I’m delighted to have writer and podcaster Susan Mathews as guest for this week’s newsletter. Season 2 of Susan’s podcast The Subverse has been my ‘go-to’ listening recently, and her thoughtful conversations around water have helped to...
It’s late Winter, or perhaps it’s early Spring. An uncertain season here in Orkney, either way. It can mean anything from shirtsleeves and birdsong to blizzarding snow and sometimes both of these in the same day. We’ve had some gentle days recently that saw the hens...
I was lucky enough to read an early copy of Victoria Bennet’s beautiful debut memoir “All My Wild Mothers”, just published by John Murray Press. I was immediately struck by the way she shows how our care for the natural world is inseparable from our care...
When I gave a presentation to the Open University a few weeks ago, I spoke about my practice of drawing water as one of deliberately slowing down in order to inhabit time with more awareness and presence. One of the questions I was asked in the (unrecorded) Q&A...
Ross Gay’s “Inciting Joy” has been keeping me company these past few days. A poet, Gay’s prose is playful, looping, forking into asides and lengthy footnotes, inviting you to meander alongside. As title the suggests, he explores ‘incitements’ or moments when a kind...
It’s not often that I sit down with a book of poetry and find myself so drawn into its world that I read it in long, deep draughts, like a novel. But this is the effect that my first encounter with the work of Canadian poet Don Domanski had on me. These are poems of...
