the water shushing, all those seagulls, flying flying flying.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

Welcome to our collaboration feature here at Wild Quiet Folk!

Substack is an endless source of inspiration, a cacophony of unique voices that can lead a reader through the weird, wonderful and wild.

Here, I have collaborated with other creatives to bring you their meditations on place, story and wilderness - the heart of Wild Quiet Folk. This series is in an interview format, but offering creative prompts rather than questions - the freedom is with the contributor, to respond in whichever way they see fit, be that words, photos, drawings, anything that enlarges rather than restricts.

Our contributor this month is Chloe Markham, and I am beyond excited to share her words with you. I did Chloe’s signature nervous system program, Joy Unplugged, in the summer and it rearranged my brain in the best way. It runs again in Feb, with applications closing at the end of this month, so get in there quickly! She writes regularly here on Substack and is a joy to follow.

Thank you for being here, and I very much hope you enjoy the below:

The last walk or outdoor adventure you went on

I’ve been starting my years with a giant inspiration-giving ritual: walking a stretch of the Cleveland Way. I get up early, when it’s still dark, and find myself bracing against the cold sea air watching the first light of the year rise over the North Sea. And it’s bloody glorious.

This year, I walked the eight-or-so miles from Ravenscar to Robin Hood’s Bay and back, with just a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, a hastily-made cheese sandwich, and the cold, January ocean for company.

There’s a magic to starting my year this way. The ocean has always been my greatest inspiration; a horizon-expanding mystery that smells of adventure and something greater than myself. That’s why I do this walk. Not for the step-count or the achievement; but for what the persistent plodding along a sometimes-desolate stretch of Yorkshire coastline does for my soul. I feel alive again. Potent. Magical.

My mission this year, as I grow my life-bettering business, is to prioritise my own inspiration first. And this walk did exactly that.

A celebration of season

Through the window I can see next door’s acer, the leaves turning into a fire-deep red. The oak in the distance slowly morphing into its own mottled orange. It’s cold, it’s dark, and the incessant rain is warning me about doing too much outside today.

But I bloody love winter.

I think the idea of summer is brilliant. Longer days, warmer weather, frolicking on the beach. And I am learning to come to terms with it as I get older. But it’s mostly a vampiric avoidance of the sun for me; a claustrophobic struggle with too-high temperatures and clothes that stick to me; a sad lack of over-the-top fur coats and moody skies, replaced with a need to do more, be more, have more fun, and enjoy-it-or-else.

And thankfully for me, in temperate climates it slowly morphs into more tolerant temperatures; the insistency of the sun’s forced frivolities disappearing into the darkness.

I love the forced slowness the early nights present us with (if, that is, you can avoid the ill-timed January hype). I love those frosty mornings lit by late sunshine. I love a roaring fire in a pub and cosying up with a good book or a better person, and a drink of something comforting.

I think winter gives us a cosy, self-nurturing opportunity to semi-hibernate and remind ourselves of the pleasure of deeper inquiry. As long as we avoid the endless drive to optimise, out-perform, and be over-productive, that is. There’s more to winter than Netflix and inconvenience. I just think we’ve been missold it for far too long.Snippets of the above taken from this article:

Joyful with Chloe Markham

4 Ways I've Made Winter More Joyful (As a Highly-Sensitive Person)

I’m typing these words to you from my bed, early on a Saturday morning…

Read more

6 months ago · 37 likes · 13 comments · Chloe Markham

The things in your pockets

If I can fit a book in my pocket, in it goes. I have a well-worn copy of The Set of the Sails, by Alan Villiers for precisely its pocket-friendly dimensions. I also carry home-made lip balm with me wherever I go, as well as big silk hair scrunchies; a little jar of my homemade body butter; and a little rollerball of something that smells brilliant. Headphones are often a feature, as is one of my favourite Leuchtturm journals and a pencil. Less pockets, I suppose, and more giant-bag, but these things act as a sort of nervous system support for when I’m a little stressed on public transport in London, or a just-in-case for being out and about in general.

A place that feels wild to you

The sea is always this place. I love mountains, and forests, and the endless moors in North Yorkshire near my home, but the ocean has always been my muse.

Some of my favourite memories are times I spent at sea. I worked as a deckhand briefly in my teens for a sailing company, Square Sail — I worked on three square-rigged ships, travelling to sailing festivals and events.

I remember my first time seeing nothing but empty ocean; no land in sight. It felt wild and exciting to me. What would be the next land we’d see? Where would we end up?

I remember another time sailing in water so calm, so precisely mirroring the sky, it felt like we were trapped in a liminal state — we weren’t at sea at all but in the imaginations of some kind of god.

Later, working at sea for oil and gas companies in a more professional position, I remember walking from my cabin down into the lab I worked in, gleefully clinging to the bannisters of the stairs as the ship heroically bobbed her way through a seven-metre swell. After the seasickness, of course, and as long as you’ve confidence in the ship and her crew, it can be amazingly perspective-giving, being at sea in bad weather. (Although sailing through a stormy Bay of Biscay in a wooden-hulled sailing ship with failed engines is a less gleeful memory.)

We know, as a scientific community, so little about our oceans, yet they’re one of the main reasons we’re breathing oxygen right now. They can be both enraged, and calm; they give us waves to surf, and destroy entire communities. There’s nothing so wild as the ocean, and I often note her down as one of my daily Good To Be Alive Moments.

A moment of care

The biggest care for me, over the past few years, are in those small moments. Reading a novel at 2pm just because I can; recognising I’m exhausted today and taking my foot off the pedal a little; being wonderfully mindful of that delicious chocolate I love instead of wolfing it down.

I think ‘care’ for me has changed enormously as I’ve learned more about my nervous system. It’s not always that meditating / yogaing / eating-your-greens thing (although all brilliant, of course), but about actually feeling how I’m doing and responding accordingly. This has transformed care for me, and as a result, my entire life.

A place that holds history, yours or others

This prompt makes me go back to those Square Sail days as a teenager, and that strange feeling of quiet devastation about a place that no longer exists, as if it never did at all.

One of those places for me is the bottom of a dry dock in Gloucester. I was a deckhand on The Earl of Pembroke at the time, and, after an eventful journey up the canal — hitting every single bridge on the way, completely destroying our bowsprit (the captain was booted out shortly after, I remember, it was all very eventful) — we ended up in dry dock for normal maintenance and all the necessary repairs.

Once we were securely in, the water was drained away and the ship rested on these enormous wooden blocks, suddenly a totally different beast to the one I’d known at sea. My task was simple and relentless: remove rust from the anchor chain. I sat at the bottom of the dock, surrounded by heavy iron links and caved in by the dock walls, tapping away with a small mallet, watching flakes of rust chip away and my blisters get bigger and bigger.

I did this for days. Weeks, maybe. My blisters were world-beaters and I ached all over. It was boiling hot. But I was young, so I didn’t question any of it.

That dock became a strange kind of home. A friend learned to use a blowtorch for the first time, we laughed and pranked each other, we sunbathed on deck.

And then, suddenly, it was all over. The repairs were done, so off we went. Water rushed back in and swallowed the space whole, the gates opened and we sailed out the way we came. My little world disappeared beneath ten metres of water, taking every trace of those few weeks with it.

It’s a strange one — I’m sure the dry dock still exists (although I’m not sure the same can be said for The Earl, which breaks my heart), so perhaps it’s a history of myself that I’m really lamenting. Oh to be that young and daft again, eh?

Share

A story you found in the land

The stories I find, they’re all mine. When I disappear into the woods, or walk a coastline, or find myself in the hills or at sea, the environment tells me my own hidden or misremembered stories back to me. It helps me remember why I do the work I do, helps me prioritise all the right things in the right ways, and sort of wiggles the foundations of my life back into place.

Without this perspective, I’m realising, I really don’t have all that much to go on. So this year, 2026, is a year of doing this more often and for no other reason than to reinspire; getting outside, with a big dose of wonder, an open mind, and letting the land tell me the stories I need to hear.

The last thing you read and loved

Frankenstein. I read this book as a way to reclaim some of my attention from my phone, around the same time I stopped using social media, so it felt like a double-whammy, and honestly I’ve never looked back on both counts. I’ve recovered my much-loved reading habit, stayed off social, and my life is much more spacious, more calm, and more joyful for it. And Frankenstein is a wonderful book — firmly in my top 5. I loved it so much, I even wrote an ‘interview’ with the long-dead author for my Substack.

A small thing you learnt recently

I recently read the wonderful Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I bought it on a whim — her previous book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is one of my favourite books of all time, and seeing her name on another beautiful cover in a London book shop I couldn’t resist.

I don’t care about moss. I know nothing about moss. What is moss but a slightly inconvenient gutter overgrowth / oddly beautiful addition to any garden? I barely gave it a thought before reading this book, but now, I see it everywhere.

Moss is one of the stabilising forces of our landscapes. It provides a safe place for seeds to sprout, it’s remarkable in its ability to completely dry up and bounce back to life again at the return of water, and the tiny micro-climate moss creates directly mirrors the giant ones we know so well. I learned the stories behind some of the ecosystems I love, and they all feature moss.

So every time I go for a walk, I’m looking out for what I can see of the 22,000 species of moss. I can’t differentiate them from each other of course, and I’ll never be a moss expert, but the story of moss and how important she is… it’s just added a wonderful delight to everywhere I go.

Chloe is a nervous system coach, yoga teacher, and writer who helps thinkers, feelers, and doers find relief from the daily grind. Her easy-going teachings on nervous system regulation, philosophy, and wellbeing help the exhausted and over-it feel more joyful, grounded, and alive. Known for her light-hearted approach and down-to-earth style, Chloe believes life’s too short for anything less than joy.

You’ll find her writings and teachings, often free, inside Joyful on Substack, and her signature program, Joy Unplugged, as well as other ways to connect, on her website, chloemarkham.co.uk

Thank you for reading this post! If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.

The long beach is five minutes from the cottage. First, I go alone, in the rain, and all is grey and the dunes stretch endlessly on and the waves push white crescents of foam onto the sand. There are razor shells here, more than I’ve seen before, patterned like abstract art. There is a section of a tree washed up on the shore, thin branches curving up like fingers, the sand below it glistening from the withdrawing tide. I find a fish, spotted and long and finned, and my childhood brain whispers to me, whispers ‘shark’.

I go the next morning when the sun is out. Still I am alone, and I leave my clothes by a raised beach hut because the sand is swallowed by high tide, and I go into the water. It is my first swim of the year, shining grey and blue, shallow so I can always touch the bottom. The sky is bright, scuffed with white clouds. The water throws back its colour. In the distance the chalk cliff runs out, ends in famous stacks. I get out because my hands start to hurt with cold, not because I want to.

I go back to the cottage, and I work on editing one novel, add words to another. I research publishers and I think about the next steps for a collection of illustrated short stories inspired by the landscape and folklore of the British isles - a project that is very much shared with artist Catherine Lovett - who is on her way!

Share

I go again to the long beach, this time with my friend. We are on a self guided residency to work out our next steps forward for that illustrated short story collection, begun on previous residencies at Mawddach and Brisons Veor. We have stories and illustrations and prints and we need a direction, but we don’t stay in and think and churn and worry. Instead we go together to the long beach and we follow, again, the long curve of pale sand.

The tide is lower this time. The water is calmer, the sky is blue. We go up, into the dunes. Looking back along the beach, the marram grass fringing our view, we see the chalk stacks in the distance. In front of us, grass and moorland and a darkening sky. Back down at the base of the dunes we turn back, following the endless curve of sea. Plans will come.

We have learned that the writing, the creating, comes not only from sitting inside, staring at a page, but from being out in the landscape, letting it feed our minds, finding the things that make us go ‘Oooooo’. It could be a tree with branches like fingers, it could be a shell that looks carved from rock, it could be the contrast between sandy beach and grassy moor.

Later, we will sit in the living room of our rented cottage and talk and brainstorm and plan. We will make clear a way forward. But for now we walk.

Always it is the first step.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.

Two years ago in Greece I saw them, orange and half hidden on rocks below the water line. I searched as I swam. U counted 5 on my longest swim. A companion bought me a starfish ring fi remember them by. But I had never seen them here.

I ignored the wind whipping my red raw skin and knelt, staring at this strange beautiful creature. And then I saw that there were more, scattered all around. Big ones, small ones, all over the sand, tangled in seaweed, piled up amongst empty mussel shells: sea stars, everywhere.

Two days before I had been to the coast and stood on the harbour arm as white fireworks of spray shot skywards. The water was roaring, the wind so strong it pulled the hat from my head, forcing me to chase it skittering along the cliff top.

Share

Still, two days later, the water was rough. I would not have swum anywhere but the tide pool, where the water is protected from the worst of the swell. I looked all around me at the hundreds of creatures washed up, their tiny suckers not strong enough to withstand the storm. They were cream and beige and peach and orange, patterned intricately, crenellated, almost carved. They were beautiful. Some were missing legs and I thought about how starfish can regenerate limbs, how they are often held up as a symbol of renewal, and I wondered, were all - were any - of these bodies alive?

I searched online for how to tell. I messaged my best beachcomber friend. Very gently, with my swim gloves still on, I touched the feet of one star. No movement. But it did not seem dry or desiccated either, it felt fleshy, solid. There was something tragic about these creatures, thrown up in their hundreds. I couldn’t even tell if they were alive. It had been a few days since the storm that ripped them from their reef. I knew they were unlikely to still be alive. And yet…. I hoped. The tide was rising fast. The water was crashing in, white and foaming, against the outer wall of the pool. I wondered about throwing them in, carrying them out to drop them back where the water was deep enough, but the swell was too great and I didn’t want their bodies - dead or alive - to be dashed against the rocks. In the end, I left them.

I thought about them as I changed shivering in the wind, as I sat with the heater on in the car, as I walked along the base of the chalk cliffs in the lowering light. By the time I returned to the tide pool, the water had risen. I went down to the curve of sand where I had stood only an hour before, tentatively pressing a finger to the body of a creature to see if it was alive or dead. There was nothing there. The water had come, had risen up and carried off the treasure that had so recently strewn the wrack line. I peered through the dark, at the washing ocean. I wanted some sign that these creatures were okay. I wanted stars, surfing through the foam, floating in the ink black water, but I could see nothing but the opaque water and the beam of my torch.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.

‘Wander With Me’ has become one of my favourite parts of Wild Quiet Folk. I love seeing the responses that come up. I love knowing that I had a tiny part in bringing more work, more words, more reflection to the world.

And so - as the year comes to a close - I have compiled everyone’s answers to the prompt ‘A Celebration of Season’. It is a long one, so if you get these letters by email, you may need to click through to read the full piece on the website.

I have been thinking recently about what I want my writing life to look like. Community and connection are vital. Substack, and the wonderful writers below, offer me this in a digital capacity, and I am so honoured by their generosity, thoughtfulness and willingness to share.

Another part of that is a space to meet in real life, to work beside each other - and so is born ‘Wild Lines’, an in person writing group for writers of the weird, the wild, the dark and the dismissed. Hosted by and I, with a focus on feminist and Queer stories, and a commitment to the chaos and joy of the writing life, we invite you to join us to work on your own projects.

We will meet for two hours, on the second Saturday morning of each month in London, somewhere on the Southbank. The 10th of January is our first one. Message me for details or find more info on Substack notes in the new year.

Writing is its own peculiar madness, and only other writers understand. There are many set-backs, doubts, and challenges, but still we persevere. The way to stay sane is to find the others - a community of support, respect, and understanding for why you are devoting yourself to people who live on a page. Together, we can hold the madness at bay. Come and join us. We’d love to have you.

Now on to the glorious celebrations of season!

Amanda Saint

Winter sunrise in Corrigeenroe, Ireland. Where I lived for around 4.5 years, on and off.

Amanda Saint is the author of two novels, As If I Were A River (2016) and Remember Tomorrow (2019), and a novella-in-flash, Pressure Drop (2024). She is the founder of The Mindful Writer, where she combines mindfulness practice with creative writing to help writers find their voice and create positive human connection through their stories. Amanda also runs WestWord literary journal and founded Retreat West, which was named Most Innovative Publisher at the 2020 Saboteur Awards and published 24 books before closing in 2025. | themindfulwriter.net | westword.substack.com

Catriona Knapman

I celebrated this week that I have started to better notice the seasonal changes in Dubai when the sun hit me directly in the eyes as I walked into the metro station on the way to work.

Notes from Saving the World

Framing Change - From Scotland to Dubai

When I moved to Dubai a year ago, I set up an informal photo exchange with a good friend in Scotland. The rules and structures were fairly loose. We would take pictures of our lives and share them each week…

Read more

2 years ago · 11 likes · 14 comments · Catriona Knapman

Noticing the changing light meant that I was noticing the sun changing position in the sky. I used to feel like nature was very unchanging here. Now I am learning to watch for its more subtle signals.

Catriona Knapman is a writer and aid worker from Scotland. On Substack she writes ‘Notes from Saving the World’, a publication about travel, nature and being a woman, inspired by stories and lessons from twenty years living and working across four continents in the aid sector.

Emma Simpson

I wrote this piece about the magic and mischief of Autumn. There is something about this time of year that captures my heart, holding it in a place of transition and anticipation. Reflections of a year coming to a close, a preparation for wintering, and a sense of enchantment in the air.

Lemon Soul

The scent of a season

Just a short little piece today, the kind of one that jumps into your fingertips in spite of you saying to yourself ‘I’m not going to do any writing today’. A piece that doesn’t respect the other 50 draft essays that have patiently been waiting for their time in the sun. Nor your commitment that that today will be the day you actually get through all th…

Read more

2 years ago · 29 likes · 38 comments · Emma Simpson

Emma is an author, wild swimmer and Tea Sommelier (yes it’s a thing!). After over 2 decades as an air traffic controller, she became unable to work due to chronic illness, and now lives a very different life, with writing at the heart.

Her first book, Breaking Waves, is about the relationship of women with water around the world, and how we navigate the ebb and flow of life. It’s coming out March 2025 and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon, at Waterstones and hopefully local book shops if you enquire 🙏

She writes a publication called Lemon Soul on Substack which is all about sharing refreshing perspectives and slices of life. It’s a place for you to know you’re not alone – there is always room on her sofa 💕

Share

Catherine Lovett

I never used to be a fan of winter but living in Cornwall has given me a new appreciation of the season. I find winter inspiring, reflecting a side to Cornwall that is perhaps less often represented in images of the area. Winter gives me access to locations that would be busy with tourists etc in summer, allowing me to capture the places as they would have been.

Catherine is an artist and printmaker living in Cornwall, where she designs handmade artworks inspired by her coastal walks and love of sea swimming. After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2003, Catherine embarked on a successful career working in costume for film and T.V, contributing to productions from Harry Potter and Star Wars to Doctor Who and Downton Abbey. Her time is now split between film sets across the country and her art studio in Cornwall.

Instagram: catherinelovett.art | Website: catherinelovett.co.uk

Jo Morris

A love of winter. Not the festive season so much as the stark beauty, lines and silhouettes across the landscape. I love rituals because I find that they help me stay connected to nature, even in the smallest of ways, and even if I can’t get outside. I bring together a few items that represent the season and say a few words that mean something to me. The offering is simple and short but symbolises my gratitude for the joy and sustenance I receive from nature. This winter offering is my thank you to the garden.

Jo is a practising witch and guide. She helps others use witchcraft to find deep companionship with the wild self. Seeds, Weeds and Wildflowers is a place for seekers of untamed edges, feral beauty and those who are drawn to witchcraft; whether that’s respectful curiosity, or an inclination to create a devotional practice. Subscribe to learn how to find wisdom in nature’s elements and cycles, with twice monthly guides from the hearth and the land. Gather in and deepen your relationship with the natural world, where the heart meets the earth.

Kathryn Anna Marshall

I’ve got to be honest the desire to see winter pass frustrates me a little. The joy is there, it just needs a little more attention. At this time of year, I can discover snowdrops, crocus, dainty Iris Reticulata in my own little yard. I love that the birds need me a little more and I become a provider of food rather than something that simply occupies the same space. The feeling of chill air, and that almost metallic smell that a cold clear morning brings. I am also aware I write this from a position of privilege – I now work in a role that allows me to see winter days, I have a home that is a warm retreat. For people who leave for work in the dark, spend all day under strip lighting and return home to dark cold house, the joys of winter are more difficult to find.

Kathryn Anna Marshall is a poet based in Coalbrookdale, a village on the banks of the River Severn . She is inspired by the landscape around her as well as issues around grief, body image and inequality. Kathryn has M.E. and Bipolar II and her work explores the reality of living with these conditions. She also writes the occasional poem about cats.

Kathryn writes a semi-regular column on her publication This Wild Feeling which is home to her poetry films, and the place you can find readings of some of her published work. You can find out more about Kathryn’s bespoke poetry and her books on her website kathrynannawrites.com. She is also moderately active on Instagram.

Alex Morgan

I was born in summer. Perhaps that’s why bright sunny skies and long days fill my heart with hope. I love the way this picture, from a week TJ and I spent last August pottering on the Llangollen Canal, captures that mood.

Alex Morgan is a journalist and author. Her memoir, Mothertongue – a meditation on memory, truth and love, triggered by the autism diagnosis she received in 2022 – was shortlisted in the flagship fiction/narrative non-fiction category of the 2024 Northern Writers’ Awards. It is currently on submission to agents.

She is the founder of www.theautisticwoman.co.uk, the UK’s only comprehensive online source of autism information for women – and others – written by an autistic woman. Her novel Tandem won the 2013 Hookline Novel Competition, and she is co-author of A Practical Guide to Camping (White Owl, 2022). She has every intention of finishing that Gothic novel one day.

Jane Porter

I’m a little bit obsessed with the changing of the seasons and eagerly spot signs that a new one is coming, from the first fritillary to the sound of a dry leaf falling in August. My favourite season is always the one that’s about to start, though I find the peak of summer rather exhausting and tend to start fantasising about Autumn very early. Top seasonal treasures include: making marmalade in January, hearing the first skylark, cow parsley in May, river swimming in June, and spotting bracket fungus in October. Every winter I dream of snow, but it almost never happens…

Jane Porter is a children’s author and illustrator, community artist and comics teacher. You can find out more through her monthly free newsletter Story Street, her YouTube channel (featuring creative inspiration and interviews with fellow picture book makers), and her website.

Jane Miles

Soon we spotted greylag geese practicing their return to their far-flung homes. They weren’t bothered by my dark feeling, didn’t seek a connection with nature, nor did they make up stories of burning crosses, haunted houses, or cursed lawns. We needed the relief of nature, but instinctually, we knew it did not need us. Perhaps that was the danger we sensed?

This was not a place for us.

Jane R. Miles writes, walks and complains—usually, in that order. She lives in the Netherlands and is working on a dark psychological thriller based on a true story. You can find her on Instagram, and soon, her website.

Share

Jonathon Stalls

Since I was a kid, sketchbooks, drawing pads, and journals piled up in the corners of rooms and tables. Each of them rough around the edges from getting tossed around in backpacks. Most of my education is in fine art. After my 242-day walk across the U.S. in 2010, I moved most of my creative energy into hosting walking events, creating walking routes, and curating environmental and mobility justice campaigns. In 2020, I started slowly returning to fine art through pen drawing. I protected time to draw again. A few hours per week eventually turned into a few days. I started selling, bartering, and gifting art at markets. I started inviting commission projects for tattoos and books. Two months ago, I joined a local art collective in my new hometown. Making and sharing art is only bringing me more and more joy.

Jonathon Stalls (he, his) is a multi-disciplinary “Walking Artist” with Intrinsic Paths. In 2010, he walked for 242 days across the U.S. and has continued to move alongside a wide variety of people and landscapes ever since. His creative work involves ink drawing, creative writing, the Pedestrian Dignity project, walk leader training with Walk2Connect (a program of America Walks), facilitating mindfulness practices, and more. He is the author of WALK - Slow Down, Wake Up & Connect at 1-3 Miles Per Hour (North Atlantic Books). He resides in Poncha Springs, CO with his husband, Ben.

Website & Ink Art Shop: www.IntrinsicPaths.com - WALK Book: UK (Bookshop, Blackwells, other) U.S. (Bookshop, North Atlantic Books) – also e-book and audiobook – check your local shops! - Patreon + Email List: www.Patreon.com/IntrinsicPaths - Pedestrian Dignity Substack

Instagram: @jstallz, @intrinsicpaths,

Jess Glaisher

Summer is my favourite breakfasting time of year. I spare no expense because when the summer fruits arrive in the shops my eyes bulge like a cartoon character and I have to have as many of them as I can fit in increasingly ridiculous-sized bowls. As a nod to it being breakfast, I usually add a few spoons of yoghurt, some cereal or oats, but that’s just to convince myself that I am not eating three people’s worth of fruit salad for breakfast. I will not be tamed by sense or cost. While these fruits are in season I will eat my fill, and several other people’s fill as well.

These bowls fuelled my hill and stair-filled walks up to the Minack [where Jess performed in the summer, read more here], drinking in the sunlight as I made my way, first down the hill into the village, then back up to the theatre entrance, then back down the steps to the stage.

Jess is a queer, disabled writer, performer, and drag king. Their debut novel Dear Lina was published in 2020 by Audible and has been called ‘A queer dystopia for our troubled times’. Their short story Hairless won second place in the Dinesh Allirajah Prize 2024, and their play Dyke Drama was long-listed for BOLD Playwrights 2024. Their work has appeared in numerous print anthologies and online. They are currently working on a horror short story collection and a second novel.

You can sign up to their Substack ‘Between the Lines’ and find them @jessglaisher_writer and @westendwestleydrag on instagram. They can often be found procrastinating with cake.

Sue Reed

Another activity with the grandbairns. Inspired by a mandala at the Green Gathering, we recreated our own in the garden using what was to hand. It is a celebration of late summer.

Sue lives in rural Northumberland where a love of nature and the wild inspires her writing. Born in Worthing, Sussex, Sue has migrated steadily north. She has worn various hats in her professional life from teacher, museum guide, and upcycler of waste wool knitwear as The Woolly Pedlar to working full time as a writer. She went to Newcastle University to do an MA in Creative Writing as a mature student in 2019, and it was during the Writing for Children and Young Adults module, that the Molly McFlynn series was first fledged.

Sue writes non-fiction essays on unapologetic ageing, gardening as resistance, slow living and slow travel over at RIPE on Substack. She also writes freelance for publications, with a particular interest in sustainable living and slow travel.

When not writing, Sue divides her time between her garden, playing with her grandchildren and exploring wild places with her husband in their converted campervan.

hiiragi

The neon lights turned the pink cherry blossoms into ghosts. I passed a salaryman coming in the opposite direction, equally surprised as I, equally entranced by the newness of the night. We walked among the ghosts that evening and every person who had ever come undone by hanami walked with us.

hiiragi currently lives in Western japan and writes speculative fiction with a touch of the Weird. You can find their substack here.

Laura Pashby

Laura Pashby is a fog-loving writer and photographer who works part time in a lovely indie bookshop. She lives in the English Cotswolds countryside with her husband and three sons, where she walks the woods and hills with her camera. Her book, Chasing Fog was described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘beautiful and haunting’. Laura’s Substack Small Stories—a search for magic and meaning in the form of letters from her writing desk—was a Substack Featured Publication 2023. Find Laura on social media as

Carys Shannon

The Pyrenees in full autumn glory.

Carys Shannon is originally from Swansea and now divides her time between Wales and the Spanish Pyrenees. She is an award-winning writer who has had short stories published by Honno Press, Parthian Books and Mslexia magazine, as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her debut novel, Truth Like Water, was published by Parthian Books in 2025. The book has been described as ‘an absolute belter of a story’, ‘a sublimely written work’ and ‘Welsh Noir at its best’. When not working, Carys is happiest enjoying slow time in big nature.

If you would like to take part in Wander With Me and think your work may be a good fit, I am looking for contributors for 2026 - so please do get in touch.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small one-off tip on Ko-Fi.

You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.

A week ago I went with my partner to our favourite beach, the one backed with chalk, and despite the rain and the lowering sky, the wind and the grey and the heavy fug of winter, we walked.

At the point where the pavement gave way to sand, there were dozens of mermaid’s purses - the egg cases of skates and sharks - washed up, high on the tide line. I shook each one gently and heard something still inside - eggs? Hatchlings? There is so much I don’t know and a wonder in the juncture between what I do and don’t. I carried the egg cases back down to the edge of the water, threw them in, to be carried away to the deep water not to desiccate in the sand. But the wind was blowing and the tide was rising, and every time we threw them back they were carried in again, left in a line of bubbles on shimmering sand.

We walked along, in the rain, our fronts soaked, cheeks cold, fingers wrinkling. A tower shaped house above seemed a perfect place to live, seemed, at the same time, to be too close to the crumble of the cliff, and we talked about living by the sea, living on the edge. The air was wet, and the rising and falling of the water painted strange shapes on the sand. We walked along and then we walked back and then we returned to the beach where the mermaid’s purses had been. I couldn’t see them. Had they made their way back to the sea after all? My chest felt warm at the thought. But then, further along the shore, we found them, all washed up together, clustered shining on the wet sand.

Sometimes writing - all art perhaps - can feel like this. Throwing things out into the ether, hoping they will float, hoping they will find a life of their own, then having them wash back up, carried by a tide seemingly beyond your control.

The egg cases were shining from the contact with the water. They were sturdy and complete still, and holding a kind of magic in their mythic name. They felt like things from elsewhere, messengers from a place beyond the reason and striving of an ordered world. Whether or not they floated off, they still held value. More and more I am coming to believe that a thing’s worth is not in its reception - it is in the making, in the fact it exists at all.

Share

A week later I go back to the same bit of coast with a friend, start further out of town. We go down, first, to the sand where the chalk is whittled into towers, walk between the stacks to a sometimes secret bay, go down, to the edge of the water. I found my first mermaid’s purse here years ago. Today the tide has turned and there are none. The sand is bare. The ocean washes back and forth, foaming, bubbles scattered over the sand. The tide is too high to follow the base of the cliffs any further, so we leave the beach and go up, walk the cliff edge, walk residential streets with houses we dream of living in, of starting an art and writing residency in.

We follow the edge of a field that smells of cabbage, long dark leaves, and a lighthouse the other side of it, seeming strange separated from the ocean by the crops. We talk about art and making and the shortness of life, and I wonder about my mermaid’s purses - still in the sand or back out floating in the sea.

I think of the phrase ‘washed up’ and how it is taken to be negative, to mean someone who has nothing left to give, who is past the vibrancy of life and creation. I wonder if we can change that. I think we need to. Maybe washed up is not used up. Maybe washed up is merely resting, dormant, waiting for the next high tide to carry us back into the surf.

If you can support my work with a subscription, it would mean the world. Alternatively, if you have enjoyed this piece, consider sending me a small tip on Ko-Fi.

You can also take a look at my sister Substack. Care Connection will be a place to celebrate the often unseen, often overlooked work of carers - to celebrate the commitment, the connection, and the joys of caring, as well as acknowledging the challenges. I’m looking for contributors, and planning on just one post a month, perhaps a few more while I’m starting out, but you won’t be inundated! If you like Wild Quiet Folk, especially the interview posts, I hope you will like Care Connection too.